Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/59

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Woman under Socialism
43

An extract from the Manchester Examiner and Times for September 1870, and which is to be found quoted in "Woman Free," by Ellis Ethelmer, is finely illustrative of the truth of the old proverb used by our ancestors that "The womb dyes the child." "An American writer says: 'While I lived among the Choctaw Indians, I held a consultation with one of their chiefs respecting the successive stages in their progress in the arts of civilised life, and, among other things, he informed me that at their start they made a great mistake; they only sent the boys to school. Their boys came home intelligent men, but they married uneducated and uncivilised wives, and the uniform result was that the children were all like their mothers. The father soon lost all his interest in both wife and children. And now,' said he, 'if we could educate but one class of our children, we should choose the girls, for when they become mothers, they educate their sons.'"

"If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How can man grow?"