p. 12 | Father and Daughter by Harry Thurston Peck

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 17, 1903

Father and Daughter

By Harry Thurston Peck

THERE are two things that can be done by a father for his daughter, and that, if they were always done, would, in the course of a single generation, make our womankind approach a level which they have never yet reached. The first is to gain the confidence of his daughter in her earlier years, and the second is to keep it unimpaired and to perpetuate it.

If he be his daughter’s friend and chosen companion, sharing all her little confidences and imparting to her much of what he knows, with the intuition of a woman and the breadth and sanity of a man, the girl will grow up with a mind unlike the minds of many women in whom femininity verges upon fatuity. From close association with a father, the young girl quite unconsciously acquires something of the largeness of the man’s nature, and loses something of the pettiness and narrowness of the woman’s. His tolerant, genial spirit will moderate her tense emotionalism. His sense of humor will rid her of sentimentalism, and imbue her with a sense of true proportion. His fun, his good comradeship, his affection, and his knowledge of life will help to send her forth into the world strengthened and developed as no purely feminine influence could strengthen and develop her.

The love of a father for his daughter is, I think, the very purest love that earth can know, the love that comes the nearest to what we all imagine the divine love to be. The love of a father for his son is intense and overmastering; yet there is a touch of personal pride, of almost conscious egoism, in it which renders it not wholly selfless and serene. But the love of a father for the girl child who has been born to him is more than any other love on earth in its purity, its unalterable constancy, its power of self-sacrifice, its profound delight, and its infinite tenderness.— Harry Thurston Peck, in Cosmopolitan.