Perhaps the letter I received from Daisy Harding on August 9th in answer to the foregoing might not have aroused in me the rebellious spirit I felt had it not epitomized the pitiful futility of attempting to argue for right for right's sake when a false sense of right satisfies a people enslaved by a superficial conventionality. The social fundamentals were all wrong.
In this letter, Daisy Harding voiced unconsciously the probable negative decision of the whole Harding family toward my situation, as well as the attitude of our whole country toward unwedded mothers and their children.
"I do hope you can make, some day, a name for yourself," she wrote. "Then you will have something to offer her for what you have denied her . . . she must suffer, and suffer deeply and bitterly when she knows all . . ." I stared back at these sentences which seemed to stand out in the letter, taunting me with their cruel injustice. ". . . something to offer her for what you have denied her"! Why, all I had denied my child was the knowledge of her parentage, and the privilege that knowledge carried of openly bestowing upon my child the love only a mother is capable of bestowing. And this latter denial on my part would cease as soon as the Hardings recognized and assumed their just obligation toward their brother's child. She wrote as though I might be a common woman, one whose life did not justify the role of motherhood, a woman who must redeem herself through fame before she could merit the God-given gift of her child!
My daughter "suffer" when she learned that she was the beloved child of a love-union between her mother and the 29th President of the United States! There does not live the person who could convince me of that, and I am willing to undertake the responsibility of rearing my child, even in her extreme youth,
