Author's Note 1

The first education is most important and this first education belongs incontestably to women. If the author of nature had wanted it to belong to men he would have given them milk to nourish the child. Speak always preferably to women in your treatises on education, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than men and can influence it more, but its success concerns them more nearly, for most widows are at the mercy of their children, who make them vividly feel the good and bad effects of the manner in which they have been raised. The laws, always more concerned about property than about people, since their object is not virtue but peace, give too little authority to mothers. However, their position is more certain than that of fathers. Their duties are more painful, their cares are more important to the right ordering of the family, and generally they feel more attachment to the children. There are occasions when a son may be excused for lack of respect for his father, but if on any occasion there was a son so unnatural as to lack respect for the mother -- who bore him in her womb and nursed him at her breast, who for so many years devoted herself to his care, such a monstrous wretch should be smothered at once as unworthy to live. You say mothers spoil their children, and no doubt that is wrong, but it is worse to deprave them as you do. The mother wants her child to be happy, wants him to be so from now on. In that she is right; if she is mistaken by the means, it is necessary to enlighten her. Ambition, avarice, tyranny, the mistaken foresight of fathers, their neglect, their harshness, are a hundredfold more harmful to the child than the blind tenderness of mothers. Moreover, I must explain what I mean by a mother and that explanation follows.