● ● ●  object,—the sine quâ non of a New-England mother,—a good education for her son.”²²

Mrs. Glover was certainly concerned about the education of her son.²³ Even in Science and Health she would take occasion to remind the reader: “A mother is the strongest educator, either for or against crime,”²⁴ and in a poem addressed to George while he was still a small child she wrote:

          O heaven-born task, to watch thy dawning mind,
          Each day’s development of ripening thought—
          To sit and see almost the twig inclined,
          The pliant sappling form the sturdy oak.²⁵

But her “meekness” did not follow the pattern of her day, which so often meant cloaking a psychologically unhealthy possessiveness in the garments of self-sacrificing devotion. She was not prepared to make her son a substitute for further creative living of her own, an emotional surrogate for the fulfillment of her still undiscovered capacities.

The genteel ideal of womanhood is typically stated by one writer of the period: “The peculiar province of a Woman is to tend with patient assiduity around the bed of sickness; to watch the feeble steps of infancy; to communicate to the young the elements of knowledge, and bless with their smiles those of their friends who are declining in the vale of tears.”²⁶ This sort of watery self-effacement was not the path that led to the discovery of Christian Science.

Seldom in the history of the sexes has there been an age when women suffered more than in the nineteenth century from the false ideals imposed on them by the prevailing culture. Words like “home”  ● ● ●