When they landed on the tip of Cape Cod they had run out of food. The men looked around the area and found a stash of corn buried in the ground by the Indians and they took it. They did not steal the corn, they borrowed it. They paid it back later. Had they not taken the corn they never
would have survived. By the end of the first winter they were doling out a quarter pound of corn bread per person per day to survive on. As you can imagine, the mothers took their bread and fed their children. They covered their children's bodies with their own to keep them warm. of the eighteen married women that came on the Mayflower, fourteen died the first winter.
They sacrificed themselves for their children knowing that if the children did not survive, they would not survive. In Plymouth we have a monument honoring the eighteen married women that came on the Mayflower. On the back of the monument it is written;
"They brought up their families in sturdy virtue and a living faith in God without which nations perish."