Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/793

 Mrs. Whittlesey's feelings were deeply interested in that portion of her sex which she wished more particularly to reach. This she some time previously evinced in procuring the tract "An Address to Mothers," to be written. She was therefore the person, in view both of her ability and her zeal, her advantages and experience, to prepare a medium of communication with her sisters, the mothers of the land. She proposed in her Magazine the two-fold object of Enlightening the minds of this portion of her sex on the subject of their relation to the community, and to the church and the duties growing out of that relation; and at the same time of presenting the motives and encouragements to appropriate and effective labour in their own peculiar sphere. Then, she hoped to operate, through mothers, on all classes of the community; on the male part, as well as the female; on husbands, and fathers, and sons, as well as wives, and daughters, and the sex generally. But it was to do only woman's-work by woman's agency. It was in no Mary Wolstonecraft spirit that the good which she wished to bring about was to be sought. It was not by trenching on the province of men, nor by usurping their place, that she would effect a reformation or improvement. In the whole subject of the moral training of the young, and arm woman with her true power. Woman she would keep to her own influence, but it was an influence neither inconsiderable nor doubtful. It was not to be confined within narrow limits. It could not be easily evaded whenever or wherever it should appear. It was insinuating, permeating like the air; it was gentle as the dews, reaching and blessing alike the root and the branches of the living, intellectual, moral being. It was truly a material work that Mrs. Whittlesley through her journal sought to accomplish—the preparation and efficiency of mothers as agents in moulding the character of their offspring. It was a truly feminine, delicate, graceful, though dignified and potent work.

Having laid her own beloved ones in their infancy upon God's altar, and sought by all appropriate means to train them for the service of their Divine Master, and having joyfully seen the most of them in the morning of life dedicating themselves to His service, she has, with convincing power and energy, urged the mothers of the land to employ those means in the education of their children which in her case God had so signally blessed. She has given great prominence to the cause of missions in the pages of her journal, and entreated parents to train up their children not only for the church at home, but with special reference to extending the triumphs of the cross in heathen lands. Many children of missionaries have been committed to her maternal care, and have obtained through her the means of education and support; but, not content with this, she gladly surrendered her first-born son to become a foreign missionary. His qualifications for usefulness and his long course of training were such as to excite the fond hope that he would be long spared to labour on earth; but the Master was in these fast ripening him for some higher post of responsibility in the upper sanctuary. A long life of service to the church at home could never have made him so holy a man as did the few years he was employed in missionary labour in India.

Maternal Associations have long been subjects of her fostering care. Through her influence and correspondence these institutions were greatly multiplied in this country, in America, and other foreign lands,