What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of MoscowTolstoy, Leo, graf
Philosophy
What to Do? Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Moscow (Russia) -- Social conditions; Social problems
reward from any one, and yet you feel the sane satisfaction.
If you are like this, you will not say after two children, or after
twenty, that you have done enough, just as the laboring man fifty years
of age will not say that he has worked enough, while he still continues
to eat and to sleep, and while his muscles still demand work; if you are
like this, your will not cast the task of nursing and care-taking upon
some other mother, just as a laboring man will not give another man the
work which he has begun, and almost completed, to finish: because into
this work you will throw your life. And therefore the more there is of
this work, the fuller and the happier is your life.
And when you are like this, for the good fortune of men, you will apply
that law of fulfilling God's will, by which you guide your life, to the
lives of your husband, of your children, and of those most nearly
connected with you. If your are like this, and know from your own
experience, that only self-sacrificing, unseen, unrewarded labor,
accompanied with danger to life and to the extreme bounds of endurance,
for the lives of others, is the appointed lot of man, which affords him
satisfaction, then you will announce these demands to others; you will
urge your husband to the same toil; and you will measure and value the
dignity of men acceding to this toil; and for this toil you will also
prepare your children.
Only that mother who looks upon children as a disagreeable accident, and
upon love, the comforts of life, costume, and society, as the object of
life, will rear her children in such a manner that they shall have as
much enjoyment as possible out of life, and that they shall make the
greatest possible use of it; only she will feed them luxuriously, deck
them out, amuse them artificially; only she will teach them, not that
which will fit them for self-sacrificing masculine or feminine labor with
danger of their lives, and to the last limits of endurance, but that
which will deliver them from this labor. Only such a woman, who has lost
the meaning of her life, will sympathize with that delusive and false
male labor, by means of which her husband, having rid himself of the
obligations of a man, is enabled to enjoy, in her company, the work of
others. Only such a woman will choose a similar man for the husband of
her daughter, and will estimate men, not by what they are personally, but
by that which is connected with them,--position, money, or their ability
to take advantage of the labor of others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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