Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.
Every single major push in education has made it worse and right now it's really bad because everything we've done is de-humanizing education. It's destroying the possibility of the teacher and the student having a warm friendly intellectual relationship.
My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford and her own mother was a doctor.