Our Incorrigibles by Marion Harland

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 20, 1916

“Our Incorrigibles”

By Marion Harland

A PRECOCIOUS four-year-old boy saw a plate broken by the fall of a fork upon it. His mother picked up the fragments, and inspected the edges of the fracture. “It was cracked already,” she pronounced, “or it would not have broken so easily.”

An hour later the boy had a grievous fall, and she ran to pick him up. “My darling! have you broken your poor little head?” “I fink so!” sobbed the sufferer. “But it was c’wackit a’weady, or it wouldn’t have b’woke so easy!”

The anecdote recurs to me with whimsical persistency in reading disquisitions upon “The Modern Girl,” set agoing in secular and religious papers by the appeal of a New York mother to the law for assistance in restraining her young daughter from associating with undesirable companions and from extravagant expenditure of liberal means. “Incorrigibility” was the form of arraignment before the court. The plea of the parent that she had done her best to restrain the wilful creature, who at seventeen supplied “copy” for the daily prints all over the United States, was confirmed by the evidence of friends and relatives.

It is not my intention to dwell upon the details and the result of this particular instance of defective family government. What struck me as significant in the affair was that so few expressed surprise at the revelation. One mother had confessed openly that she had been driven to extremity. If public opinion, as conveyed in newspaper and conversation, were to be credited, society, in all walks of American domestic life, is so familiar with the idea of daughter’s domination and mother’s vassalage that the aforesaid extreme case caused scarcely a week’s wonder.

The residuum of the ferment of talk was the general inquiry, “Who is to blame for this monstrous wrong to family and community?” With marvelous unanimity the verdict was rendered: “The mothers are more culpable than the daughters. What are they thinking of that they do not put an end to lawlessness of speech and behavior? The remedy is in their hands. Let them act, and promptly!”

“Incorrigibility,” we are told, should not be so much as named in connection with the débutante. She should be wax in the deft fingers of the mother who bore her, and to whom she owes love and obedience. The root of the evil is in the absorption of the matron of this generation in fashionable frivolities, and almost as fashionable philanthropies and politics, to the shameful neglect of home and offspring.

As I have said, it is in listening to these faultless theories that the story of my four-year-old’s apology for his broken head comes back to me:—

“It was c’wackit a’weady!”

The mother who begins to “control” her prankish daughter when she is on the edge of early womanhood, is a matter of eighteen years too late. The noxious weed of incorrigibility is not the growth of a single night,—nor of one season. The fine china of character was cracked already, or it would not have broken so easily. . . .

The nursery in which our grandmothers bore rule was “a despotic monarchy.” Our children flourish under a republic. Self-development according to natural laws, the God-given right of the newly-made being to live its own life and enjoy its own individuality, are no longer themes open to discussion. They are axiomatic. The rod is as obsolete as the thumbscrew; they are regarded as equally barbarous.

I would guard the reference to corporal punishment before I go a step farther. In some of the happiest and most wisely governed households I have ever had the happiness to know, the rod, as a mode of chastisement, was unknown. But I have yet to see a well-managed nursery in which punishment of some kind for wrong-doing is a dead letter. Wilful transgression and the consequent penalty, sin and suffering, should stand for cause and effect the world over.

“When should I begin my child’s education?” asked a young mother of a matronly friend.

“It should have been begun the day she was born!” was the rejoinder. “Weeds spring up sooner than flowers, and grow faster.”

A disciple of the new school of child training caught up the word:—

“That is the cant of maternal servitude. I recognize the heading of ‘Chapter First.’ My dear lady, are you still lingering in the shadows of the Middle Ages?”

I maintain, in defense of the “Middle Ages,” that motherhood, so far from being servitude, is the noblest mission to which a woman can be called. Moreover, I challenge contradiction of the assertion that there is the same difference between characters and minds molded by the mother who estimates aright her high and holy calling, and those committed to hirelings (no matter how faithful and expert), as between homemade and “contract” manufactures.

Sixty years ago a schoolgirl said to me, “When I am in doubt as to the right or wrong of any course I am disposed to take, I ask myself, ‘Can I tell mother what I mean to do?’ If I am not altogether willing to talk it over with her, I know there is something wrong about it.”

This simple test was, for the daughter, the touch of Ithuriel’s spear. She had learned by heart, and for life, the meaning of the first word of the commandment with promise. She “honored” her mother in word and in deed. . . .

Harking back to the homely illustration with which my talk began, I submit another and yet more apposite figure. A builder once explained to me that hardwood, even of excellent quality, must undergo a certain process of seasoning and manipulation before it can be warranted against “checking.” “That is, going into little cracks all over the surface,” he explained at my look of inquiry. “When that happens, nothing can be done for it.”

I set down the quaint phrase in my notebook. It fits partly into the study of the eighteen-year-old “incorrigible” and her congeners.—Marion Harland, in the Mother’s Magazine.