MEN’S AND WOMEN’S VIEWS ON BABIES.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2722, 9 December 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 integral part of the social structure. To the feminine mind, when not too confident 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 sympatic aunt appear to find an exhaustible charm in 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 baby as an object of special regard under the form of baby-worship, the other and harder sox has coldly held itself aloof from what it has chosen to consider these frivolities. Not only to the 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 lip as there have arisen before his mind images of a home rendered noisy and chaotic by the invasion of doctors nurses &c., of a wife continually preoccupied, of new doctor’s bills and so on. If given to philosophize, he might be tempted to ask what purpose is served in the economy of things by the helpless infantile condition making large demands on the time and energies of others. When the voice of his wife woos him to join the feminine company of baby-worshippers he proves as hard as flint. He says that he can see nothing in this early and vegetal period of human existaece 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 sex 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.—From “ Babies and Science,” injthe “ Cornhill Magazine.”