MEN’S AND WOMEN’S VIEWS ON BABIES.

Globe, Volume XXIII, Issue 2307, 26 August 1881, Page 3

MEN’S AND WOMEN’S VIEWS ON BABIES.

With one-half of the adult population babies have, of course, always been recognised as an integral part of the social structure. To the feminine mind when not too confined by selfish vanities, or embittered by prolonged disappointment, the baby is apt to appear one of the most considerable interests of life. The mother, the nurse, and the sympathetic aunt appear to find an inexhaustible charm in all the events of babyhood. There is a tender beauty in its fragile form, a delightful surprisingness and mystery in all its small ways, which goes straight to the kindly heart of the sex. Yet while one sex has thus set up the boby as on object of special regard under the form of babyworship, the other and harder sex has coldly held itself aloof from what it has chosen to consider frivolities. Not only to crusty bachelor uncle, even to the father himself, the arrival of a baby has commonly presented itself in anything but the light of a joyous occurrence. When congratulated by his friends on the event, he has, perhaps, bitten his lips as there have arisen before his mind images of a home rendered noisy and chaotic by the invasion of the doctor, nurses, As., of a wife continually preoccupied, of new doctor’s bills, and so on. If given to philosophise, he might be tempted to ask what purpose is served in the economy of things by the helpless infantile condition making such largo demands on the time and energies of others. When the voice of his wife woes him to join the feminine com pany of baby-worshippers, he proves as hard as flint. Ho says that he can see nothing in this early and vegetal period of human existence to attract him, that all babies are alike, and so on—utterances which are of course shocking heresies from the mother’s point of view. In short, to the male sox as a whole, the baby during the first six months of its life is apt to appear, if not something positively wrong in the arrangement of things, at least something quite unimportant which calls for no notice, and is best put out of sight as far as possible.—“ Oornhill Magazine ” for May.