The Inspiration of Motherhood

I have known no wife worthier than Rose Shahfa to give the ideal picture of the good wife and the happy marriage.

And I have known no mother worthier than Rose Shahfa to convey what motherhood inspires to mothers and wives and children and the rising generation.

And I have known no woman of letters who draws her literature from the very heart of her married and family life, without affectation, more than the writer Rose Shahfa.

Fortune granted me to know Rose Shahfa in her full reality, for I knew her as a wife, and knew her as a mother, and knew her as a woman of letters.

I almost said that the book 'The Inspiration of Motherhood' is a program she has laid down for woman — girl, wife, mother, and educator — she, the best of writers, women of letters, and guides.

And I would have wished I could strike out the word 'wished,' were it not for the spirit of conciliation and reserve with which the writer has suffused her counsels, and were it not for the belief manifest in the book in the possibility of

woman's reaching her right by way of petition and gentleness, and by persuading those whom gentleness does not persuade and whom meek petitioning does not stir, even were it to spring from the very heart of logic.

And while I thank the writer for what she mentioned in her essay 'Woman's Rights' about my championing of woman, I cannot now but correct her phrase in the said essay. For I did not 'analyze the necessity of giving woman her rights'; rather, I analyzed woman's right to these rights, and the necessity of struggle for the sake of taking them. And the difference between giving and taking is vast. Giving is charity, and I do not conceal that I think ill of charity and of the charitable, and of the aim these pursue through their charity.

The book 'The Inspiration of Motherhood' is full of proofs, for those who need proofs, that woman is not inferior to man in her understanding of patriotism and of human and social values. Indeed, she surpasses him in awareness and in comprehension of her essential qualities, as she surpasses him in zeal for those qualities, and surpasses him in concern for society — to make it a virtuous society and a pillar for the homeland in which her children will live and find happiness.

I can affirm that whoever has read 'The Inspiration of Motherhood' cannot but have felt what noble spirit dictated to the writer her essays on 'Woman's Strength,' 'Moral Immunity,' 'the Women's Renaissance,' 'Woman and Wealth,' and many, many more. Strength, in her view, is the strength of right, not the strength of weapons and slaughter. And moral immunity, as the writer has described it, is the foundation of the human virtues and of social, national, and political progress. Nor is the book's author mistaken — in my view at least — when she says that 'art is more manifest in woman's nature than in man's.' Is not woman herself the invention of an artist?

It may be beyond me to analyze all the proofs and truths in 'The Inspiration of Motherhood' establishing the powers of soul and mind latent in woman which qualify her for equality with man. It remains for woman to display these powers in a stubborn struggle, so as to rid herself of the label the reactionary generations have fastened upon her — the label of 'the weak sex.'