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THE HOME

_Shall the home be our world ... or the world our home?_




THE HOME

ITS WORK AND INFLUENCE


BY

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN


NEW YORK
CHARLTON COMPANY
1910

Copyrighted 1903
Republished, November, 1910
by
THE CHARLTON CO.

Printed by The Co-Operative Press, New York City




    To every Man who maintains a Home--
    To every Woman who "keeps house"--
    To every House-Servant, owned, hired, or married--
    To every Boy and Girl who lives at Home--
    To every Baby who is born and reared at Home--
            In the hope of better homes for all this book
                is dedicated.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                       PAGE

   I. INTRODUCTORY,                                              3

  II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME,                                14

 III. DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY,                                       36

  IV. PRESENT CONDITIONS,                                       62

   V. THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP.  I. THE HOUSEWIFE,                82

  VI. THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP. II. THE HOUSEMAID,               104

 VII. HOME-COOKING,                                            124

VIII. DOMESTIC ART,                                            143

  IX. DOMESTIC ETHICS,                                         160

   X. DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT,                                  184

  XI. THE LADY OF THE HOUSE,                                   206

 XII. THE CHILD AT HOME,                                       230

XIII. THE GIRL AT HOME,                                        252

 XIV. HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN,                                   272

  XV. HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS,                                300

 XVI. LINES OF ADVANCE,                                        323

XVII. RESULTS,                                                 342




    TWO CALLINGS


    I

    _I hear a deep voice through uneasy dreaming,
      A deep, soft, tender, soul-beguiling voice;
    A lulling voice that bids the dreams remain,
    That calms my restlessness and dulls my pain,
    That thrills and fills and holds me till in seeming
      There is no other sound on earth--no choice._

    _"Home!" says the deep voice, "Home!" and softly singing
      Brings me a sense of safety unsurpassed;
    So old! so old! The piles above the wave--
    The shelter of the stone-blocked, shadowy cave--
    Security of sun-kissed treetops swinging--
      Safety and Home at last!_

    _"Home" says the sweet voice, and warm Comfort rises,
      Holding my soul with velvet-fingered hands;
    Comfort of leafy lair and lapping fur,
    Soft couches, cushions, curtains, and the stir
    Of easy pleasures that the body prizes,
      Of soft, swift feet to serve the least commands._

    _I shrink--half rise--and then it murmurs "Duty!"
      Again the past rolls out--a scroll unfurled;
    Allegiance and long labor due my lord--
    Allegiance in an idleness abhorred--
    I am the squaw--the slave--the harem beauty--
      I serve and serve, the handmaid of the world._

    _My soul rebels--but hark! a new note thrilling,
      Deep, deep, past finding--I protest no more;
    The voice says "Love!" and all those ages dim
    Stand glorified and justified in him;
    I bow--I kneel--the woman soul is willing--
      "Love is the law. Be still! Obey! Adore!"_

    _And then--ah, then! The deep voice murmurs "Mother!"
      And all life answers from the primal sea;
    A mingling of all lullabies; a peace
    That asks no understanding; the release
    Of nature's holiest power--who seeks another?
      Home? Home is Mother--Mother, Home--to me._

    _"Home!" says the deep voice; "Home and Easy Pleasure!
      Safety and Comfort, Laws of Life well kept!
    Love!" and my heart rose thrilling at the word;
    "Mother!" it nestled down and never stirred;
    "Duty and Peace and Love beyond all measure!
      Home! Safety! Comfort! Mother!"--and I slept._


    II

    _A bugle call! A clear, keen, ringing cry,
      Relentless--eloquent--that found the ear
    Through fold on fold of slumber, sweet, profound--
    A widening wave of universal sound,
    Piercing the heart--filling the utmost sky--
      I wake--I must wake! Hear--for I must hear!_

    _"The World! The World is crying! Hear its needs!
      Home is a part of life--I am the whole!
    Home is the cradle--shall a whole life stay
    Cradled in comfort through the working day?
    I too am Home--the Home of all high deeds--
      The only Home to hold the human soul!_

    _"Courage!--the front of conscious life!" it cried;
      "Courage that dares to die and dares to live!
    Why should you prate of safety? Is life meant
    In ignominious safety to be spent?
    Is Home best valued as a place to hide?
      Come out, and give what you are here to give!_

    _"Strength and Endurance! of high action born!"
      And all that dream of Comfort shrank away,
    Turning its fond, beguiling face aside:
    So Selfishness and Luxury and Pride
    Stood forth revealed, till I grew fierce with scorn,
      And burned to meet the dangers of the day._

    _"Duty? Aye, Duty! Duty! Mark the word!"
      I turned to my old standard. It was rent
    From hem to hem, and through the gaping place
    I saw my undone duties to the race
    Of man--neglected--spurned--how had I heard
      That word and never dreamed of what it meant!_

    _"Duty! Unlimited--eternal--new!"
      And I? My idol on a petty shrine
    Fell as I turned, and Cowardice and Sloth
    Fell too, unmasked, false Duty covering both--
    While the true Duty, all-embracing, high,
      Showed the clear line of noble deeds to do._

    _And then the great voice rang out to the turn,
      And all my terror left me, all my shame,
    While every dream of joy from earliest youth
    Came back and lived!--that joy unhoped was truth,
    All joy, all hope, all truth, all peace grew one,
      Life opened clear, and Love? Love was its name!_

    _So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more,
      I saw at last its meaning and its place;
    Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
    But Mother--the World's Mother--come at last,
    To love as she had never loved before--
      To feed and guard and teach the human race._

    _The world was full of music clear and high!
      The world was full of light! The world was free!
    And I? Awake at last, in joy untold,
    Saw Love and Duty broad as life unrolled--
    Wide as the earth--unbounded as the sky--
      Home was the World--the World was Home to me!_




THE HOME




I

INTRODUCTORY


In offering this study to a public accustomed only to the unquestioning
acceptance of the home as something perfect, holy, quite above
discussion, a word of explanation is needed.

First, let it be clearly and definitely stated, the purpose of this
book is to maintain and improve the home. Criticism there is, deep and
thorough; but not with the intention of robbing us of one essential
element of home life--rather of saving us from conditions not only
unessential, but gravely detrimental to home life. Every human being
should have a home; the single person his or her home; and the family
their home.

The home should offer to the individual rest, peace, quiet, comfort,
health, and that degree of personal expression requisite; and these
conditions should be maintained by the best methods of the time. The
home should be to the child a place of happiness and true development;
to the adult a place of happiness and that beautiful reinforcement of
the spirit needed by the world's workers.

We are here to perform our best service to society, and to find our
best individual growth and expression; a right home is essential to
both these uses.

The place of childhood's glowing memories, of youth's ideals, of the
calm satisfaction of mature life, of peaceful shelter for the aged;
this is not attacked, this we shall not lose, but gain more
universally. What is here asserted is that our real home life is
clogged and injured by a number of conditions which are not necessary,
which are directly inimical to the home; and that we shall do well to
lay these aside.

As to the element of sanctity--that which is really sacred can bear
examination, no darkened room is needed for real miracles; mystery and
shadow belong to jugglers, not to the truth.

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to
improvement. This specially dear and ancient one, however, we have
successfully kept shut, and so it has not improved as have some others.

The home is too important a factor in human life to be thus left behind
in the march of events; its influence is too wide, too deep, too
general, for us to ignore.

Whatever else a human being has to meet and bear, he has always the
home as a governing factor in the formation of character and the
direction of life.

This power of home-influence we cannot fail to see, but we have bowed
to it in blind idolatry as one of unmixed beneficence, instead of
studying with jealous care that so large a force be wisely guided and
restrained.

We have watched the rise and fall of many social institutions, we have
seen them change, grow, decay, and die; we have seen them work mightily
for evil--or as mightily for good; and have learned to judge and choose
accordingly, to build up and to tear down for the best interests of the
human race.

In very early times, when the child-mind of inexperienced man was
timid, soft, and yet conservative as only the mind of children and
savages can be, we regarded all institutions with devout reverence and
fear.

Primitive man bowed down and fell upon his face before almost
everything, whether forces of nature or of art. To worship, to
enshrine, to follow blindly, was instinctive with the savage.

The civilised man has a larger outlook, a clearer, better-ordered
brain. He bases reverence on knowledge, he loses fear in the light of
understanding; freedom and self-government have developed him. It does
not come so readily to him to fall upon his face--rather he lifts his
face bravely to see and know and do. In place of the dark and cruel
superstitions of old time, with the crushing weight of a strong cult of
priests, we have a free and growing church, branching steadily wider as
more minds differ, and coming nearer always to that final merging of
religion in life which shall leave them indistinguishable. In place of
the iron despotisms of old time we have a similar growth and change in
governments, approaching always nearer to a fully self-governing
condition. Our growth has been great, but it has been irregular and
broken by strange checks and reversions; also accompanied, even in its
heights, by parallel disorders difficult to account for.

In all this long period of progress the moving world has carried with
it the unmoving home; the man free, the woman confined; the man
specialising in a thousand industries, the woman still limited to her
domestic functions. We have constantly believed that this was the true
way to live, the natural way, the only way. Whatever else might
change--and all things did--the home must not. So sure were we, and are
we yet, of this, that we have utterly refused to admit that the home
has changed, has grown, has improved, in spite of our unshaken
convictions and unbending opposition.

The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the
brain--the hardest and most iron-bound as well. Given a sufficiently
deep conviction, and facts are but as dreams before its huge reality.

Our convictions about the home go down to the uttermost depths, and
have changed less under the tooth of time than any others, yet the
facts involved have altered most radically. The structure of the home
has changed from cave to tent, from tent to hut, from hut to house,
from house to block or towering pile of "flats"; the functions of the
home have changed from every incipient industry known to past times, to
our remaining few; the inmates of the home have changed, from the
polygamous group and its crowd of slaves, to the one basic family
relation of father, mother, and child; but our feelings have remained
the same.

The progress of society we have seen to be hindered by many evils in
the world about us and in our own characters; we have sought to oppose
them as best we might, and even in some degree to study them for wiser
opposition.

Certain diseases we have traced to their cause, removed the cause, and
so avoided the disease; others we are just beginning to trace, as in
our present warfare with "the white plague," tuberculosis.

Certain forms of vice we are beginning to examine similarly, and
certain defects of character; we are learning that society is part of
the living world and comes under the action of natural law as much as
any other form of life.

But in all this study of social factors affecting disease and vice and
character, we have still held that the home--our most universal
environment--was perfect and quite above suspicion.

We were right at bottom. The home _in its essential nature_ is pure
good, and in its due development is progressively good; but it must
change with society's advance; and the kind of home that was wholly
beneficial in one century may be largely evil in another. We must
forcibly bear in mind, in any honest study of a long-accustomed
environment, that our own comfort, or even happiness, in a given
condition does not prove it to be good.

Comfort and happiness are very largely a matter of prolonged
adjustment. We like what we are used to. When we get used to something
else we like that too--and if the something else is really better, we
profit by the change. To the tired farmer it is comfort to take off his
coat, put up his yarn-stockinged feet on a chair, and have his wife
serve him the supper she has cooked. The tired banker prefers a
dressing gown or lounging jacket, slippers, a well-dressed,
white-handed wife, and a neat maid or stately butler to wait on the
table. The domestic Roman preferred a luxurious bath at the hands of
his slaves. All these types find comfort in certain surroundings--yet
the surroundings differ.

The New England farmer would not think a home comfortable that was full
of slaves--even a butler he would find oppressive; the New York banker
would not enjoy seeing his wife do dirty work. Ideals change--even home
ideals; and whatever kind of home we have, so that we grow up in it and
know no other, we learn to love. Even among homes as they now are,
equally enjoyed by their inmates, there is a wide scale of difference.
Why, then, is it impossible to imagine something still further varying
from what we now know; yet to the children born therein as dear and
deeply loved?

Again let us remember that happiness, mere physical comfort and the
interchange of family affection, is not all that life is for. We may
have had "a happy childhood," as far as we can recall; we may have been
idolised and indulged by our parents, and have had no wish ungratified;
yet even so all this is no guarantee that the beloved home has given us
the best training, the best growth. Nourmahal, the Light of the Harem,
no doubt enjoyed herself--but perhaps other surroundings might have
done more for her mind and soul. The questions raised here touch not
only upon our comfort and happiness in such homes as are happy ones,
but on the formative influence of these homes; asking if our present
home ideals and home conditions are really doing all for humanity that
we have a right to demand. There is a difference in homes not only in
races, classes, and individuals, but in periods.

The sum of the criticism in the following study is this: the home has
not developed in proportion to our other institutions, and by its
rudimentary condition it arrests development in other lines. Further,
that the two main errors in the right adjustment of the home to our
present life are these: the maintenance of primitive industries in a
modern industrial community, and the confinement of women to those
industries and their limited area of expression. No word is said
against the real home, the true family life; but it is claimed that
much we consider essential to that home and family life is not only
unnecessary, but positively injurious.

The home is a beautiful ideal, but have we no others? "My Country"
touches a deeper chord than even "Home, Sweet Home." A homeless man is
to be pitied, but "The Man without a Country" is one of the horrors of
history. The love of mother and child is beautiful; but there is a
higher law than that--the love of one another.

In our great religion we are taught to love and serve all mankind.
Every word and act of Christ goes to show the law of universal service.
Christian love goes out to all the world; it may begin, but does not
stay, at home.

The trend of all democracy is toward a wider, keener civic
consciousness; a purer public service. All the great problems of our
times call for the broad view, the large concept, the general action.
Such gain as we have made in human life is in this larger love; in some
approach to peace, safety, and world-wide inter-service; yet this so
patent common good is strangely contradicted and off-set by
cross-currents of primitive selfishness. Our own personal lives, rich
as they are to-day, broad with the consciousness of all acquainted
races, deep with the consciousness of the uncovered past, strong with
our universal knowledge and power; yet even so are not happy. We are
confused--bewildered. Life is complicated, duties conflict, we fly and
fall like tethered birds, and our new powers beat against old
restrictions like ships in dock, fast moored, yet with all sail set and
steam up.

It is here suggested that one cause for this irregular development of
character, this contradictory social action, and this wearing unrest in
life lies unsuspected in our homes; not in their undying essential
factors, but in those phases of home life we should have long since
peacefully outgrown. Let no one tremble in fear of losing precious
things. That which is precious remains and will remain always. We do
small honour to nature's laws when we imagine their fulfilment rests on
this or that petty local custom of our own.

We may all have homes to love and grow in without the requirement that
half of us shall never have anything else. We shall have homes of rest
and peace for all, with no need for half of us to find them places of
ceaseless work and care. Home and its beauty, home and its comfort,
home and its refreshment to tired nerves, its inspiration to worn
hearts, this is in no danger of loss or change; but the home which is
so far from beautiful, so wearing to the nerves and dulling to the
heart, the home life that means care and labour and disappointment, the
quiet, unnoticed whirlpool that sucks down youth and beauty and
enthusiasm, man's long labour and woman's longer love--this we may
gladly change and safely lose. To the child who longs to grow up and be
free; to the restless, rebelling boy; to the girl who marries all too
hastily as a means of escape; to the man who puts his neck in the
collar and pulls while life lasts to meet the unceasing demands of his
little sanctuary; and to the woman--the thousands upon thousands of
women, who work while life lasts to serve that sanctuary by night and
day--to all these it may not be unwelcome to suggest that the home need
be neither a prison, a workhouse, nor a consuming fire.

Home--with all that the sweet word means; home for each of us, in its
best sense; yet shorn of its inordinate expenses, freed of its grinding
labours, open to the blessed currents of progress that lead and lift us
all--this we may have and keep for all time.

It is, therefore, with no iconoclastic frenzy of destruction, but as
one bravely pruning a most precious tree, that this book is put
forward; inquiring as to what is and what is not vital to the subject;
and claiming broadly that with such and such clinging masses cut away,
the real home life will be better established and more richly fruitful
for good than we have ever known before.




II

THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME


We have been slow, slow and reluctant, to apply the laws of evolution
to the familiar facts of human life. Whatever else might move, we
surely were stationary; we were the superior onlookers--not part of the
procession. Ideas which have possessed the racial mind from the oldest
times are not to be dispossessed in a day; and this idea that man is
something extra in the scheme of creation is one of our very oldest. We
have always assumed that we were made by a special order, and that our
manners and customs were peculiarly and distinctively our own,
separated by an immeasurable gap from those of "the lower animals."

Now it appears, in large succeeding waves of proof, that there are no
gaps in the long story of earth's continual creation; some pages may be
lost to us, but they were once continuous. There is no break between us
and the first stir of life upon our planet. Life is an unbroken line, a
ceaseless stream that pours steadily on; or rather, it grows like an
undying tree, some of whose branches wither and drop off, some reach
their limit part way up, but the main trunk rises ever higher. We stand
at the top and continue to grow, but we still carry with us many of the
characteristics of the lower branches.

At what point in this long march of life was introduced that useful,
blessed thing--the home? Is it something new, something distinctively
human, like the church, the school, or the post office? No. It is
traceable far back of humanity, back of the mammals, back of the
vertebrates; we find it in most elaborate form even among insects.

What is a home? The idea of home is usually connected with that of
family, as a place wherein young are born and reared, a common shelter
for the reproductive group. The word may be also applied to the common
shelter for any other permanent group, and to the place where any
individual habitually stays. Continuous living in any place by
individual or group makes that place a home; even old prisoners, at
last released, have been known to come back to the familiar cell
because it seemed like "home" to them. But "the home," in the sense in
which we here discuss it, is the shelter of the family, of the group
organised for purposes of reproduction. In this sense a beehive is as
much a home as any human dwelling place--even more, perhaps. The snow
hut of the Eskimo, the tent of hides that covers the American savage,
the rock-bound fastness of the cave-dweller--these are homes as truly
as the costliest modern mansion. The burrow of the prairie dog is a
home, a fox's earth is a home, a bird's nest is a home, and the shelter
of the little "seahorse" is a home. Wherever the mother feeds and
guards her little ones,--more especially if the father helps
her,--there is, for the time being, home.

This accounts at once for the bottomless depths of our attachment to
the idea. For millions and millions of years it has been reborn in each
generation and maintained by the same ceaseless pressure. The furry
babies of the forest grow to consciousness in nests of leaves, in a
warm stillness where they are safe and comfortable, where mother
is--and mother is heaven and earth to the baby. Our lightly spoken
phrase "What is home without a mother?" covers the deepest truth; there
would never have been any home without her. It is from these
antecedents that we may trace the formation of this deep-bedded
concept, home.

The blended feelings covered by the word are a group of life's first
necessities and most constant joys: shelter, quiet, safety, warmth,
ease, comfort, peace, and love. Add to these food, and you have the sum
of the animal's gratification. Home is indeed heaven to him. The world
outside is, to the animal with a home, a field of excitement, exertion,
and danger. He goes out to eat, in more or less danger of being eaten;
but if he can secure his prey and drag it home he is then perfectly
happy. Often he must feed where it falls, but then home is the place
for the after-dinner nap.

With the graminivora there is no thought of home. The peaceful
grass-eater drops foal or fawn, kid, calf, or lamb, where chance may
find her in the open, and feeds at random under the sky. Vegetable food
of a weak quality like grass has to be constantly followed up; there is
no time to gather armfuls to take home, even if there were homes--or
arms. But the beasts of prey have homes and love them, and the little
timid things that live in instant danger--they, too, have homes to hide
in at a moment's notice. These deep roots of animal satisfaction
underlie the later growths of sentiment that so enshrine the home idea
with us. The retreat, the shelter both from weather and enemies, this
is a primal root.

It is interesting to note that there is a strong connection still
between a disagreeable climate and the love of home. Where it is
comfortable and pleasant out of doors, then you find the life of the
street, the market place, the café, the plaza. Where it is damp and
dark and chill, where rain and wind, snow and ice make it unpleasant
without, there you find people gathering about the fireside, and
boasting of it as a virtue--merely another instance of the law that
makes virtue of necessity.

Man began with the beasts' need of home and the beasts' love of home.
To this he rapidly applied new needs and new sentiments. The ingenious
ferocity of man, and his unique habit of preying on his own kind, at
once introduced a new necessity, that of fortification. Many animals
live in terror of attack from other kinds of animals, and adapt their
homes defensively as best they may, but few are exposed to danger of
attack from their own kind. Ants, indeed, sometimes make war; bees are
sometimes thieves; but man stands clear in his pre-eminence as a
destroyer of his own race. From this habit of preying on each other
came the need of fortified homes, and so the feeling of safety attached
to the place grew and deepened.

The sense of comfort increased as we learned to multiply conveniences,
and, with this increase in conveniences, came decreased power to do
without them. The home where all sat on the floor had not so much
advantage in comfort over "out-of-doors" as had the home where all sat
on chairs, and became unable to sit on the ground with ease. So safety
and comfort grew in the home concept. Shelter, too, became more complex
as door and window and curtain guarded us better, and made us more
susceptible to chill. Peace became more dear at home as war increased
outside; quiet, as life waxed louder in the world; love, as we learned
to hate each other more. The more dangerous and offensive life outside,
the more we cling to the primal virtues of the home; and conversely, in
our imagination of heaven, we do not picture the angels as bound up in
their homes--if, indeed, they have any--but as gladly mingling in the
larger love which includes them all. When we say "Heaven is my home,"
we mean the whole of it.

The care and shelter of the young is a far larger problem with us than
with our hairy ancestors. Our longer period of immaturity gives us
monogamous marriage and the permanent home. The animal may change his
mate and home between litters; ours lap. This over-lapping,
long-continuing babyhood has given us more good than we yet recognise.

Thus we see that all the animal cared for in the home we have in
greater degree, and care for more; while we have, further, many home
ideals they knew not. One of the earliest steps in human development
was ancestor-worship. With lower animals the parents do their duty
cheerfully, steadily, devotedly, but there is no thought of return. The
law of reproduction acts to improve the race by relentlessly
sacrificing the individual, and that individual, the parent, never sets
up a claim to any special veneration or gratitude.

But with us it is different. Our little ones lasting longer and
requiring more care, we become more conscious of our relation to them.
So the primitive parent very soon set up a claim upon the child, and as
the child was absolutely helpless and in the power of the parent, it
did not take long to force into the racial mind this great back-acting
theory. The extreme height is found where it is made a religion,
ancestor-worship, once very common, and still dominant in some of our
oldest, _i.e._, most primitive civilisations, as the Chinese. This
ancestor-worship is what gave the element of sanctity to the home. As
late as the Roman civilisation its power was so strong that the home
was still a temple to a dwindling group of household gods--mere fossil
grandpas--and we ourselves are not yet free from the influence of Roman
civilisation. We still talk in poetic archaisms of "the altar of the
home."

The extension of the family from a temporary reproductive group to a
permanent social group is another human addition to the home idea. To
have lived in one hole all his infancy makes that hole familiar and
dear to the little fox. To have lived in one nest all his life makes
that nest more familiar and more dear to the rook. But to have lived in
one house for generations, to have "the home of my ancestors" loom upon
one's growing consciousness--this is to enlarge enormously our sense of
the dignity and value of the term.

This development of the home feeling of course hinges upon the theory
of private property rights; and on another of our peculiar specialties,
the exaltation of blood-relationships. Our whole social structure,
together with social progress and social action, rests in reality on
social relationship--that is, on the interchange of special services
between individuals. But we, starting the custom at a time when we knew
no better, and perpetuating it blindly, chose to assume that it was
more important to be connected physically as are the animals, than
psychically as human beings; so we extended the original family group
of father, mother, and child into endless collateral lines and tried to
attach our duties, our ambitions, our virtues and achievements to that
group exclusively. The effect of this on any permanent home was
necessarily to still further enlarge and deepen the sentiment attached
to it.

There is another feature of human life, however, which has contributed
enormously to our home sentiment,--the position of women. Having its
rise, no doubt, in the over-lapping babyhood before mentioned, the
habit grew of associating women more continuously with the home, but
this tendency was as nothing compared to the impetus given by the
custom of ownership in women. Women became, practically, property. They
were sold, exchanged, given and bequeathed like horses, hides, or
weapons. They belonged to the man, as did the house; it was one
property group. With the steadily widening gulf between the sexes which
followed upon this arbitrary imprisonment of the woman in the home, we
have come to regard "the world" as exclusively man's province, and "the
home" as exclusively woman's.

The man, who constitutes the progressive wing of the human race, went
on outside as best he might, organising society, and always enshrining
in his heart the woman and the home as one and indivisible. This gives
the subtle charm of sex to a man's home ideals, and, equally, the scorn
of sex to a man's home practices. Home to the man first means mother,
as it does to all creatures, but later, and with renewed intensity, it
means his own private harem--be it never so monogamous--the secret
place where he keeps his most precious possession.

Thus the word "home," in the human mind, touches the spring of a large
complex group of ideas and sentiments, some older than humanity, some
recent enough for us to trace their birth, some as true and inalienable
as any other laws of life, some as false and unnecessary as any others
of mankind's mistakes. It does not follow that all the earliest ones
are right for us to-day, because they were right for our remote
predecessors, or that those later introduced are therefore wrong.

What is called for is a clear knowledge of the course of evolution of
this earliest institution and an understanding of the reasons for its
changes, that we may discriminate to-day between that which is vital
and permanent in home life and that which is unessential and injurious.
We may follow without difficulty the evolution of each and all the
essential constituents of home, mark the introduction of
non-essentials, show the evils resultant from forced retention of
earlier forms; in a word, we may study the evolution of the home
precisely as we study that of any other form of life.

Take that primal requisite of safety and shelter which seems to
underlie all others, a place where the occupant may be protected from
the weather and its enemies. This motive of home-making governs the
nest-builder, the burrow-digger, the selector of caves; it dominates
the insect, the animal, the savage, and the modern architect. Dangers
change, and the home must change to suit the danger. So after the caves
were found insufficient, the lake-dwellers built above the water, safe
when the bridge was in. The drawbridge as an element of safety lingered
long, even when an artificial moat must needs be made for lack of lake.
When the principal danger is cold, as in Arctic regions, the home is
built thick and small; when it is heat, we build thick and large; when
it is dampness, we choose high ground, elevate the home, lay drains;
when it is wind, we seek a sheltered slope, or if there is no slope,
plant trees as a wind-break to protect the home, or, in the worst
cases, make a "cyclone cellar."

The gradual development of our careful plastering and glazing, our
methods of heating, of carpeting and curtaining, comes along this line
of security and shelter, modified always by humanity's great enemy,
conservatism. In these mechanical details, as in deeper issues, free
adaptation to changed conditions is hindered by our invariable effort
to maintain older habits. Older habits are most dear to the aged, and
as the aged have always most controlled the home, that institution is
peculiarly slow to respond to the kindling influence of changed
condition. The Chaldeans built of brick for years unnumbered, because
clay was their only building material. When they spread into Assyria,
where stone was plenty, they continued calmly putting up great palaces
of sunbaked brick,--mere _adobe_,--and each new king left the cracking
terraces of his predecessor's pride and built another equally
ephemeral. The influence of our ancestors has dominated the home more
than it has any other human institution, and the influence of our
ancestors is necessarily retroactive.

In the gathering currents of our present-day social evolution, and
especially in this country where progress is not feared, this heavy
undertow is being somewhat overcome. Things move so rapidly now that
one life counts the changes, there is at last a sense of motion in
human affairs, and so these healthful processes of change can have free
way. The dangers to be met to-day by the home-builder are far different
from those of ancient times, and, like most of our troubles, are
largely of our own making. Earthquake and tidal wave still govern our
choice of place and material somewhat, and climate of course always,
but fire is the chief element of danger in our cities, and next to fire
the greatest danger in the home is its own dirt.

The savage was dirty in his habits, from our point of view, but he
lived in a clean world large enough to hold his little contribution of
bones and ashes, and he did not defile his own tent with detritus of
any sort. We, in our far larger homes, with our far more elaborate
processes of living, and with our ancient system of confining women to
the home entirely, have evolved a continuous accumulation of waste
matter in the home. The effort temporarily to remove this waste is one
of the main lines of domestic industry; the effort to produce it is the
other.

Just as we may watch the course of evolution from a tiny transparent
cell, absorbing some contiguous particle of food and eliminating its
microscopic residuum of waste, up to the elaborate group of alimentary
processes which make up so large a proportion of our complex
physiology; so we may watch the evolution of these home processes from
the simple gnawing of bones and tossing them in a heap of the
cave-dweller, to the ten-course luncheon with its painted menu. In
different nations the result varies, each nation assumes its methods to
be right, and, so assuming, labours on to meet its supposed needs, to
fulfil its local ambitions and duties as it apprehends them. And in no
nation does it occur to the inhabitants to measure their habits and
customs by the effect on life, health, happiness, and character.

The line of comfort may be followed in its growth like the line of
safety. At first anything to keep the wind and rain off was
comfortable--any snug hole to help retain the heat of the little
animal. Then that old ABC of all later luxury, the bed,
appeared--something soft between you and the rock--something dry
between you and the ground. So on and on, as ease grew exquisite and
skill increased, till we robbed the eider duck and stripped the goose
to make down-heaps for our tender flesh to lie on, and so to the costly
modern mattress. The ground, the stamped clay floor, the floor of
brick, of stone, of wood; the rushes and the sand; the rug--a mere hide
once and now the woven miracle of years of labour in the East, or gaudy
carpet of the West--so runs that line of growth. Always the simple
beginning, and its natural development under the laws of progress to
more and more refinement and profusion. Always the essential changes
that follow changed conditions, and always the downward pull of
inviolate home-tradition, to hold back evolution when it could.

See it in furnishing: A stone or block of wood to sit on, a hide to lie
on, a shelf to put the food on. See that block of wood change under
your eyes and crawl up history on its forthcoming legs--a stool, a
chair, a sofa, a settee, and now the endless ranks of sittable
furniture wherewith we fill the home to keep ourselves from the floor
withal. And these be-stuffed, be-springed, and upholstered till it
would seem as if all humanity were newly whipped. It is much more
tiresome to stand than to walk. If you are confined at home you cannot
walk much--therefore you must sit--especially if your task be a
stationary one. So, to the home-bound woman came much sitting, and much
sitting called for ever softer seats, and to the wholly home-bound
harem women even sitting is too strenuous; there you find cushions and
more cushions and eternal lying down. A long way this from the strong
bones, hard muscles, and free movement of the sturdy squaw, and yet a
sure product of evolution with certain modifications of religious and
social thought.

Our homes, thanks to other ideas and habits, are not thus
ultra-cushioned; our women can still sit up, most of the time,
preferring a stuffed chair. And among the more normal working classes,
still largely and blessedly predominant, neither the sitting nor the
stuffing is so evident. A woman who does the work in an ordinary home
seldom sits down, and when she does any chair feels good.

In decoration this long and varied evolution is clearly and prominently
visible, both in normal growth, in natural excess, and in utterly
abnormal variations. So large a field of study is this that it will be
given separate consideration in the chapter on Domestic Art.

What is here sought is simply to give a general impression of the
continual flux and growth of the home as an institution, as one under
the same laws as those which govern other institutions, and also of the
check to that growth resultant from our human characteristic of
remembering, recording, and venerating the past. The home, more than
any other human phenomenon, is under that heavy check. The home is an
incarnate past to us. It is our very oldest thing, and holds the heart
more deeply than all others. The conscious thought of the world is
always far behind the march of events, it is most so in those
departments where we have made definite efforts to keep it at an
earlier level, and nowhere, not even in religion, has there been a more
distinct, persistent, and universal attempt to maintain the most remote
possible status.

"The tendency to vary," that inadequate name for the great centrifugal
force which keeps the universe swinging, is manifested most in the
male. He is the natural variant, where the female is the natural
conservative. By forcibly combining the woman with the home in his
mind, and forcibly compelling her to stay there in body, then,
conversely, by taking himself out and away as completely as possible,
we have turned the expanding lines of social progress away from the
home and left the ultra-feminised woman to ultra-conservatism therein.
Where this condition is most extreme, as in the Orient, there is least
progress; where it is least extreme, as with us, there is the most
progress; but even with us, the least evolved of all our institutions
is the home. Move it must, somewhat, as part of human life, but the
movement has come from without, through the progressive man, and has
been sadly retarded in its slow effect on the stationary woman.

This difference in rate of progress may be observed in the physical
structure of the home, in its industrial processes, and in the group of
concepts most closely associated with it. We have run over, cursorily
enough, the physical evolution of the home-structure, yet wide as have
been its changes they do not compare with the changes along similar
lines in the ultra-domestic world. Moreover, such changes as there are
have been introduced by the free man from his place in the more rapidly
progressive world outside.

The distinctively home-made product changes far less. We see most
progress in the physical characteristics of the home, its plan,
building, materials, furnishings, and decoration, because all these are
part of the world growth outside. We see less progress in such of the
home industries as remain to us. It should be always held in mind that
the phrase "domestic industry" does not apply to a special kind of
work, but to a certain grade of work, a stage of development through
which all kinds pass. All industries were once "domestic," that is,
were performed at home and in the interests of the family. All
industries have since that remote period risen to higher stages, except
one or two which are still classed as "domestic," and rightly so, since
they are the only industries on earth which have never left their
primal stage. This a very large and important phase of the study of the
home, and will be given due space later.

Least of all do we see progress in the home ideas. The home has changed
much in physical structure, in spite of itself. It has changed somewhat
in its functions, also in spite of itself. But it has changed very
little--painfully little--dangerously little, in its governing
concepts. Naturally ideas change with facts, but if ideas are held to
be sacred and immovable, the facts slide out from under and go on
growing because they must, while the ideas lag further and further
behind. We once held that the earth was flat. This was our concept and
governed our actions. In time, owing to a widening field of action on
the one hand, and a growth of the human brain on the other, we
ascertained the fact that the earth was round. See the larger thought
of Columbus driving him westward, while the governing concepts of the
sailors, proving too strong for him, dragged him back. Then, gradually,
with some difficulty, the idea followed the fact, and has since
penetrated to all minds in civilised countries. But the flatness of the
earth was not an essential religious concept, though it was clung to
strongly by the inert religion of the time; nor was it a domestic
concept, something still more inert. If it had been, it would have
taken far longer to make the change.

What progress has been made in our domestic concepts? The oldest,--the
pre-human,--shelter, safety, comfort, quiet, and mother love, are still
with us, still crude and limited. Then follow gradually later
sentiments of sanctity, privacy, and sex-seclusion; and still later,
some elements of personal convenience and personal expression. How do
these stand as compared with the facts? Our safety is really insured by
social law and order, not by any system of home defence. Against the
real dangers of modern life the home is no safeguard. It is as open to
criminal attack as any public building, yes, more. A public building is
more easily and effectively watched and guarded than our private homes.
Sewer gas invades the home; microbes, destructive insects, all diseases
invade it also; so far as civilised life is open to danger, the home is
defenceless. So far as the home is protected it is through social
progress--through public sanitation enforced by law and the public
guardians of the peace. If we would but shake off the primitive
limitations of these old concepts, cease to imagine the home to be a
safe place, and apply our ideas of shelter, safety, comfort, and quiet
to the City and State, we should then be able to ensure their
fulfilment in our private homes far more fully.

The mother-love concept suffers even more from its limitations. As a
matter of fact our children are far more fully guarded, provided for,
and educated, by social efforts than by domestic; compare the children
of a nation with a system of public education with children having only
domestic education; or children safeguarded by public law and order
with children having only domestic protection. The home-love and care
of the Armenians for their children is no doubt as genuine and strong
as ours, but the public care is not strong and well organised, hence
the little Armenians are open to massacre as little Americans are not.
Our children are largely benefited by the public, and would be much
more so if the domestic concept did not act too strongly in limiting
mother love to so narrow a field of action.

The later sentiments of sanctity and the others have moved a little,
but not much. _Why_ it is more sacred to make a coat at home than
to buy it of a tailor, to kill a cow at home than to buy it of a
butcher, to cook a pie at home than to buy it of a baker, or to teach a
child at home than to have it taught by a teacher, is not made clear to
us, but the lingering weight of those ages of ancestor-worship, of real
sacrifice and libation at a real altar, is still heavy in our minds. We
still by race-habit regard the home as sacred, and cheerfully profane
our halls of justice and marts of trade, as if social service were not
at least as high a thing as domestic service. This sense of sanctity is
a good thing, but it should grow, it should evolve along natural lines
till it includes all human functions, not be forever confined to its
cradle, the home.

The concept of sex-seclusion is, with us, rapidly passing away. Our
millions of wage-earning women are leading us, by the irresistible
force of accomplished fact, to recognise the feminine as part of the
world around us, not as a purely domestic element. The foot-binding
process in China is but an extreme expression of this old domestic
concept, the veiling process another. We are steadily leaving them all
behind, and an American man feels no jar to his sexuo-domestic
sentiments in meeting a woman walking freely in the street or working
in the shops.

The latest of our home-ideas, personal convenience and expression, are
themselves resultant from larger development of personality, and lead
out necessarily. The accumulating power of individuality developed in
large social processes by the male, is inherited by the female; she,
still confined to the home, begins to fill and overfill it with the
effort at individual expression, and must sooner or later come out to
find the only normal field for highly specialised human power--the
world.

Thus we may be encouraged in our study of domestic evolution. The
forces and sentiments originating in the home have long since worked
out to large social processes. We have gone far on our way toward
making the world our home. What most impedes our further progress is
the persistent retention of certain lines of industry within domestic
limits, and the still more persistent retention of certain lines of
home feelings and ideas. Even here, in the deepest, oldest, darkest,
slowest place in all man's mind, the light of science, the stir of
progress, is penetrating. The world does move--and so does the home.




III

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY


There is a school of myths connected with the home, more tenacious in
their hold on the popular mind than even religious beliefs. Of all
current superstitions none are deeper rooted, none so sensitive to the
touch, so acutely painful in removal. We have lived to see nations
outgrow some early beliefs, but others are still left us to study, in
their long slow processes of decay. Belief in "the divine right of
kings," for instance, is practically outgrown in America; and yet,
given a king,--or even a king's brother,--and we show how much of the
feeling remains in our minds, disclaim as we may the idea. Habits of
thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may
reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the
same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

Wherever the pouring stream of social progress has had little
influence,--in remote rural regions, hidden valleys, and neglected
coasts,--we find still in active force some of the earliest myths. They
may change their names as new religions take the place of old, Santa
Claus and St. Valentine holding sway in place of forgotten deities of
dim antiquity, but the festival or custom embodied is the same that was
enjoyed by those most primitive ancestors. Of all hidden valleys none
has so successfully avoided discovery as the Home. Church and State
might change as they would--as they must; science changed, art changed,
business changed, all human functions changed and grew save those of
the home. Every man's home was his castle, and there he maintained as
far as possible the facts and fancies of the place, unaltered from
century to century.

The facts have been too many for him. The domestic hearth, with its
undying flame, has given way to the gilded pipes of the steam heater
and the flickering evanescence of the gas range. But the sentiment
about the domestic hearth is still in play. The original necessity for
the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire--and it
was an altar fire in very truth at one period--has passed with the
means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from
that incessant service, but the _feeling_ that women should stay
at home is with us yet.

The time when all men were enemies, when out-of-doors was one
promiscuous battlefield, when home, well fortified, was the only place
on earth where a man could rest in peace, is past, long past. But the
_feeling_ that home is more secure and protective than anywhere else is
not outgrown.

So we have quite a list of traditional sentiments connected with home
life well worth our study; not only for their interest as
archaeological relics, but because of their positive injury to the life
of to-day, and in the hope that a fuller knowledge will lead to sturdy
action. So far we have but received and transmitted this group of
myths, handed down from the dim past; we continue to hand them down in
the original package, never looking to see if they are so; if we, with
our twentieth-century brains really believe them.

A resentful shiver runs through the reader at the suggestion of such an
examination. "What! Scrutinise the home, that sacred institution, and
even question it? Sacrilegious!" This very feeling proves the frail and
threadbare condition of this group of ideas. Good healthy young ideas
can meet daylight and be handled, but very old and feeble ones, that
have not been touched for centuries, naturally dread inspection, and no
wonder--they seldom survive it.

Let us begin with one especially dominant domestic myth, that fondly
cherished popular idea--"the privacy of the home." In the home who has
any privacy? Privacy means the decent seclusion of the individual, the
right to do what one likes unwatched, uncriticised, unhindered. Neither
father, mother, nor child has this right at home. The young man setting
up in "chambers," the young woman in college room or studio, at last
they realise what privacy is, at last they have the right to be alone.
The home does provide some privacy for the family as a lump--but it
remains a lump--there is no privacy for the individual. When homes and
families began this was enough, people were simple, unspecialised,
their tastes and wishes were similar; it is not enough to-day.

The progressive socialisation of humanity develops individuals; and
this ever-increasing individuality suffers cruelly in the crude
familiarity of home life. There sits the family, all ages, both sexes,
as many characters as persons; and every budding expression, thought,
feeling, or action has to run the gauntlet of the crowd. Suppose any
member is sufficiently strong to insist on a place apart, on doing
things alone and without giving information thereof to the others--is
this easy in the home? Is this relished by the family?

The father, being the economic base of the whole structure, has most
power in this direction; but in ninety-nine cases in a hundred he has
taken his place and his work outside. In the one hundredth case, where
some artist, author, or clergyman has to do his work at home--what is
his opinion then of the privacy of that sacred place?

The artist flees to a studio apart, if possible; the author builds him
a "den" in his garden, if he can afford it; the clergyman strives
mightily to keep "the study" to himself, but even so the family, used
to herding, finds it hard to respect anybody's privacy, and resents it.

The mother--poor invaded soul--finds even the bathroom door no bar to
hammering little hands. From parlour to kitchen, from cellar to garret,
she is at the mercy of children, servants, tradesmen, and callers. So
chased and trodden is she that the very idea of privacy is lost to her
mind; she never had any, she doesn't know what it is, and she cannot
understand why her husband should wish to have any "reserves," any
place or time, any thought or feeling, with which she may not make
free.

The children, if possible, have less even than the mother. Under the
close, hot focus of loving eyes, every act magnified out of all natural
proportion by the close range, the child soul begins to grow. Noticed,
studied, commented on, and incessantly interfered with; forced into
miserable self-consciousness by this unremitting glare; our little ones
grow up permanently injured in character by this lack of one of
humanity's most precious rights--privacy.

The usual result, and perhaps the healthiest, is that bickering which
is so distinctive a feature of family life. The effect varies. Sore
from too much rubbing, there is a state of chronic irritability in the
more sensitive; callous from too much rubbing there is a state of
chronic indifference in the more hardy; and indignities are possible,
yes, common, in family life which would shock and break the bonds of
friendship or of love, and which would be simply inconceivable among
polite acquaintances.

Another result, pleasanter to look at, but deeply injurious to the
soul, is the affectionate dominance of the strongest member of the
family; the more or less complete subservience of the others. Here is
peace at least; but here lives are warped and stunted forever by the
too constant pressure, close and heavy, surrounding them from infancy.

The home, as we know it, does not furnish privacy to the individual,
rich or poor. With the poor there is such crowding as renders it
impossible; and with the rich there is another factor so absolutely
prohibitive of privacy that the phrase becomes a laughing-stock.

Private?--a place private where we admit to the most intimate personal
association an absolute stranger; or more than one? Strangers by birth,
by class, by race, by education--as utterly alien as it is possible to
conceive--these we introduce in our homes--in our very bedchambers; in
knowledge of all the daily habits of our lives--and then we talk of
privacy! Moreover, these persons can talk. As they are not encouraged
to talk to us, they talk the more among themselves; talk fluently,
freely, in reaction from the enforced repression of "their place," and,
with perhaps a tinge of natural bitterness, revenging small slights by
large comment. With servants living in our homes by day and night,
confronted with our strange customs and new ideas, having our family
affairs always before them, and having nothing else in their occupation
to offset this interest, we find in this arrangement of life a
condition as far removed from privacy as could be imagined.

Consider it further: The average servant is an ignorant young woman.
Ignorant young women are proverbially curious, or old ones. This is not
because of their being women, but because of their being ignorant. A
well-cultivated mind has matter of its own to contemplate, and mental
processes of absorbing interest. An uncultivated mind is comparatively
empty and prone to unguarded gossip; its processes are crude and weak,
the main faculty being an absorbing appetite for events--the raw
material for the thoughts it cannot think. Hence the fondness of the
servant class for "penny dreadfuls"--its preferred food is highly
seasoned incident of a wholly personal nature. This is the kind of mind
to which we offer the close and constant inspection of our family life.
This is the kind of tongue which pours forth description and comment in
a subdomiciliary stream. This is the always-open avenue of information
for lover and enemy, spy and priest, as all history and literature
exhibit; and to-day for the reporter--worse than all four.

In simple communities the women of the household, but little above the
grade of servant in mind, freely gossip with their maids. In those more
sophisticated we see less of this free current of exchange, but it is
there none the less, between maid and maid, illimitable. Does not this
prove that our ideas of privacy are somewhat crude--and that they are
kept crude--must remain crude so long as the home is thus vulgarly
invaded by low-class strangers? May we not hope for some development of
home life by which we may outgrow forever these coarse old customs, and
learn a true refinement which keeps inviolate the privacy of both soul
and body in the home?

One other, yes, two other avenues of publicity are open upon this
supposed seclusion. We have seen that the privacy of the mother is at
the mercy of four sets of invaders: children, servants, tradesmen, and
callers. The tradesmen, in a city flat, are kept at a pleasing distance
by the dumb-waiter and speaking tube; and, among rich households
everywhere, the telephone is a defence. But, even at such long range,
the stillness and peace of the home, the chance to do quiet continued
work of any sort, are at the mercy of jarring electric bell or piercing
whistle. One of the joys of the country vacation is the escape from
just these things; the constant calls on time and attention, the
interruption of whatever one seeks to do, by these mercantile demands
against which the home offers no protection.

In less favoured situations, in the great majority of comfortable
homes, the invader gets far closer. "The lady of the house" is
demanded, and must come forth. The front door opens, the back door
yawns, the maid pursues her with the calls of tradesmen, regular and
irregular; from the daily butcher to the unescapable agent with a
visiting card. Of course we resist this as best we may with a bulwark
of trained servants. That is one of the main uses of servants--to offer
some protection to the inmates of this so private place, the home!

Then comes the fourth class--callers. A whole series of revelations as
to privacy comes here; a list so long and deep as to tempt a whole new
chapter on that one theme. Here it can be but touched on, just a
mention of the most salient points.

First there is the bulwark aforesaid, the servant, trained to protect a
place called private from the entrance of a class of persons privileged
to come in. To hold up the hands of the servant comes the lie; the
common social lie, so palpable that it has no moral value to most of
us--"Not at home!"

The home is private. Therefore, to be in private, you must claim to be
out of it!

Back of this comes a whole series of intrenchments--the reception room,
to delay the attack while the occupant hastily assumes defensive
armour; the parlour or drawing room, wherein we may hold the enemy in
play, cover the retreat of non-combatants, and keep some inner chambers
still reserved; the armour above mentioned--costume and manner, not for
the home and its inmates, but meant to keep the observer from forming
an opinion as to the real home life; and then all the weapons crudely
described in rural regions as "company manners," our whole system of
defence and attack; by which we strive, and strive ever in vain, to
maintain our filmy fiction of the privacy of the home.

The sanctity of the home is another dominant domestic myth. That we
should revere the processes of nature as being the laws of God is good;
a healthy attitude of mind. But why revere some more than others, and
the lower more than the higher?

The home, as our oldest institution, is necessarily our lowest, it came
first, before we were equal to any higher manifestation. The home
processes are those which maintain the individual in health and
comfort, or are intended to; and those which reproduce the individual.
These are vital processes, healthy, natural, indispensable, but why
sacred? To eat, to sleep, to breathe, to dress, to rest and amuse one's
self--these are good and useful deeds; but are they more hallowed than
others?

Then the shocked home-worshipper protests that it is not these physical
and personal functions which he holds in reverence, but "the sacred
duties of maternity," and "all those precious emotions which centre in
the home."

Let us examine this view; but, first let us examine the sense of
sanctity itself--see what part it holds in our psychology. In the first
dawn of these emotions of reverence and sanctity, while man was yet a
savage, the priest-craft of the day forced upon the growing racial mind
a sense of darkness and mystery, a system of "tabu"--of "that which is
forbidden." In China still, as term of high respect, the imperial seat
of government is called "the Forbidden City." To the dim thick early
mind, reverence was confounded with mystery and restriction.

Today, in ever-growing light, with microscope and telescope and Röntgen
ray, we are learning the true reverence that follows knowledge, and
outgrowing that which rests on ignorance.

The savage reveres a thing because he cannot understand it--we revere
because we can understand.

The ancient sacred must be covered up; to honour king or god you must
shut your eyes, hide your face, fall prostrate.

The modern sacred must be shown and known of all, and honoured by
understanding and observance.

Let not our sense of sanctity shrink so sensitively from the searcher;
if the home is really sacred, it can bear the light. So now for these
"sacred processes of reproduction." (Protest. "We did not say
'reproduction,' we said 'maternity!'") And what is maternity but one of
nature's processes of reproduction? Maternity and paternity and the
sweet conscious duties and pleasures of human child-rearing are only
more sacred than reproduction by fission, by parthenogenesis, by any
other primitive device, because they are later in the course of
evolution, so higher in the true measure of growth; and for that very
reason education, the social function of child-rearing, is higher than
maternity; later, more developed, more valuable, and so more sacred.
Maternity is common to all animals--but we do not hold it sacred, in
them. We have stultified motherhood most brutally in two of our main
food products--milk and eggs--exploiting this function remorselessly to
our own appetites.

In humanity, in some places and classes we do hold it sacred, however.
Why? "Because it is the highest, sweetest, best thing we know!" will be
eagerly answered. Is it--really? Is it better than Liberty, better than
Justice, better than Art, Government, Science, Industry, Religion? How
can that function which is common to savage, barbarian, peasant, to all
kinds and classes, low and high, be nobler, sweeter, better, than those
late-come, hard-won, slowly developed processes which make men greater,
wiser, kinder, stronger from age to age?

The "sacred duties of maternity" reproduce the race, but they do
nothing to improve it.

Is it not more sacred to teach right conduct for instance, as a true
preacher does, than to feed one's own child as does the squaw? Grant
that both are sacred--that all right processes are sacred--is not the
relative sanctity up and out along the line of man's improvement?

Do we hold a wigwam more sacred than a beast's lair and less sacred
than a modern home? If so, why? Do we hold an intelligent, capable
mother more sacred than an ignorant, feeble one? Where are the limits
and tendencies of these emotions?

The main basis of this home-sanctity idea is simply the historic record
of our ancient religion of ancestor-worship. The home was once used as
a church, as it yet is in China; and the odour of sanctity hangs round
it still. The other basis is the equally old custom of sex-seclusion--the
harem idea. This gives the feeling of mystery and "tabu," of "the
forbidden"--a place shut and darkened--wholly private. A good, clean,
healthy, modern home, with free people living and loving in it, is no
more sacred than a schoolhouse. The schoolhouse represents a larger
love, a higher function, a farther development for humanity. Let us
revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the
lowest; the future, not the past!

Closely allied to our sense of home-sanctity and sprung from the same
root, is our veneration for the old; either people or things; the "home
of our ancestors" being if anything more sacred than our own, and the
pot or plate or fiddle-back chair acquiring imputed sanctity by the
simple flux of time. What time has to do with sanctity is not at first
clear. Perhaps it is our natural respect for endurance. This thing has
_lasted_, therefore it must be good; the longer it lasts the better it
must be, let us revere it!

If this is a legitimate principle, let us hold pilgrimages to the
primordial rocks, they have lasted longer than anything else, except
sea water. Let us frankly worship the sun--or the still remoter
dog-star. Let us revere the gar-fish above the shad--the hedgehog more
than the cow--the tapir beyond the horse--they are all earlier types
and yet endure!

Still more practically let us turn our veneration to the tools,
vehicles, and implements which preceded ours--the arrow-head above the
bullet, the bone-needle above the sewing machine, the hour-glass above
the clock!

There is no genuine reason for this attitude. It is merely a race
habit, handed down to us from very remote times and founded on the
misconceptions of the ignorant early mind. The scientific attitude of
mind is veneration of all the laws of nature, or works of God, as you
choose to call them. If we must choose and distinguish, respecting this
more than that, let us at least distinguish on right lines. The claim
of any material object upon our respect is the degree of its use and
beauty. A weak, clumsy, crooked tool acquires no sanctity from the
handling of a dozen grandfathers; a good, strong, accurate one is as
worthy of respect if made to-day. It is quite possible to the mind of
man to worship idols, but it is not good for him.

A great English artist is said to have scorned visiting the United
States of America as "a country where there were no castles." We might
have showed him the work of the mound-builders, or the bones of the
Triceratops, they are older yet. It will be a great thing for the human
soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards. We are pushed forward
by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our
shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along;
still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping "the
God of our fathers." Why not the God of our children? Does eternity
only stretch one way?

Another devoutly believed domestic myth is that of the "economy" of the
home.

The man is to earn, and the woman to save, to expend judiciously, to
administer the products of labour to the best advantage. We honestly
suppose that our method of providing for human wants by our system of
domestic economy is the cheapest possible; that it would cost more to
live in any other way. The economic dependence of women upon men, with
all its deadly consequences, is defended because of our conviction that
her labour in the home is as productive as his out of it; that the
marriage is a partnership in which, if she does not contribute in cash,
she does in labour, care, and saving.

It is with a real sense of pain that one remorselessly punctures this
beautiful bubble. When plain financial facts appear, when economic laws
are explained, then it is shown that our "domestic economy" is the most
wasteful department of life. The subject is taken up in detail in the
chapter on home industries; here the mere statement is made, that the
domestic system of feeding, clothing, and cleaning humanity costs more
time, more strength, and more money than it could cost in any other way
except absolute individual isolation. The most effort and the least
result are found where each individual does all things for himself. The
least effort and the most result are found in the largest
specialisation and exchange.

The little industrial group of the home--from two to five or ten--is
very near the bottom of the line of economic progress. It costs men
more money, women more work, both more time and strength than need be
by more than half. A method of living that wastes half the time and
strength of the world is not economical.

Somewhat along this line of popular belief comes that pretty fiction
about "the traces of a woman's hand." It is a minor myth, but very dear
to us. We imagine that a woman--any woman--just because she is a woman,
has an artistic touch, an æsthetic sense, by means of which she can
cure ugliness as kings were supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on
of hands. We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some
lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers a flower pot,
a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly proclaims--"A woman has been
here." He thinks it is beautiful because it is feminine--a
sexuo-æsthetic confusion common to all animals.

The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions, is a strange
field of study. The varied forms of crests, combs, wattles, callosities
of blue and crimson, and the like, with which one sex attracts the
other, are interesting to follow; but they do not appeal to the
cultivated sense of beauty. Beauty--beauty of sky and sea, of flower
and shell, of all true works of art--has nothing to do with sex.

When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those who _have_
beautified the world for us; on the immortal marbles and mosaics,
vessels of gold and glass, on building and carving and modelling and
painting; the enduring beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich
embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great record of
world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a woman's hand.

Then study real beauty in the home--any home--all homes. There are
women in our farm-houses--women who painfully strive to produce beauty
in many forms; crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck
together, made of wax; made--of all awful things--of the hair of the
dead! Here are traces of a woman's hand beyond dispute, but is it
beauty? Through the hands of women, with their delighted approval,
pours the stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture,
fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration, fashion in clothing.
What miracle does "a woman's hand" work on this varying flood of
change?

The woman is as pleased with black horsehair as with magenta reps; she
is equally contented with "anti-macassars" as with sofa-cushions, if
these things are fashionable. Her "old Canton" is relegated to the
garret when "French China" of unbroken white comes in; and then brought
down again in triumph when the modern goes out and the antique comes in
again.

She puts upon her body without criticism or objection every excess,
distortion, discord, and contradiction that can be sewed together. The
æsthetic sense of woman has never interfered with her acceptance of
ugliness, if ugliness were the fashion. The very hair of her head goes
up and down, in and out, backwards and forwards under the sway of
fashion, with no hint of harmony with the face it frames or the head it
was meant to honour. In her house or on her person "the traces of a
woman's hand" may speak loud of sex, and so please her opposite; but
there is no assurance of beauty in the result. This sweet tradition is
but another of our domestic myths.

Among them all, most prominent of all, is one so general and so
devoutly accepted as to call for most thorough exposure. This is our
beloved dogma of "the maternal instinct." The mother, by virtue of
being a mother, is supposed to know just what is right for her
children. We honestly believe, men and women both, that in motherhood
inheres the power rightly to care for childhood.

This is a nature-myth, far older than humanity. We base the theory on
observation of the lower animals. We watch the birds and beasts and
insects, and see that the mother does all for the young; and as she has
no instruction and no assistance, yet achieves her ends, we attribute
her success to the maternal instinct.

What is an instinct? It is an inherited habit. It is an automatic
action of the nervous system, developed in surviving species of many
generations of repetition; and performing most intricate feats.

There is an insect which prepares for its young to eat a carefully
paralysed caterpillar. This ingenious mother lays her eggs in a neatly
arranged hole, then stings a caterpillar, so accurately as to deprive
him of motion but not of life, and seals up the hole over eggs and
fresh meat in full swing of the maternal instinct. A cruelly inquiring
observer took out the helpless caterpillar as soon as he was put in;
but the instinct-guided mother sealed up the hole just as happily. She
had done the trick, as her instinct prompted, and there was no
allowance for scientific observers in that prompting. She had no
intelligence, only instinct. You may observe mother instinct at its
height in a fond hen sitting on china eggs--instinct, but no brains.

We, being animals, do retain some rudiments of the animal instincts;
but only rudiments. The whole course of civilisation has tended to
develop in us a conscious intelligence, the value of which to the human
race is far greater than instinct. Instinct can only be efficient in
directing actions which are unvaryingly repeated by each individual for
each occasion. It is that repetition which creates the instinct. When
the environment of an animal changes he has to use something more than
instinct, or he becomes ex-tinct!

The human environment is in continual flux, and changes more and more
quickly as social evolution progresses. No personal conditions are so
general and unvarying with us as to have time to develop an instinct;
the only true ones for our race are the social instincts--and maternity
is not a social process.

Education is a social process, the very highest. To collect the
essentials of human progress and supply them to the young, so that each
generation may improve more rapidly, that is education. The animals
have no parallel to this. The education of the animal young by the
animal mother tends only to maintain life, not to improve it. The
education of a child, and by education is meant every influence which
reaches it, from birth to maturity, is a far more subtle and elaborate
process.

The health and growth of the body, the right processes of mental
development, the ethical influences which shape character--these are
large and serious cares, for which our surviving driblets of instinct
make no provision. If there were an instinct inherent in human mothers
sufficient to care rightly for their children, then all human mothers
would care rightly for their children.

Do they?

What percentage of our human young live to grow up? About fifty per
cent. What percentage are healthy? We do not even expect them to be
healthy. So used are we to "infantile diseases" that our idea of a
mother's duty is to nurse sick children, not to raise well ones! What
percentage of our children grow up properly proportioned, athletic and
vigorous? Ask the army surgeon who turns down the majority of
applicants for military service. What percentage of our children grow
up with strong, harmonious characters, wise and good? Ask the great
army of teachers and preachers who are trying for ever and ever to
somewhat improve the adult humanity which is turned out upon the world
from the care of its innumerable mothers and their instincts.

Our eyes grow moist with emotion as we speak of our mothers--our own
mothers--and what they have done for us. Our voices thrill and tremble
with pathos and veneration as we speak of "the mothers of great men--"
mother of Abraham Lincoln! Mother of George Washington! and so on. Had
Wilkes Booth no mother? Was Benedict Arnold an orphan?

_Who_, in the name of all common sense, raises our huge and growing
crop of idiots, imbeciles, cripples, defectives, and degenerates, the
vicious and the criminal; as well as all the vast mass of slow-minded,
prejudiced, ordinary people who clog the wheels of progress? Are the
mothers to be credited with all that is good and the fathers with all
that is bad?

That we are what we are is due to these two factors, mothers and
fathers.

Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our social
environment is what modifies heredity and develops human character. The
kind of country we live in, the system of government, of religion, of
education, of business, of ordinary social customs and convention, this
is what develops mankind, this is given by our fathers.

What does maternal instinct contribute to this sum of influences? Has
maternal instinct even evolved any method of feeding, dressing,
teaching, disciplining, educating children which commands attention,
not to say respect? It has not.

The mothers of each nation, governed only by this rudimentary instinct,
repeat from generation to generation the mistakes of their more
ignorant ancestors; like a dog turning around three times before he
lies down on the carpet, because his thousand-remove progenitors turned
round in the grass!

That the care and education of children have developed at all is due to
the intelligent efforts of doctors, nurses, teachers, and such few
parents as chose to exercise their human brains instead of their brute
instincts.

That the care and education of children are still at the disgraceful
level generally existent is due to our leaving these noble functions to
the unquestioned dominance of a force which, even among animals, is not
infallible, and which, in our stage of socialisation, is practically
worthless.

Of all the myths which befog the popular mind, of all false worship
which prevents us from recognising the truth, this matriolatry is one
most dangerous. Blindly we bow to the word "mother"--worshipping the
recreative processes of nature as did forgotten nations of old time in
their great phallic religions.

The processes of nature are to be studied, not worshipped; the laws of
nature find best reverence in our intelligent understanding and
observance, not in obsequious adoration. When the human mother shows
that she understands her splendid function by developing a free,
strong, healthy body; by selecting a vigorous and noble mate; by
studying the needs of childhood, and meeting them with proficient
services, her own or that of others better fitted; by presenting to the
world a race of children who do not die in infancy, who are not preyed
upon by "preventable diseases," who grow up straight, strong,
intelligent, free-minded, and right-intentioned; then we shall have
some reason to honour motherhood, and it will be brain-work and
soul-work that we honour. Intelligence, study, experience, science,
love that has more than a physical basis--human motherhood--not the
uncertain rudiments of a brute instinct!




IV

PRESENT CONDITIONS


The difference between our current idea of the home to-day, and its
real conditions, is easily seen. That is, it is easily seen if we are
able temporarily to resist the pressure of inherited traditions, and
use our individual brain power for a little while. We must remember, in
attempting to look fairly, to see clearly, that a concept is a much
stronger stimulus to the brain than a fact.

A fact, reaching the brain through any sensory nerve, is but an
impression; and if a previous impression to the contrary exists,
especially if that contrary impression has existed, untouched, for many
generations, the fact has but a poor chance of acceptance. "What!"
cries the astonished beholder of some new phenomenon. "Can I believe my
eyes!" and he does not believe his eyes, preferring to believe the
stock in trade of his previous ideas. It takes proof, much proof,
glaring, positive, persistent, to convince us that what we have long
thought to be so is not so. "A preconceived idea" is what we call this
immoveable lump in the brain, and if the preconceived idea is deeply
imbedded, knit, and rooted as an "underlying conviction," and has so
existed for a very long time, then a bombardment of most undeniable
facts bounds off it without effect.

Our ideas of the home are, as we have seen, among the very deepest in
the brain; and to reach down into those old foundation feelings, to
disentangle the false from the true, to show that the true home does
not involve this group of outgrown rudiments is difficult indeed. Yet,
if we will but use that wonderful power of thought which even the most
prejudiced can exercise for a while, it is easy to see what are the
real conditions of the average home to-day. By "average" is not meant
an average of numbers. The world still has its millions of savage
inhabitants who do not represent to-day, but anthropologic yesterdays,
long past.

Even in our own nation, our ill-distributed social advance leaves us a
vast majority of population who do not represent to-day, but a historic
yesterday. The home that is really of to-day is the home of the people
of to-day, those people who are abreast of the thought, the work, the
movement of our times. The real conditions of the present-day home are
to be studied here; not in the tepee of the Sioux, the clay-built walls
of the Pueblo, the cabin of the "Georgia cracker," or mountaineer of
Tennessee; or even in the thousand farm-houses which still repeat so
nearly the status of an earlier time.

The growth and change of the home may be traced through all these
forms, in every stage of mechanical, industrial, economic, artistic,
and psychic development; but the stage we need to study is that we are
now in, those homes which are pushed farthest in the forefront of the
stream of progress. An average home of to-day, in this sense, is one of
good social position, wherein the husband has sufficient means and the
wife sufficient education to keep step with the march of events; one
which we should proudly point out to a foreign visitor as "a typical
American home."

Now, how does this home really stand under dispassionate observation?

The ideal which instantly obtrudes itself is this: A beautiful,
comfortable house meeting all physical needs; a happy family,
profoundly enjoying each other's society; a father, devotedly spending
his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain this little heaven; a
mother, completely wrapped up in her children and devotedly spending
her life in their service, working miracles of advantage to them in so
doing; children, happy in the home and growing up beautifully under its
benign influence--everybody healthy, happy, and satisfied with the
whole thing.

This ideal is what we are asked to lay aside temporarily; and in its
place to bring our minds to bear on the palpable facts in the case.
Readers of a specially accurate turn of mind may perhaps be interested
enough to jot down on paper their own definite observations of, say, a
dozen homes they know best.

One thing may be said here in defence of our general ignorance on this
subject: the actual conditions of home life are studiously concealed
from casual observation. Our knowledge of each other's homes is
obtained principally by "calling" and the more elaborate forms of
social entertainments.

The caller only reaches the specially prepared parlour or reception
room; the more intimate friends sometimes the bedroom or even nursery,
if they are at the time what we call "presentable"; and it is part of
our convention, our age-long habit of mind, to accept this partial and
prepared view as a picture of the home life. It is not.

To know any home really, you must live in it, "winter and summer" it,
know its cellar as well as parlour, its daily habits as well as its
company manners. So we have to push into the background not only the
large, generally beautiful home ideal, smiling conventionally like a
big bronze Buddha; but also that little pocket ideal which we are
obliged to use constantly to keep up the proper mental attitude.

We are not used to looking squarely, open-eyed and critical, at any
home, so "sacred" is the place to us. Now, having laid aside both the
general ideal and the pocket ideal, what do we see?

As to physical health and comfort and beauty: Ask your Health Board,
your sanitary engineer, how the laws of health are observed in the
average home--even of the fairly well-to-do, even of the fairly
educated. Learn what we may of art and science, the art of living, the
science of living is not yet known to us. We build for ourselves
elaborate structures in which to live, following architectural
traditions, social traditions, domestic traditions, quite regardless of
the laws of life for the creature concerned.

This home is the home of a live animal, a large animal, bigger than a
sheep--about as big as a fallow deer. The comfort and health of this
animal we seek to insure by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of
cloth and then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with cloth
and paper and occasionally "aired" by opening windows. We feed the
animal in the box, bringing into it large and varied supplies of food,
and cooking them there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant
upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and smell of our own
preferred food-processes, yet holding it essential that they shall all
be carried on in the same box with the animal to be fed; we proceed to
enlarge the box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed doors
these offensive details (which we would not do without for the world),
and to introduce into the box still other animals of different grades
to perform the offensive processes.

You thus find in a first-class modern home peculiar warring conditions,
in the adjustment of which health and comfort are by no means assured.
The more advanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find
complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential
disease, involved in the integral--supposedly integral--processes of
the place. The more lining and stuffing there are, the more waste
matter fills the air and settles continually as dust; the more
elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a
healthy animal to live in; the more labour required, the greater the
wear and tear on both the heads of the family.

The conditions of health in a representative modern home are by no
means what we are capable of compassing.

We consider "antiseptic cleanliness" as belonging only to hospitals,
and are content to spend our daily, and nightly, lives in conditions of
septic dirt.

An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic feet of air in an hour.
How many homes provide such an amount, fresh, either by day or night?

Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to wrong conditions in
shop and office, to chances of the crowd, or to special drug habits.
Diseases of women and children must be studied at home, where they take
rise. The present conditions of the home as to health and comfort are
not satisfactory.

As to beauty: we have not much general knowledge of beauty, either in
instinct or training; yet, even with such as we have, how ill satisfied
it is in the average home. The outside of the house is not beautiful;
the inside is not beautiful; the decorations and furnishings are not
beautiful. The home, by itself, in its age-long traditionalism, does
not allow of growth in these lines; nor do its physical limitations
permit of it. But as education progresses and money accumulates we hire
"art-decorators" and try to creep along the line of advance.

A true natural legitimate home beauty is rare indeed. We may be
perfectly comfortable among our things, and even admire them; people of
any race or age do that; but that sense of "a beautiful home" is but
part of the complex ideal, not a fact recognised by those who love and
study beauty and art. We do not find our common "interiors" dear to the
soul of the painter. So we may observe that in general the home does
not meet the demands of the physical nature, for simple animal health
and comfort; nor of the psychical for true beauty.

Now for our happy family. Let it be carefully borne in mind that no
question is raised as to the happiness of husband and wife; or of
parent and child in their essential relation; but of their happiness as
affected by the home.

The effect of the home, as it now is, upon marriage is a vitally
interesting study. Two people, happily mated, sympathetic physically
and mentally, having many common interests and aspirations, proceed
after marrying to enter upon the business of "keeping house," or
"home-making." This business is not marriage, it is not parentage, it
is not child-culture. It is the running of the commissary and dormitory
departments of life, with elaborate lavatory processes.

The man is now called upon to pay, and pay heavily, for the maintenance
of this group of activities; the woman to work, either personally, by
deputy, or both, in its performance.

Then follows one of the most conspicuous of conditions in our present
home: the friction and waste of its supposedly integral processes. The
man does spend his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain--not a
"little heaven," but a bunch of ill-assorted trades, wherein everything
costs more than it ought to cost, and nothing is done as it should be
done--on a business basis.

How many men simply hand out a proper sum of money for "living
expenses," and then live, serene and steady, on that outlay?

Home expenses are large, uncertain, inexplicable. In some families an
exceptional "manager," provided with a suitable "allowance," does
keep the thing in comparatively smooth running order, at considerable
cost to herself; but in most families the simple daily processes of
"housekeeping" are a constant source of annoyance, friction, waste, and
loss. Housekeeping, as a business, is not instructively successful. As
the structure of the home is not what we so readily took for granted in
our easily fitting ideals, so the functions of the home are not,
either. We are really struggling and fussing along, trying to live
smoothly, healthfully, peacefully; studying all manner of "new thought"
to keep us "poised," pining for a "simpler life"; and yet all spending
our strength and patience on the endless effort to "keep house," to
"make a home"--to live comfortably in a way which is not comfortable;
and when this continuous effort produces utter exhaustion, we have
_to go away from home_ for a rest! Think of that, seriously.

The father is so mercilessly overwhelmed in furnishing the amount of
money needed to maintain a home that he scarce knows what a home is.
Time, time to sit happily down with his family, or to go happily out
with his family, this is denied to the patient toiler on whose
shoulders this ancient structure rests. The mother is so overwhelmed in
her performance or supervision of all the inner workings of the place
that she, too, has scant time for the real joys of family life.

The home is one thing, the family another; and when the home takes all
one's time, the family gets little. So we find both husband and wife
overtaxed and worried in keeping up the institution according to
tradition; both father and mother too much occupied in home-making to
do much toward child-training, man-making!

What is the real condition of the home as regards children--its primal
reason for being? How does the present home meet their needs? How does
the home-bound woman fill the claims of motherhood? As a matter of
fact, _are_ our children happy and prosperous, healthy and good,
at home? Again the ideal rises; picture after picture, tender, warm,
glowing; again we must push it aside and look at the case as it is. In
our homes to-day the child grows up--when he does not die--not at all
in that state of riotous happiness we are so eager to assume as the
condition of childhood. The mother loves the child, always and always;
she does what she can, what she knows how; but the principal work of
her day is the care of the house, not of the child; the construction of
clothes--not of character.

Follow the hours in the day of the housewife: count the minutes spent
in the care and service of the child, as compared with those given to
the planning of meals, the purchase of supplies, the labour either of
personally cleaning things or of seeing that other persons do it; the
"duties" to society, of the woman exempt from the actual house-labour.

"But," we protest, "all this is for the child--the meals, the well-kept
house, the clothes--the whole thing!"

Yes? And in what way do the meals we so elaborately order and prepare,
the daintily furnished home, the much-trimmed clothing, contribute to
the body-growth, mind-growth, and soul-growth of the child? The
conditions of home life are not those best suited to the right growth
of children. Infant discipline is one long struggle to coerce the
growing creature into some sort of submission to the repressions, the
exactions, the arbitrary conventions of the home.

In broad analysis, we find in the representative homes of to-day a
condition of unrest. The man is best able to support it because he is
least in it; he is part and parcel of the organised industries of the
world, he has his own special business to run on its own lines; and he,
with his larger life-basis, can better bear the pressure of
house-worries. The wife is cautioned by domestic moralists not to annoy
her husband with her little difficulties; but in the major part of
them, the economic difficulties, she must consult him, because he pays
the bills.

When a satisfactory Chinaman is running a household; when the money is
paid, the care deputed, the whole thing done as by clock-work, this
phase of home unrest is removed; but the families so provided for are
few. In most cases the business of running a home is a source of
constant friction and nervous as well as financial waste.

Quite beyond this business side come the conditions of home life, the
real conditions, as affecting the lives of the inmates. With great
wealth, and a highly cultivated taste, we find the members of the
family lodged in as much privacy and freedom as possible in a home, and
agreeing to disagree where they are not in accord. With great love and
highly cultivated courtesy and wisdom, we find the members of the
family getting on happily together, even in a physically restricted
home. But in the average home, occupied by average people, we find the
members of the family jarring upon one another in varying degree.

That harmony, peace, and love which we attribute to home life is not as
common as our fond belief would maintain. The husband, as we have seen,
finds his chief base outside, and bears up with greater or less success
against the demands and anxieties of the home. The wife, more closely
bound, breaks down in health with increasing frequency. The effect of
home life on women seems to be more injurious in proportion to their
social development. Our so-called "society" is one outlet, though not a
healthful one, through which the woman seeks to find recreation,
change, and stimulus to enable her to bear up against a too continuous
home life.

The young man at home is almost a negligible factor--he does not stay
in it any more than he can help. The young woman at home finds her
growing individuality an increasing disadvantage, and many times makes
a too hasty marriage because she is not happy at home--in order to have
"a home of her own," where she still piously believes all will be well.

The child at home has no knowledge of any other and better environment
wherewith to compare this. He accepts his home as the unavoidable base
of all things--he cannot think of life with a different home. But the
eagerness with which he hails any proposition that takes him out of it,
his passionate hunger for change, for novelty; the fever which most
boys have for "running away"; the eager, intense interest in stories of
anything and everything as far removed from home life as possible; the
dreary _ennui_ of the child who is punished by being kept at home--or
who has to stay there continuously for any reason--standing at the
window which can give sight of the world outside and longing for
something to happen--all this goes to indicate that home life does not
satisfy the child. There was a time when it did, when it satisfied
every member of the family; but that was under far more primitive
conditions.

The home has not developed in the same ratio as its occupants. The
people of to-day are not content in the homes of a thousand years
before yesterday. Our present home conditions are being changed--very
gradually, owing to the stiffness of the material, but are slowly
changing before our eyes. As a matter of fact, we are ready--more than
ready--for the homes of the future; as a matter of feeling, we are
clinging with all our might to the homes of the past; and, in their
present conditions, our homes are not by any means those centres of
rest, peace, and satisfaction we are so religiously taught to think
them.

Suppose for an instant that they were. Suppose the trouble, the
weariness, the danger and evils of outside life were all laid aside the
moment we entered the home. There all was well. No financial trouble.
No industrial trouble. No physical trouble. No mental trouble. No moral
trouble. Just a place where everything ran on wheels; and where the
world-worn soul could count on peace and refreshment.

Vain supposition! Whatever the financial troubles of the world, the
place where they are felt most is in the home. Here is where the money
is spent, and most wastefully misspent as we shall see later. Here is
where there is never enough, where the demand continually exceeds the
supply.

As to industrial trouble, the labour question is a large one
everywhere. The introduction of machinery has brought its train of
needless disadvantages as well as its essential advantages. There are
dishonesty and inefficiency to meet and cope with. But compare the
conversation of a hundred business men with that of a hundred
housekeeping women, and learn respect for the magnitude of the
industrial troubles of the home.

For physical troubles, as we have before indicated, the home is no
relief. We struggle to enforce laws improving the physical conditions
of the coal mine and the factory, but these laws find their utmost
difficulty of application in the "sweatshops," the place where work is
done at home. There is no law to improve the sanitary condition of the
kitchen, to compel the admission of oxygen to the bedroom. In the home
every law of health may be disregarded with impunity. We strive by
building regulations and Boards of Health to make some improvement, but
the conditions of home life, as now existing, are no guarantee of
safety from physical troubles.

As to the mental and moral--the whole field of psychical error and
difficulty--the home is the place where we suffer most. The struggles
and falls of the soul, our most intimate sins, the keenest pain we
know--the home is the arena for these in large measure. Tender virtues
grow there, too--deep and abiding love, generous devotion, patient
endurance--faithfulness and care; but for one home that shows us these
is another where dominant injustice, selfishness, unthinking cruelty,
impatience, grossest rudeness, a callous disregard for the oft-trodden
feelings of others is found instead. No wide acquaintance with present
homes can fail to note these things in every shade of growth. Home is a
place where people live, people good and bad, great and small, wise and
unwise. The home does not make the bad good, the small great, or the
foolish wise. Many a man who _has_ to be decent in his social life
is domineering and selfish at home. Many a woman who has to be
considerate and polite in her social life, such as it is, is exacting
and greedy at home, and cruel as only the weak and ignorant can be. Now
if the home was what produced the virtues we commonly attribute to it,
then all homes, of all times and peoples, would have the same effect.

The American man holds pre-eminence as sacrificed to the home; the
American woman as being most petted and indulged therein. In England we
find the man more the centre of indulgence, in Germany still more
so--and the women subsidiary to his use and pleasure.

How can "the home" be credited with such opposite results? If, as is
commonly assumed, the home has any unfailing general effect, we must be
able to point out that effect in the homes of Russia, China, France,
and Egypt. If we find the homes of the nations differ we must look for
the cause in the national institutions--not the domestic.

That our well-loved homes are as good as they are is due to our race
progress; to our religion, our education, our general social advance.
When a peasant family from Hungary comes to America, they establish a
Hungarian home. As they become Americanised the home changes and
improves. The credit is not due to the home, but to the country.
Meanwhile the home does have certain definite effects upon our life;
due to its own nature, and acting upon us in every time and place.

These we shall analyse and follow in studying the effects of the home
upon society in a later chapter. In this observation of present
conditions we should note merely how our average home life now stands.
And we may plainly see these things; a general condition of unrest and
more or less dissatisfaction. A tendency to ever-growing expense, which
threatens the very existence of the home and is forcing many into
boarding houses. An increasing difficulty in the industrial
processes--a difficulty so great that the lives of our women are
embittered and shortened by it, and the periods of anxiety and
ill-adjustment are longer than those of satisfactory service. An
improvement in sanitary conditions so far as public measures can reach
the home, but a wide field of disease owing to wrong habits of
clothing, eating, and breathing. A rudimentary custom of child-culture
only beginning to show signs of progress; and a degree of unhappiness
to which the divorce and criminal courts, as well as insane asylums and
graveyards, bear crushing testimony.

With conditions of home life as far from our cherished ideal as these,
is it not time for us bravely to face the problem, and study home life
with a view to its improvement? Not "to abolish the home," as is wildly
feared by those who dare not discuss it. A pretty testimony this to
their real honour and belief! Is the home so light a thing as to be
blown away by a breath of criticism? Are we so loosely attached to our
homes as to give them up when some defects are pointed out? Is it not a
confession of the discord and pain we so stoutly deny, that we are not
willing to pour light into this dark place and see what ails it?

There is no cause for fear. So long as life lasts we shall have homes;
but we need not always have the same kind.

Our present home is injured by the rigidly enforced maintenance of
long-outgrown conditions. We may free ourselves, if we will, from every
one of those injurious, old conditions, and still retain all that is
good and beautiful and right in the home.




V

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP


_I. The Housewife_

All industry began at home.

All industry was begun by women.

Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation, during that long period
of slowly changing savagery which antedates our really human life,
whatever work was done on earth was done by the woman in the home. From
that time to this we have travelled far, spread wide, grown broad and
high; and our line of progress is the line of industrial evolution.

Where the patient and laborious squaw once carried on her back the
slaughtered game for her own family, now wind and steam and lightning
distribute our provisions around the world. Where she once erected a
rude shelter of boughs or hides for her own family, now mason and
carpenter, steel and iron worker, joiner, lather, plasterer, glazier,
plumber, locksmith, painter, and decorator combine to house the world.
Where she chewed and scraped the hides, wove bark and grasses, made
garments, made baskets, made pottery, made all that was made for her
own family, save the weapons of slaughter, now the thousand
manufactures of a million mills supply our complex needs and pleasures.
Where she tamed and herded a few beasts for her own family, now from
ranchman to packer move the innumerable flocks and herds of the great
plains; where she ploughed with a stick and reaped with a knife, for
her own family, now gathered miles of corn cross continent and ocean to
feed all nations. Where she prepared the food and reared the child for
her own family--what! Has the world stopped? Is history a dream? Is
social progress mere imagination?--_there she is yet!_ Back of history,
at the bottom of civilisation, untouched by a thousand whirling
centuries, the primitive woman, in the primitive home, still toils at
her primitive tasks.

All industries began at home, there is no doubt of that. All other
industries have left home long ago. Why have these stayed? All other
industries have grown. Why have not these?

What conditions, social and economic, what shadowy survival of oldest
superstitions, what iron weight of custom, law, religion, can be
adduced in explanation of such a paradox as this? Talk of Siberian
mammoths handed down in ice, like some crystallised fruit of earliest
ages! What are they compared with this antediluvian relic! By what art,
what charm, what miracle, has the twentieth century preserved _alive_
the prehistoric squaw!

This is a phenomenon well worth our study, a subject teeming with
interest, one that concerns every human being most closely--most
vitally. Sociology is beginning to teach us something of the processes
by which man has moved up and on to his present grade, and may move
farther. Among those processes none is clearer, simpler, easier to
understand, than industrial evolution. Its laws are identical with
those of physical evolution, a progression from the less to the
greater, from the simple to the complex, a constant adaptation of means
to ends, a tendency to minimise effort and maximise efficiency. The
solitary savage applies his personal energy to his personal needs. The
social group applies its collective energy to its collective needs. The
savage works by himself, for himself; the civilised man works in
elaborate inter-dependence with many, for many. By the division of
labour and its increasing specialisation we vastly multiply skill and
power; by the application of machinery we multiply the output; by the
development of business methods we reduce expense and increase results;
the whole line of growth is the same as that which makes a man more
efficient in action than his weight in shell-fish. He is more highly
organised and specialised. So is modern industry.

The solitary savage knew neither specialisation nor organisation--he
"did his own work." This process gives the maximum of effort and the
minimum of results. Specialised and organised industry gives the
minimum of effort and the maximum of results. That is civilised
industry.

The so idealised and belauded "home industries" are still savage. The
modern home is built and furnished by civilised methods. Arts, crafts,
and manufactures, sciences, professions, many highly sublimated
processes of modern life combine to make perfect the place where we
live; but the industries practised in that place remain at the first
round of the ladder.

Instead of having our pick of the latest and best workers, we are here
confined to the two earliest--the Housewife and the Housemaid. The
housewife is the very first, and she still predominates by so large a
majority as to make us wonder at the noisy prominence of "the servant
question." (It is not so wonderful, after all, for that class of the
population which keeps servants is the class which makes the most
noise.) Even in rich America, even in richest New York, in
_nine-tenths_ of the families the housewife "does her own work."
This is so large a proportion that we will consider the housewife
first--and fully.

Why was woman the first worker? Because she is a mother. All living
animals are under the law of, first, self-preservation, and, second,
race-preservation. But the second really comes first; the most
imperative forces in nature compel the individual to sacrifice to the
race. This law finds its best expression in what we call "the maternal
sacrifice." Motherhood means giving. There is no limit to this urgency.
The mother gives all she has to the young, including life. In many low
organisms the sacrifice is instantaneous and complete--the mother dies
in giving birth to the young--just lays her eggs and dies. Such forms
of life have to remain low, however. The defunct mothers can be of no
further use to the young, so they have to be little instinctive
automata, hopelessly arrested in the path of progress.

Nature perceived that this wholly sacrified mother was not the best
kind. Little by little the usefulness of the mother was prolonged, the
brooding mother, the feeding mother, lastly the nursing mother, highest
of all. Order mammalia stands at the top, type of efficient motherhood.

When human development began, new paths were open to mother-love--new
tasks to maternal energy. The human mother not only nursed and guarded
the child, but exercised her dawning ingenuity in adding to its comfort
by making things.

The constructive tendency is essentially feminine; the destructive
masculine. Male energy tends to scatter and destroy, female to gather
and construct. So human labour comes by nature from the woman, was hers
entirely for countless ages, while the man could only hunt and fight,
or prance and prophesy as "medicine man"; and this is still so in those
races which remain savage. Even in so advanced a savage race as the
Zulus, the women do the work; and our own country has plenty of similar
examples near at hand.

As human civilisation is entirely dependent on progressive industry,
while hunting and fighting are faculties we share with the whole
carnivora, it is easy to see that during all those ages of savagery the
woman was the leader. She represented the higher grade of life; and
carried it far enough to bring to birth many of the great arts as well
as the humbler ones, especially the invaluable art of language.[1]

          [1] See Otis Mason, "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture."

But maternal energy has its limits. What those limits are may be best
studied in an ant's nest or a beehive. These marvellous insects,
perfected types of industry and of maternity, have succeeded in
_organising motherhood_. Most creatures reproduce individually,
these collectively--all personal life absolutely lost in the group
life. Moved by an instinct coincident with its existence, the
new-hatched ant, still weak and wet from the pupa, staggers to the
nearest yet unborn to care for it, and cares for it devotedly to the
end of life.

One bee group-mother, crawling from cell to cell, lays eggs unnumbered
for the common care; the other group-mothers, their own egg-laying
capacity in abeyance, labour unceasingly in the interests of those
common eggs; and the delicate perfection of provision and service thus
attained results in--what? In a marvellous motherhood and a futile
fatherhood; the predominant female, the almost negligible male--a
temporary fertilising agent merely; in infinite reproduction, and that
is all; in more bees, and more ants, more and more for ever, like the
sands of the sea. They would cover the earth like a blanket but for
merciful appetites of other creatures. But this is only
multiplication--not improvement. Nature has one more law to govern life
besides self-preservation and reproduction--progress. To be, to re-be,
and to be better is the law. It is not enough to keep one's self alive,
it is not enough to keep one's kind alive, we must improve. This law of
growth, which is the grand underlying one that moves the universe, acts
on living species mainly through the male. He is progressive where the
female is conservative by nature. He is a variant where she is the race
type. This tendency to vary is one of the most beneficent in nature.
Through it comes change, and, through change, improvement. The
unbridled flow of maternal energy is capable of producing an exquisite
apparatus for child-rearing, and no more. The masculine energy is
needed also, for the highest evolution.

Well is it for the human race that the male savage finally took hold of
the female's industry. Whether he perceived her superiority and sought
to emulate it is doubtful; more probably it was the pressure of
economic conditions which slowly forced him to it. The glaring proofs
of time taught him that the pasture was more profitable than the
hunting ground, and the cornfield than the pasture. The accumulating
riches produced by the woman's industry drew him on. Slowly,
reluctantly, the lordly fighter condescended to follow the humble
worker, who led him by thousands of years. In the hands of the male,
industry developed. The woman is a patient, submissive, inexhaustible
labourer. The pouring forces of maternity prompt her to work for
ever--for her young. Not so the man. Working is with him an acquired
habit, and acquired very late in his racial life. The low-grade man
still in his heart despises it, he still prefers to be waited on by
women, he still feels most at home in hunting and fighting. And man
alone being represented in the main fields of modern industry, this
male instinct for hunting and fighting plays havoc with the true
economic processes. He makes a warfare of business, he makes prey of
his competitors, he still seeks to enslave--to make others work for
him, instead of freely and joyously working all he can. The best
industrial progress needs both elements--ours is but a compromise as
yet, something between the beehive and the battlefield.

But, with all the faults of unbridled male energy, it has lifted
industry from the limits of the home to that of the world. Through it
has come our splendid growth; much marred by evils of force and fraud,
crude, wasteful, cruel, but progressive; and infinitely beyond the
level of these neglected rudimentary trades left at home; left to the
too tender mercies of the housewife.

The iron limits of her efficiency are these: First, that of average
capacity. Just consider what any human business would be in which there
was no faintest possibility of choice, of exceptional ability, of
division of labor. What would shoes be like if every man made his own,
if the shoemaker had never come to his development? What would houses
be like if every man made his own? Or hats, or books, or waggons? To
confine any industry to the level of a universal average is to strangle
it in its cradle. And there, for ever, lie the industries of the
housewife. What every man does alone for himself, no man can ever do
well--or woman either. That is the first limit of the "housewife."

The next is the maternal character of this poor primeval labourer.
Because of her wealth of power and patience it does not occur to her to
make things easier for herself. The fatal inertia of home industries
lies in their maternal basis. The work is only done for the family--the
family is satisfied--what remains? There is no other ambition, no other
incentive, no other reward. Where the horizon of duty and aspiration
closes down with one's immediate blood relations, there is no room for
growth.

All that has pushed and pulled reluctant man up the long path of social
evolution has not touched the home-bound woman. Whatever height he
reached, her place was still the same. The economic relation of the
sexes here works[2] with tremendous force. Depending on the male for
her economic profit, her own household labours kept to the sex-basis,
and never allowed to enter the open market, there was nothing to modify
her original sex-tendency to work with stationary contentment. If we
can imagine for a moment a world like ours, with all our elaborate
business processes in the hands of women, and the men still in the
position of the male savage--painted braves, ready for the warpath, and
good for little else--we get a comparison with this real condition,
where the business processes are in the hands of men, and the women
still in the position of the female savage--docile toilers for the
family, and good for little else. That is the second limit of the
housewife--that she is merely working for her own family--in the
sex-relation--not the economic relation; as servant to the family
instead of servant to the world.

          [2] See "Women and Economics," C. P. Stetson.

Next comes her isolation. Even the bottom-level of a universal
average--even the blind patience of a working mother--could be helped
up a little under the beneficent influence of association. In the days
when the ingenious squaw led the world, she had it. The women toiled
together at their primitive tasks and talked together as they toiled.
The women who founded the beginnings of agriculture were founders also
of the village; and their feminine constructive tendencies held it
together while the destructive tendencies of the belligerent male
continually tore it apart. All through that babyhood of civilisation,
the hunting and fighting instinct made men prey upon the accumulated
wealth resultant from the labouring instinct of women--but industry
conquered, being the best. As industry developed, as riches increased,
as property rights were defined, as religions grew, women were confined
more and more closely at home. Later civilisations have let them out to
play--but not to work. The parasitic female of the upper classes is
allowed the empty freedom of association with her useless kind; but the
housewife is still confined to the house.

We are now giving great attention to this matter of home industry. We
are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on
Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of
home industry--and we omit to notice that it is just because it is home
industry that all this trouble is necessary.

So far as home industry had been affected by world industry, it has
improved. The implements of cooking and cleaning, for instance--where
should we be if our modern squaw had to make her own utensils, as did
her ancient prototype? The man, in world industry, makes not only the
house, with all its elaborate labour-saving and health-protecting
devices; not only the furniture of the house, the ornaments, hangings,
and decorations, but the implements of the home industries as well. Go
to the household furnishing store of our day--remember the one pot of
the savage family to boil the meat and wash the baby--and see the
difference between "homemade" and "world-made" things.

So far as home industry has progressed, it is through contact with the
moving world outside; so far as it remains undeveloped, it is through
the inexorable limitations of the home in itself.

There is one more limitation to be considered--the number of
occupations practised. Though man has taken out and developed all the
great trades, and, indeed, all trades beyond a certain grade, he has
left the roots of quite a number at home. The housewife practises the
conflicting elements of many kinds of work. First, she is cook.
Whatever else is done or undone, we must eat; and since eating is
ordained to be done at home, that is her predominant trade. The
preparation and service of food is a most useful function; and as a
world-industry, in the hands of professionals, students, and experts,
it has reached a comparatively high stage of development.

In the nine-tenths of our homes where the housewife is cook, it comes
under all these limitations: First, average capacity; second,
sex-tendency; third, isolation; fourth, conflicting duties.

The cook, having also the cleaning to do, the sewing, mending, nursing,
and care of children, the amount of time given to cooking is perforce
limited. But even the plainest of home cooking must take up a good
proportion of the day. The cooking, service, and "cleaning up" of
ordinary meals, in a farmhouse, with the contributory processes of
picking, sorting, peeling, washing, etc., and the extra time given to
special baking, pickling, and preserving, take fully six hours a day.
To the man, who is out of the house during work-hours, and who seldom
estimates woman's work at its real value, this may seem extreme, but
the working housewife knows it is a fair allowance, even a modest one.

There are degrees of speed, skill, intelligence, and purchasing power,
of course; but this is a modest average; two hours for breakfast, three
for dinner, one for supper. The preparation of food as a household
industry takes up half the working time of half the population of the
world. This utterly undeveloped industry, inadequate and exhausting,
takes nearly a quarter of a twelve-hour day of the world's working
force.

Cooking and sewing are inimical; the sewing of the housewife is quite
generally pushed over into the evening as well as afternoon, thus
lengthening her day considerably. Nursing, as applied to the sick, must
come in when it happens, other things giving way at that time. Cleaning
is continuous. Cooking, of course, makes cleaning; the two main
elements of dirt in the household being grease and ashes; another, and
omnipresent one, dust. Then, there are the children to clean, and the
clothes to clean--this latter so considerable an item as to take two
days of extra labour--during which, of course, other departments must
be less attended.

We have the regular daily labour of serving meals and "clearing up," we
have the regular daily labour of keeping the home in order; then we
have the washing day, ironing day, baking day, and sweeping day. Some
make a special mending day also. This division, best observed by the
most competent, is a heroic monument to the undying efforts of the
human worker to specialise. But we have left out one, and the most
important one, of our home industries--the care of children.

Where is Children's Day?

The children are there every day, of course. Yes, but which hour of the
day? With six for food, with--spreading out the washing and ironing
over the week--two for laundry, with--spreading the sweeping day and
adding the daily dusting and setting to rights--two for cleaning; and
another two for sewing--after these twelve hours of necessary labour
are accounted for, what time remains for the children?

The initial purpose of the home is the care of children. The initial
purpose of motherhood is the care of children. How are the duties of
the mother compatible with the duties of the housewife? How can
child-culture, as a branch of human progress, rise to any degree of
proficiency in this swarming heap of rudimentary trades?

Nothing is asked--here--as to how the housewife, doing all these things
together her life long, can herself find time for culture and
development; or how can she catch any glimmer of civic duty or public
service beyond this towering pile of domestic duty and household
service. The particular point herein advanced is that the conditions of
home industry _as such_ forever limit the growth of the industry
so practised; forever limit the growth of the persons so practising
them; and also tend to limit the growth of the society which is content
to leave any of its essential functions in this distorted state.

Our efforts to "lift the standard of household industry" ignore the
laws of industry. We seek by talking and writing, by poetising and
sermonising, and playing on every tender sentiment and devout
aspiration, to convince the housewife that there is something
particularly exalted and beautiful, as well as useful, in her
occupation. This shows our deep-rooted error of sex-distinction in
industry. We consider the work of the woman in the house as essentially
feminine, and fail to see that, as work, it is exactly like any other
kind of human activity, having the same limitations and the same
possibilities.

Suppose we change the sex and consider for a while the status
of a house-husband. He could be a tall, strong, fine-looking
person--man-servants often are. He could love his wife and his
children--industrial status does not affect these primal instincts. He
could toil from morning to night, manfully, to meet their needs.

Suppose we are visiting in such a family. We should find a very rude
small hut--no one man could build much of a house, but, ah! the tender
love, the pride, the intimate emotion he would put into that hut! For
his heart's dearest--for his precious little ones--he had dragged
together the fallen logs--chipped them smooth with his flint-ax (there
could have been no metal work while every man was a house-husband), and
piled them together. With patient, loving hands he had daubed the
chinks with clay, made beds of leaves, hung hides upon the walls. Even
some rude stools he might have contrived--though furniture really
belongs to a later period. But over all comes the incessant demand for
food. His cherished family must eat, often and often, and under that
imperative necessity all others wait.

So he goes forth to the hunt, brave, subtle, fiercely ingenious; and,
actuated by his ceaseless love for his family he performs wonders. He
brings home the food--day after day--even sometimes enough for several
days, though meat does not keep very long. The family would have food
of a sort, shelter of a sort, and love. But try to point out to the
house-husband what other things he could obtain for them, create for
them, provide for them, if he learned to combine with other men, to
exchange labour, to organise industry. See his virtuous horror!

What! Give up his duty to his family! Let another man hunt for
them!--another man build their home--another man make their garments!
He will not hear of it. "It is my duty as a husband," he will tell you,
"to serve my wife. It is my duty as a father to serve my children. No
other person could love them as I do, and without that love the work
would not be done as well." Strong in this conviction, the
house-husband would remain intrenched in his home, serving his family
with might and main, having no time, no strength, no brain capacity for
undertaking larger methods; and there he and his family would all be,
immovable in the Stone Age.

Never was any such idiot on earth as this hypothetical home-husband. It
was not in him to stay in such primitive restrictions. But he has been
quite willing to leave his wife in that interestingly remote period.

The permanent error of the housewife lies in that assumption that her
love for her family makes her service satisfactory. Family affection
has nothing to do with the specialist's skill; nor with the
specialist's love of his work for the pleasure of doing it. That is the
kind of love that makes good work; and that is the kind of work the
world needs and the families within it. Men, specialised, give to their
families all that we know of modern comforts, of scientific appliances,
of works of art, of the complex necessities and conveniences of modern
life. Women, unspecialised, refuse to benefit their families in like
proportion; but offer to them only the grade of service which was
proper enough in the Stone Age, but is a historic disgrace to-day.

A house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband. Are we
never to have a man-wife? A really suitable and profitable companion
for a man instead of the bond-slave of a house? There is nothing in
the work of a house which requires marital or maternal affection. It
does require highly developed skill and business sense--but these it
fails to get.

Would any amount of love on the part of that inconceivable
house-husband justify him in depriving his family of all the fruits of
progress? What a colossal charge of malfeasance in office could be
brought against such a husband--such a father; who, under the name of
love, should so fail in his great first duty--Progress.

How does the woman escape this charge? Why is not she responsible for
progress, too? By that strange assumption does she justify this
refusal to keep step with the world? She will tell you, perhaps, that
she cannot do more than she does--she has neither time nor strength nor
ambition for any more work. So might the house-husband have defended
himself--as honestly and as reasonably. It is true. While every man
had to spend all his time providing for his own family, no man ever
had, or ever could have, time, strength, or ambition to do more.

It is not _more_ work that is asked of women, but less. It is _a
different method_ of work. Human progress rests upon the interchange of
labour; upon work done humanly for each other, not, like the efforts of
the savage or the brute, done only for one's own. The housewife,
blinded by her ancient duty, fails in her modern duty.

It is true that, while she does this work in this way, she can do no
more. Therefore she must stop doing it, and learn to do differently.
The house will not be "neglected" by her so doing; but is even now most
shamefully neglected by her antique methods of labour. The family will
not be less loved because it has a skilled worker to love it. Love has
to pass muster in results, as well as intentions. Here are five
mothers, equally loving. One is a Hottentot. One is an Eskimo. One is a
Hindoo. One is a German peasant woman. One is an American and a
successful physician.

Which could do most for her children? All might compete on even terms
if "love is enough," as poets have claimed; but _which could best
provide for her children_?

Neither overflowing heart nor overburdened hand sufficiently counts in
the uplifting of the race; that rests on _what is done_. The position
of the housewife is a final limitation and a continuous, increasing
injury both to the specific industries of the place, and to her first
great duty of motherhood. The human race, fathered only by
house-husbands, would never have moved at all. The human race, mothered
only by housewives, has moved only half as fast and as far as it
rightly should have done, and the work the patient housewife spends her
life on is pitifully behind in the march of events. The home as a
workshop is utterly insufficient to rightly serve the needs of the
growing world.




VI

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP


_II. The Housemaid_

Among that tenth part of the population sufficiently rich to keep
servants, the conditions of domestic industry are familiar to us. This
is the tenth which is most conscious, and most vocal. It has the widest
range of social contact; it is most in touch with literature; both in
speech and writing we hear oftenest from the small class who keep
servants.

The woman who does her own work is not usually a writer and has little
time for reading. Moreover, her difficulties, though great, are not of
the sort that confound the mistress of servants. The housewife is held
to her work by duty and by love; also by necessity. She cannot "better
herself" by leaving; and indeed, without grave loss and pain, she
cannot leave at all. So the housewife struggles on, too busy to
complain; and accomplishes, under this threefold bond of duty, love,
and necessity far more than can be expected of a comparatively free
agent.

Therefore we hear little of the "problem" of domestic service where the
wife is the servant; and have to draw our conclusions from such data as
the large percentage of farmers' wives who become insane, and such
generalisations as those of the preceding chapter. But the "Servant
Question" is clearly before us. It is an economic problem which presses
upon us all, (that tenth of us all which is so prominent that it
tacitly assumes its problem to be universal;) and the pressure of which
increases daily. We are even beginning to study it scientifically. Miss
Salmon's valuable book on "Domestic Service" contributes much useful
information. The Household Economic Association exists largely to
alleviate the distresses of this system of industry. Scarce one woman
(of this tenth) but feels the pinch of our imperfect method of doing
housework, and as they become better educated and more intelligent, as
some of them even learn something of more advanced economic processes,
this crude, expensive, and inadequate system causes more and more
uneasiness and distress.

What is the status of household industry as practised by servants? It
is this: The Housewife having become the Lady of the House, and the
work still having to be done in the house, others must be induced to do
it. In the period from which this custom dates it was a simple matter
of elevating "the wife or chief wife"[3] to a position of dominance,
and leaving the work to be done by the rest of the women. Domestic
service, as an industrial status, dates from the period of the
polygynous group; the household with the male head and the group of
serving women; from the time when wives were slaves and slaves were
wives, indiscriminately. (See domestic relations of Jacob.)

          [3] See Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class."

The genesis of the relation being thus established, it is easy to
account for its present peculiar and dominating condition--celibacy.
The housemaid is the modern derivative from the slave-wife. She may no
longer be the sub-wife of the master--but neither may she be another
man's wife.

No married man wishes his wife to serve another man. This household
service, being esteemed as a distinctly feminine function, closely
involved with maternity, or at least with marriage, or, if not with
marriage, at the very least with woman's devotion, and quite
inconsistent with any other marriage; therefore we find the labours of
the household performed by celibate women of a lower class. Our modern
household is but a variation of the primitive group--the man and his
serving women still.

In the period of slave labour, where both men and women were owned and
exploited, we find household labour performed by men; and in those
Oriental nations where slavery yet exists we find man-service common in
the home. Also in nations still influenced by feudalism, where service
once went with the soil, where the lord is still attended by what was
originally his contingent of fighting men, but which has gradually
dwindled to an array of footmen and butlers; there we find men still
contented, or partially contented, to do house-service. But it ranks
last and lowest in man's mind, and justly. As fast as industrial
evolution progresses we find men less and less content to do this work
in this way; or, for that matter, women either.

In the highly advanced economic status of America we are especially
confronted with this difficulty, and have to supply our needs from
nations still largely under the influence of the feudal régime, or
those in the yet lower period of slavery. Men-servants, when obtained,
are generally satisfactory; no public outcry is made over them. It is
the "servant-girl" that constitutes the element of difficulty, and it
is she that we must consider.

Let it be clearly held in mind that the very first economic relation
was that of sex, based on the natural tendency of the female to work;
sex-labour. The second stage of economic relation is that of force;
slave-labour. The next is that of payment, what we call the contract
system; wage-labour.

Social evolution still shows us all these forms actively present in
this age, though belonging to such remote and different ones; just as
physical evolution still shows us monad and mollusk as well as
vertebrate mammals. Each stage has its use and value. But when an early
stage comes into contact with a later one there is trouble.

We have all seen how inevitably a savage status recedes and disappears
before the civilised. Individual savages may be assimilated by the
civilised competing race; but savagery and civilisation cannot coexist
when they come in contact and competition. A savage cult may endure on
an island in the South Seas, but not in England or America. So an early
status of labour has to give way to a later; as shown so conspicuously
in the last great historic instance in our own country.

Household industry is a mixed status, composed mainly of sex-labour,
the first stage; and partially of slave-labour, the second. This
slave-labour is in the act of changing to contract labour; and, as
such, cannot endure the conditions of home industry. The housewife has
to, the house-slave had to, the house-servant mostly had to; but the
house-_employee_ does not have to, and will not if she can help it.

The contract status of labour is incompatible with home industry. Note
how the condition of celibacy intereacts upon the relation. We expect
of our house-servants that they be "attached," "loyal," "faithful,"
"respectful," "devoted"; we do not say they always are, but that is
our ideal; these are the qualities for which we most praise them.
Attachment is especially valued. If only we could still _own_ them!
Then there would be that pleasant sense of permanence and security so
painfully lacking in our modern house-service. Short of owning them we
seek by various futile methods to "attach" them. Some societies give
medals for long service. The best thing we can say of a servant is "she
stayed with me for seven years!" or whatever period we can boast. Now
we do not seek to "attach" our butcher or baker or candlestick-maker;
why our cook? Because this status of celibacy has necessarily resulted
in the most painful conditions of transient incapacity in
house-service.

People must marry. People ought to marry. People will marry, whether we
say yes or no. Why should the housemaid stay a maid for our sakes? What
do we offer in the exciting prospect of always doing the same work for
the same wages, compared to the prospect of doing the same work,
without wages, it is true, but with a "mechanic's lien" on her
husband's purse? Or what would any scale of wages or promotion be
against the joys of a home of her own, a husband of her own, children
of her own?

We, intrenched in our own homes and families, think she ought to be
satisfied with serving our husbands and children, but she is not--and
never will be. There is of course a certain percentage of old maids and
widows, sufficiently disagreeable not to be wanted by their relatives,
or sufficiently independent not to want them; sufficiently capable to
hold a place as house-servant, but not sufficiently capable to follow
any other trade; or, in last possibility, there is here and there that
Blessed Damosel of our domestic dreams--a strong, capable, ingenious
woman, not hampered by any personal ties or affections; not choosing to
marry; preferring to work in a kitchen to working in a shop; and so
impressed by the august virtues and supreme importance of our family
that she becomes "attached" to it for life. These cases are, however,
rare. In the vast majority of households the maid is a maid, a young
woman of the lower classes, doing this work because she can do no
other, and doing it only until she marries. The resultant conditions of
the industry so practised are precisely what we might expect.

This young woman is in no way attached to the family. A family is
connected by the ties of sex, by marriage and heredity, with occasional
cases of adoption. If the servant is not a relative, or adopted, she
does not belong to the family. She has left her father's family, and
looks forward to her husband's, meanwhile as an aid to the first or a
means to the latter, she serves ours. She is of the lower classes
because no others will do this work. She is ignorant because, if she
were intelligent, she would not do it--does not do it; the
well-schooled, well-trained young woman much prefers other work. So we
find household industry in that tenth of our homes not served by the
housewife, is in the hands of ignorant and inferior young women,
_under conditions of constant change_.

The position of the lady of the house, as this procession of untrained,
half-trained, ill-trained, or at least _otherwise_-trained young
women march through her domain, is like that of the sergeant of
companies of raw recruits. She "lifts 'em--lifts 'em--lifts 'em"--but
there is never any "charge that wins the day."

Household industry we must constantly remember never rises to the level
of a regular trade. It is service--not "skilled labour." What is done
there is done under no broad light of public improvement, but is merely
catering to the personal tastes and habits, whims and fancies of one
family. The lady of the house is by no means a captain of industry. She
is not a trainer and governor of able subordinates, like the mate of a
ship or the manager of a hotel. Her position is not one of power, but
of helplessness. She has to be done for and waited on. Whatever maternal
instinct may achieve at first hand in the woman-who-does-her-own-work,
it does _not_ make competent instructors. When the lady of the house's
husband gets rich enough she hires a house-keeper to engage, discharge,
train, and manage the housemaids.

Here and there we do find an efficient lady of the house who can do
wonders even with this stream of transient incapacity, but the
prominence of the servant-question proves her rarity. If all ladies of
houses could bring order out of such chaos, could meet constant needs
by transient means, the subtleties of refined tastes by the
inefficiencies of unskilled labour, then nothing more need be said. But
the thing cannot be done. The average house-mistress is not a
servant-charmer and the average housemaid is _necessarily incapable_.
This is what should be squarely faced and acknowledged. The kind of
work that needs to be done to keep a modern home healthy, comfortable,
and refined, cannot be done--can never be done--by this office-boy
grade of labour. Because home industry is home industry, because it has
been left aborted in the darkness of private life while other
industries have grown so broad and high in the light of public life, we
have utterly failed to recognise its true value.

These industries, so long neglected and misused, are of supreme
importance. The two main ones--the preparation of food and the care of
children--can hardly be over-estimated in value to the race. On the one
the health of the world mainly depends, yes, its very life. On the
other the progress of the world depends, and that is more than life.
That these two great social functions should be left contentedly to the
hands of _absolutely the lowest grade of labour in our civilisation_ is
astounding. It is the lowest grade of labour not because it is
performed by the lowest class of labour--humanity can grow to splendid
heights from that beginning, and does so every day; but it is the
lowest because it is carried on in the home.

The conditions of home industry as practised by either housewife or
housemaid are hopelessly restrictive. They are, as we have seen, the
low standard of average capacity; the element of sex-tendency; the
isolation and the unspecialised nature of the work. In two of these
conditions the housemaid gains on the housewife. She is partly out of
the sex-tendency status and partly into the contract relation; hence
the patient, submissive, conservative influence is lightened. In
families of greater affluence there is some specialisation; we have
varieties in housemaid; cookmaid, scullerymaid, nursemaid, chambermaid,
parlourmaid,--as many as we can afford; and in such families we find
such elevation of home-industry as is possible; marred, however, by
serious limitations.

Household industry is a world question; and in no way to be answered by
a solution only possible of application to one family in a thousand. It
is a question of our time and the future, and not met by a solution
which consists in maintaining an elaborate archaism. The proper feeding
of the world to-day is no more to be guaranteed by one millionaire's
French cook, than was the health of the Roman world by one patrician's
Greek doctor.

Human needs, in remote low stages of social development, were met by
privately owned labourers. As late as the Middle Ages the great lord
had in his_menie_ every kind of functionary to minister to his
wants; not only his private servants of the modern kind, with butlers
and sutlers and pantlers in every degree; but his armourer, his tailor,
his minstrel, and his fool.

The feudal lord kept a fool to amuse him, whereas we go to the theatre.
He kept a cook to feed him--and we do it yet. He kept a poet to
celebrate his deeds and touch his emotions. We have made poetry the
highest class in literature, and literature the world's widest art--by
setting the poet free.

To work for the world at large is necessary to the development of the
work. A private poet is necessarily ignoble. So is a private cook. The
iron limitations of household service are immutable--world service has
none. To cater to the whims of one master lowers both parties
concerned. To study the needs of humanity and minister to them is the
line of social progress.

There is nothing private and special in the preparation of food; a more
general human necessity does not exist. There must be freedom and
personal choice in the food prepared, but it no more has to be cooked
for you than the books you love best have to be written for you. We
flatter ourselves that we get what we want by having it done at home.
Apply that condition to any other kind of human product and see if it
holds. We get what we want by free choice from the world's markets--not
from a workshop in the back yard. Imagine the grade of production, the
arts, crafts, and manufactures, that we should have to select from, if
we tried to have all things made for us by private servants! Apply the
intelligence and skill of this zoetrope procession of housemaids to
watch-making or shoe-making, or umbrella-making, or the making of
paper, or glass, or steel, or any civilised commodity; and if we can
easily see how immeasurably incompetent these flitting handmaids would
be for any of these lines of work, why do we imagine them competent to
prepare food and take care of children? Because we have never thought
of it at all.

Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by their scorn for
"women's work." Women are too busy doing these things to think about
them at all; or if they think, stung by the pain of pressing
inconvenience, they only think personally, they only feel it for
themselves, each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty
ostrich with his head in the sand.

The question is a public one; none could be more so. It affects in one
of its two branches every human being except those who board; every
home, without exception. Perhaps some impression may be made on the
blank spaces of our untouched minds by exhibiting the economic status
of home industry.

We Americans are credited with acuteness and good business sense. How
can we reconcile ourselves to the continuance of a system not only so
shamefully inadequate, but so ruinously expensive? If we are not
mortified to find that our boasted industrial progress carries embedded
in its very centre this stronghold of hoary antiquity, this knotted,
stumpy bunch of amputated rudiments; if we are not moved by the low
standard of general health as affected by food, and the no standard of
general education as affecting the baby, perhaps we can be stimulated
somewhat by the consideration of expense.

The performance of domestic industries involves, first, an enormous
waste of labour. The fact that in nine cases out of ten this labour is
unpaid does not alter its wastefulness. If half the men in the world
stayed at home to wait on the other half, the loss in productive labour
would be that between half and the fraction required to do the work
under advanced conditions, say one-twentieth. Any group of men
requiring to be cooked for, as a ship's crew, a lumber camp, a company
of soldiers, have a proportionate number of cooks. To give each man a
private cook would reduce the working strength materially. Our private
cooks being women makes no difference in the economic law. We are so
accustomed to rate women's labour on a sex-basis, as being her "duty"
and not justly commanding any return, that we have quite overlooked
this tremendous loss of productive labour.

Then there is the waste of endless repetition of "plant." We pay rent
for twenty kitchens where one kitchen would do. All that part of our
houses which is devoted to these industries, kitchen, pantry, laundry,
servants' rooms, etc., could be eliminated from the expense account by
the transference of the labour involved to a suitable workshop. Not
only our rent bills, but our furnishing bills, feel the weight of this
expense. We have to pay severally for all these stoves and dishes,
tools and utensils, which, if properly supplied in one proper place
instead of twenty, would cost far less to begin with; and, in the hands
of skilled professionals, would not be under the tremendous charge for
breakage and ruinous misuse which now weighs heavily on the
householder. Then there is the waste in fuel for these nineteen
unnecessary kitchens, and lastly and largest of any item except labour,
the waste in food.

First the waste in purchasing in the smallest retail quantities; then
the waste involved in separate catering, the "left overs" which the
ingenious housewife spends her life in trying to "use up"; and also the
waste caused by carelessness and ignorance in a great majority of
cases. Perhaps this last element, careless ignorance, ought to cover
both waste and breakage, and be counted by itself, or as a large item
in the labour account.

Count as you will, there could hardly be devised a more wasteful way of
doing necessary work than this domestic way. It costs on the most
modest computation three times what it need cost. Once properly aroused
to a consideration of these facts it will be strange indeed if
America's business sense cannot work out some system of meeting these
common human necessities more effectually and more economically.

The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife,
released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive
labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the
world's wealth. But nothing could be farther from the thoughts of the
Lady of the House. Her husband being able to keep more than one woman
to do the work of the house; and much preferring to exhibit an idle
wife, as proof of his financial position,[4] the idle wife proceeds so
to conduct her house as to add to its labours most considerably. The
housewife's system of housekeeping is perforce limited to her own
powers. The size of the home, the nature of its furnishings and
decorations, the kind of clothes worn by the women and children, the
amount of food served and the manner of its service; all these are
regulated by the housewife's capacity for labour. But once the
housemaid enters the field of domestic labour there is a scale of
increase in that labour which has no limits but the paying capacity of
the man.

          [4] See Veblen again.

This element of waste cannot be measured, because it is a progressive
tendency, it "grows by what it feeds upon" (as most things do, by the
way!) and waxes greater and greater with each turn of the wheel. If the
lady of the house, with one servant, were content to live exactly as
she did before; keeping the work within the powers of the deputy, she
would be simply and absolutely idle, and that is a very wearing
condition; especially to woman, the born worker. So the lady of the
house, mingling with other ladies of houses, none of them having
anything but houses to play with, proceeds so to furnish, decorate, and
arrange those houses, and so to elaborate the functions thereof, as to
call for more and ever more housemaids to do the endless work.

This open door of senseless extravagance hinges directly upon the idle
wife. She leaves her position of domestic service, not to take a higher
one in world service; but to depute her own work to an inferior and do
none at all.

Thus we find that in the grade of household labour done by the
housewife we have all those elements of incapacity and waste before
explained; and that in the grade done by the housemaid we have a
decrease in ability, a measurable increase in direct waste, and an
immeasurable increase in the constantly rising sum of waste due to
these bloated buildings stuffed with a thousand superfluities wherein
the priceless energies of women are poured out in endless foolishness;
in work that meets no real need; and in play that neither rests nor
refreshes.

So far our sufferings under the present rapid elimination of the
housemaid have taught us little. Our principal idea of bettering the
condition is by training servants. We seriously propose to establish
schools to train these reluctant young women to our service; even in
some cases to pay them for going there. This is indeed necessary; for
why should they pay for tuition, or even waste time in gratuitously
studying, when they can get wages without?

We do not, and cannot, offer such graded and progressive salaries as
shall tempt really high-class labour into this field. Skilled labour
and domestic service are incompatible. The degree of intelligence,
talent, learning, and trained skill which should be devoted to feeding
and cleaning the human race will never consent to domestic service. It
is the grade of work which forever limits its development, the place,
the form of service. So long as the home is the workshop the housewife
cannot, and the housemaid will not, even if she could, properly do this
work for the neglected world.

Is it not time that the home be freed from these industries so palpably
out of place? That the expense of living be decreased by two-thirds and
the productive labour increased by nine-twentieths? That our women
cease to be an almost universal class of house-servants; plus a small
class of parasitic idlers and greedy consumers of wealth? That the
preparation of food be raised from its present condition of inadequacy,
injury, and waste to such a professional and scientific position that
we may learn to spare from our street corners both the drug-store and
the saloon? That the care of children become at last what it should
be--the noblest and most valuable profession, to the endless profit of
our little ones and progress of the race? And that our homes, no longer
greasy, dusty workshops, but centres of rest and peace; no longer
gorgeous places of entertainment that does not entertain, but quiet
places of happiness; no longer costing the laborious lives of
overworked women or supporting the useless lives of idle ones, but
properly maintained by organised industries; become enjoyed by men and
women alike, both glad and honourable workers in an easy world?




VII

HOME-COOKING


We are all reared in a traditional belief that what we get to eat at
home is, by virtue of that location, better than what we get to eat
anywhere else. The expression, "home-cooking," carries a connotation of
assured excellence, and the popular eating-house advertises "pies like
those your mother used to make," as if pie-making were a maternal
function. Economy, comfort, and health are supposed to accompany our
domestic food supply, and danger to follow the footsteps of those who
eat in a hotel, a restaurant, or a boarding house. Is this
long-accepted theory correct? Is the home, as the last stage of our
elaborate processes of social nutrition, a success?

"Home-cooking" is an alluring phrase, but lay aside the allurement; the
term applies to Eskimo hut, to Choctaw wigwam, to Turk and Chinaman and
Russian Jew--whose home-cooking are we praising? Our own, of course.
Which means nothing--absolutely nothing--but that the stomach adapts
itself to what it has to live on--unless it is too poisonous. Of course
we like what we are used to; be it sauerkraut or saleratus biscuit. We
like tobacco too, and alcohol, and chloral and morphine.

The long-suffering human system (perhaps toughened by ages of
home-cooking)--will adapt itself even to slow death.

But how does our universally praised home-cooking affect our health? To
find it pure and undefined, far from the deleterious products of mere
business cooking, we must go to the isolated farmhouse. Does either the
physician or the epicure point with pride to that dietary?

Its results are not due to lack of proper materials. There you have no
much-blamed "baker's bread"; no "city milk"; no wilted vegetables and
questionable meats; no painted confectionery and bakeshop sweets; no
wild hurry to catch the morning car. You have mother love and mother
instinct untrammelled, with the best materials we know, pure dairy
produce and fresh vegetables and fruits. As a result, you should look
for splendid health, clear complexions, bright eyes, perfect teeth, and
sublime digestions. Instead, we find men who keep fairly well to middle
life because their vigorous out-of-door work enables them to cope for a
while with their home-cooking; but in the women you find a sadly low
average of health and beauty. Dyspepsia is the rule. False teeth are
needed before they are thirty.

Patent medicine is the family divinity. Their ordinary home-cooking is
pork and potatoes; and their extraordinary home-cooking is such
elaborate elegance of pie and cake as to supply every element of
mischief omitted in the regular diet. The morbid appetites, the uneasy
demand for stimulants, both in men and women, the rarity of good
digestion--these do not prove much in favour of this system of
preparing food.

The derivation of the habit is clear enough and easily traced. Among
individual animals, the nutritive processes are simple. By personal
effort each creature helps himself from a free supply, competing
mercilessly with every other creature that comes in his way. Vegetarian
animals compete peaceably as philosophical anarchists; carnivorous ones
compete with more violence. Among both classes we find homes among
those whose food is portable; holes, caves, or nests; places where the
young can be guarded and their food brought to them. From the grisly
heap of bones in the lion's den, or shells below the squirrel's nest,
through the "kitchen middens" of primitive man, to the daily output of
garbage from our well-loved homes to-day is an unbroken line. "A place
to feed the young" was once a sufficient definition of a home, but the
home has grown since then. Man is a social animal. He is part of
something; his life is not dependent on his own efforts solely, but on
those of many other men. We get our food, not by going out to quarrel
with one another over a free supply, but by helping one another in
various elaborate processes of production, distribution, and
preparation. In this last process of preparation women long held a
monopoly; and, as women were kept at home, so food was, naturally,
prepared at home. But as soon as men banded together to go on long
expeditions without women--which was at the beginning of the history of
war--they learned to cook and eat away from home, and the cook, as a
craftsman, was developed. This social functionary has been officiating
for a long time. He has cooked as a business, giving his whole time to
it; he has cooked for miscellaneous numbers, and has had to study
averages; he has cooked for great dignitaries, epicurean and
capricious. So, in course of time, has grown among us some little
knowledge of the art and science of cooking. This growth has not taken
place in the home. An ignorant overworked poor woman, cooking for her
family, has not, and never can have, the time, means, or opportunity
for the large experiment and practice which have given us the great
diet-list of to-day. Each woman, learning only from her mother, has
been able only to hand down to us the habits of a dark, untutored past.
Outside the home, man, the specialised cook, acting under pressure of
larger needs and general competition, has gradually improved the
vessels, utensils, and materials of the home food supply.

Note carefully that, in home-cooking, there are absent these great
necessities of progress--specialisation and competition, as well as the
wide practical experience which is almost as essential. Go among the
most backward peasantry of any country and compare the "home-cooking"
of each nation in its present form, with the specialised cooking of the
best hotels, clubs, or of those great official or private
entertainments which employ the professional cook. It is rare, of
course, to find home-cooking wholly unaffected by social cooking, for
man, as an ultra-domestic character, learns something elsewhere and
brings it home; but the point to be insisted on is that the development
in cooking comes from outside the home, and does not originate in it.
Still, in spite of all our progress, the great mass of mankind eats two
meals at home; women and children, three.

The preparation of food is still the main business of housekeeping; its
labour, the one great labour of the place; its cost, the main expense.
In building, the conveniences for this trade--kitchen, dining-room,
pantry, cupboard, and cellar--require a large part of the outlay, and
the furnishing of these with linen, china, and silver, as well as the
wooden and iron articles, adds heavily to the list. The wife and mother
still has, for her main duty, the management of the family food supply,
even if she is not the principal worker, and the maintenance of
domestic service, to keep our food system in motion, is one of the
chief difficulties of modern life. Nine-tenths of our women "do their
own work," as has been before shown. Those nine-tenths of the female
population--as well as the majority of servants--expend most of their
labour in the preparation of food and the cleansing processes connected
with it.

With all this time, labour, and expense given to the feeding of
humanity, what are the results? How are we educated in knowledge and
taste as to right eating? What are our general food habits? To these
questions it may be promptly answered that no other animal is so
depraved in its feeding habits as man; no other animal has so many
diseases of the alimentary system. The dog ranks next to us in
diseases, and shares our home-cooking. The hog, which we most highly
recommend, is "corn-fed," not reared on our remnants of the table. The
long and arduous labours of public-spirited men have lifted our
standards of living in many ways. Public sanitation, beginning outside
and slowly driven in on the reluctant home, has lowered our death rate
in the great filth-diseases which used to decimate the world. But the
food diseases are not lessened. Wrong eating and wrong drinking are
responsible for an enormous proportion of our diseases and our crimes,
to say nothing of the still larger average of unhealthiness and
unhappiness in which we live. Can we get at the causes of this
department of human trouble? and, when found, do they bear any relation
to our beloved custom of home-cooking and home-eating? We can--and they
do. The trouble springs from two main features: bad food--insufficient,
oversufficient, ill-chosen, or ill-prepared; and our own ignorance and
lack of self-control.

Consider the bad food first. Food is produced all over the earth,
passes through many hands, and is finally selected by the housewife.
She is not a trained expert, and can never be while she confines
herself to serving one house. She does not handle quantities sufficient
or cater for consumers enough to gain large knowledge of her business.
She is, in nine cases out of ten, limited financially in her buying
power. These conditions make the food market particularly open to
adulteration, and to the offering of inferior materials. The individual
housewife cannot herself discriminate in all the subtleties of
adulterated food, nor has she the time or the means to secure expert
tests of her supplies. Moreover, her separate purchasing power is so
small that it cannot intimidate the seller; he has ignorance and a
small purse to deal with, and he deals with them accordingly.

The purchase of food in quantities by trained buyers would lift the
grade of our supplies at once. No man is going to waste time and money
in adulteration subject to daily analysis, or in offering stale,
inferior articles which will not appear saleable to the trained eye.
The wholesale poisoning of babies by bad milk is an evil our city
governments are seeking to combat, but the helpless anarchy of a
million ignorant homes, unorganised, untrained, and obliged to get the
milk at once, renders our governmental efforts almost vain.
Insufficient food is owing, in part, to economic causes, and in part to
ignorance of what the body needs. On the economic side comes in a most
important view of the home as a food purveyer. The private purchase and
preparation of food is the most expensive method. It is wonderful to
see how people cling to their notion of "the economy" of home-cooking.
By the simplest business laws, of world-wide application, the small
purchaser has to pay the largest price. The expenses incident to the
re-retailing of food, from the apples rotting on the ground in New York
State to the apples we purchase at twenty cents a quart for New York
City tables, form a large part of the cost of living. Thousands of
middlemen thrive like leeches on the long, slow current of food
material, as it pours in myriad dribbling streams from the great
sources of production, far away, into our innumerable kitchen doors.

In a city block there are, let us say, two hundred families, which, at
our usual average of five individuals to a family, would number one
thousand persons. The thousand persons should consume, we will say,
five hundred quarts of milk a day. The purchase of five hundred quarts
of milk and the proportionate cream, as well as butter, would maintain
a nice little dairy--several blocks together would maintain a large
one. Your bustling restaurant proudly advertises "Milk and cream fresh
every day from our own dairies!" But your beloved home has no such
purchasing power, but meekly absorbs pale cultures of tuberculosis and
typhoid fever at eight cents a quart. The poorer people are, the more
they pay for food, separately. The organised purchasing power of these
same people would double their food supply, and treble it.

Besides the expense entailed in purchasing is that of private
preparation. First, the "plant" is provided. For our two hundred
families there are two hundred stoves, with their utensils. The
kitchen, and all that it contains, with dining-rooms, etc., have been
already referred to, but should be held firmly in mind as a large item
in rent and furnishing. Next, there is the labour. Two hundred women
are employed for about six hours a day each,--twelve hundred working
hours,--at twenty cents an hour. This means two hundred and forty
dollars a day, or sixteen hundred and eighty dollars a week, that the
block of families is paying to have its wastefully home-purchased food
more wastefully home-cooked. Of course, if these cooks are the
housewives, they do not get the money; but the point is, that this much
labour is _worth_ that amount of money, and that productive energy
is being wasted. What ought it to cost? One trained cook can cook for
thirty, easily; three, more easily, for a hundred. The thousand people
mentioned need, in largest allowance, thirty cooks--and the thirty
cooks, organised, would not need six hours a day to do the same work,
either. Thirty cooks, even at ten dollars a week, would be but three
hundred dollars, and that is some slight saving as against sixteen
hundred and eighty!

We have not mentioned fully another serious evil. "Insufficient food" would
be easily removable from our list by a more economical method of buying and
cooking it. The other element of insufficiency--ignorance,--would go also,
if we had skilful and learned cooks and caterers instead of unskilled and
unlearned amateurs, who know only how to cater to the demands of hungry
children and injudicious men at home. Wise temperance workers know that
many men drink because they are not properly fed; and women, too,
consume tea and coffee to make up in stimulants for the lack of
nutrition about which they know nothing. Under this same head comes the
rest of that list, the over-sufficient, ill-chosen, and ill-prepared
food. It is not simply that the two hundred amateur cooks (whether they
be permanent wife or transient servant, they are all, in a business
sense, amateurs,--ask a real cook!) waste money by their sporadic
efforts, but their incapacity wastes our blood in our veins. We do not
die, swift and screaming, from some sharp poison administered through
malice; but our poor stomachs are slowly fretted by grease-hardened
particles, and wearied out by heavy doses of hot dough. Only iron
vigour can survive such things.

"It is ill-chosen," is one charge against home-cooking. What governs
our choice? Why does a German eat decaying cabbage and mite-infested
cheese, an American revel in fat-soaked steak and griddle-cakes, a
Frenchman disguise questionable meats with subtly-blended spices, and
so on, through the tastes of all the nations and localities? It is
environment and heredity that governs us--that's all. It is not
knowledge, not culture and experience, not an enlightened taste, or the
real choice of a trained mind capable of choosing.

A child is fed by his mother, who transmits remote ancestral customs,
unchanged by time. Children are hungry and like to eat. The young
stomach is adapted to its food supply; it grows accustomed to it and
"likes" it,--and the man continues to demand the doughnuts, the
sauerkraut, the saleratus biscuit, which he "likes." One ghastly
exception should be taken to this smooth statement. I have said that
"the young stomach is adapted to its food supply." Alas, alas! This is
true of those who survive; but think of the buried babies,--of the
dear, dead children, of the "diseases incidental to childhood,"--and
question if some part of that awful death-list is not due to our
criminal ignorance of what is proper food! There is no knowledge, save
the filtering down of ancient customs and what the private cook can
pick up from house to house; no experience, save that gained by
practising on one's own family or the family of one's employer--and I
never heard of either wife or servant gathering statistics as to who
lived and who died under her cooking--no special training; and no room
or time or means to learn! It would be a miracle if all should survive.

The ignorance which keeps us so ill-fed _is an essential condition of
home-cooking_. If we had only home-shoe-making, or home-doctoring,
or home-tailoring--barbering--what you please--we should show the same
wide-spread ignorance and lack of taste. What we have learned in
cooking comes from the advance of that great branch of human industry
in its free social field, and that advance has reacted to some degree
on the immovable home.

Next consider self-control, the lack of which is so large a factor in
our food diseases. We have attained some refinement of feeling in
painting, music, and other arts; why are we still so frankly barbaric
in our attitude toward food? Why does modern man, civilised, educated,
cultured, still keep his body in a loathsome condition, still suffer,
weaken, and die, from foul food habits? It is not alone the huge evil
of intemperance in drink, or simple gluttony; but the common habits of
our young girls, serenely indulging in unlimited candy, with its
attendant internal consequences; or of our cultured women, providing at
their entertainments a gross accumulation of unwholesome delicacies,
with scarcely more discrimination than was shown by Heliogabalus. We
eat what we like, and our liking is most crude and low.

The position of the woman who feeds us--the wife and mother--is
responsible for this arrest of development. She is not a free cook, a
trained cook, a scientific cook; she belongs to the family. She must
cook for the man because he pays for it. He maintains the home--and
her--largely for that very purpose. It is his home, his table, his
market bill; and, if John does not like onions, or pork, or cereals,
they do not appear. If Mrs. Peterkin paid for it, and John was cook,
why John would cook to please her! In two ways is Mrs. Peterkin forced
to cater to John's appetite; by this plain, economic fact, that it is
his food she is cooking, and by the sexuo-economic fact that "the way
to a man's heart is through his stomach." For profit and for love--to
do her duty and to gain her ends--in all ways, the home cook is forced
to do her home cooking to please John. It is no wonder John clings so
ardently to the custom. Never again on earth will he have a whole live
private cook to himself, to consider, before anything else, his special
tastes and preferences. He will get better food, and he will have to
get used to it. His tastes will be elevated by the quality of the food,
instead of the quality of the food being adapted solely to his tastes.
To the children, again, the mother caters under direct pressure of
personal affection. It is very, very hard to resist the daily, yea,
tri-daily, demands of those we love.

It is this steady, alluring effort of subservient love which keeps us
still so primitively self-indulgent in our food habits. The mother-love
of a dumb animal may teach her what is right for her young to eat, but
it does not teach the human mother. Ask any doctor, any trained nurse,
anyone who has watched the children of the poor. If the children of the
rich are more wisely fed, it is not because of any greater amount of
mother-love, but of some degree of mother-education. Motherhood and
wifehood do not teach cooking.

What we need in our system of feeding the world is not instinct,
affection, and duty, but knowledge, practice, and business methods.
Those who are fitted by natural skill and liking to be cooks should
cook, and many should profit by their improved products. Scientific
training, free from the tender pressure of home habits, would soon
eliminate our worst viands; and, from the wide choice offered by a
general field of patronage, there would appear in time a cultivated
taste. Greater freedom for personal idiosyncrasy would be given in this
general field of choice, yet a simpler average would undoubtedly be
formed. Great literature and great music were never developed when the
bard performed for his master only.

We, keeping our food system still on this miserable basis of private
catering to appetite, are thereby prevented from studying it with a
view to race improvement. The discoveries of the food specialist and
scientific dietist are lost in the dark recesses of a million homes, in
the futile, half-hearted efforts of unskilled labour. What the
immediate family "likes" is the governing law; no matter how wise may
be the purpose of the mother-cook. With most of us food is scarcely
thought of in its real main use--to supply bodily waste with
judiciously combined materials.

The home-bred appetite cries out for "mother's cooking," with no more
idea of its nutritive values than has a child. This is most remarkable
among our enormous farming population, yet there most absolutely the
case. The mechanic or business man has no dealings whatever with his
food except to eat it. He gives over his life's health, his daily
strength, into the hands of his beloved female domestic; and asks
nothing whatever of her production except that it "taste good."

But the farmer has a different trade. With him the whole business of
his life is to feed things that they may grow. He has to replenish the
soil with the elements his crops exhaust, in order to reap the best
crops, the most profit. And even more directly with his live-stock;
from hen to horse, with pigs, sheep, and cattle, he has constantly to
consider what to put into them in order to be sure of the product, not
too much grain for the horse, not too much hay; enough "green feed" in
season; the value of the silo, the amount of salt necessary; the effect
of beets, of wild onions, in the grass and in the butter; what to give
hens in winter to make them lay; how to regulate the diet for more milk
and less cream, or for less milk and more cream; how to fatten, how to
strengthen, how to improve--in all ways the farmer has to realise the
importance of food values in his business.

Yet that same man, day after day, consumes his own food and sees his
children fed, to say nothing of the mother of his children, without
ever giving one thought to the nutritive values of that food. There
must be enough to satisfy hunger, and it must "taste good," according
to his particular brand of ancestry, his race habits, and early
environment; but, beyond that, nothing is required.

The farmer has assistance in his business. He shares in the accumulated
experience of many farmers, before him and about him. There are
valuable experiments being made in his behalf by the Bureau of
Agriculture. He has trade papers to bring him the fruits of the world's
progress in this line. Agriculture is one of the world's great
functions, and has made magnificent progress. But humaniculture has no
Bureau, no Secretary, no Experiment Stations; unless we count the
recent experiments in boric-acid diet. The most valuable livestock on
earth are casually fed by the haphazard efforts of any and every kind
of ignorant woman; hired servants or married servants, as the case may
be; dull, shortsighted, overworked women, far too busy in "doing the
cooking" ever to study the science of feeding humanity. No science
could ever make progress in such hands. Science must rest on broad
observation, on the widest generalisation and deduction, on careful
experiment and reconsideration.

This is forever impossible at home. Until the food laboratory entirely
supersedes the kitchen there can be no growth. Many of us, struggling
to sit fast between two stools, seeing the imperative need of
scientific feeding for humanity, yet blindly clinging to the separate
wife-mother-cook functionary, exhort "the woman" to study all this
matter, and cheerfully to devote her life to scientifically feeding her
beloved family.

"The woman"--that is, a woman, any woman, every woman, and that means
the deadly Average, the hopelessly Isolated, the handicapped Maternal,
with the Lack of Specialisation, the Confusion of other Trades, and the
Lack of Incentive. Not until "The woman" in "the home" can everywhere
manifest a high degree of skill as a doctor, as an architect, as a
barber, as anything, can she manifest that high degree as a cook.

Cooking is an art; cooking is a science; cooking is a handicraft;
cooking is a business. None of these can ever grow without following
the laws of all industrial progress--specialisation, contact and
exchange, legitimate competition, and the stimulus of large
world-incentives. When we have these we shall be able to improve our
kind of animal as much as we do other kinds. We cannot arbitrarily by
breeding, but we can by nutrition and education--to an unknown extent.
Nutrition, properly adjusted, nutrition for the human animal, has
hardly been thought of by the home cook. The inexorable limit of our
Home-cooking is the Home.




VIII

DOMESTIC ART


One of the undying efforts of our lives, of the lives of half the
world, is "to make home beautiful." We love beauty, we love home, we
naturally wish to combine the two. The rich spare no expense, the
æsthetic no care and pains, in this continuous attempt; and the "home"
papers, or "home departments" in other papers, teem with instruction on
the subject for the eager, but untutored many.

In varying fields of work there is a strong current of improvement, in
household construction, furnishing, and decoration; and new employments
continually appear wherein the more cultured few apply their talents to
the selection and arrangement of "artistic interiors" ready-made for
the purchaser. Whole magazines are devoted to this end, articles
unnumbered, books not a few, and courses of lectures. People who know
beauty and love it are trying to teach it to those who do not, trying
to introduce it where it is so painfully needed--in the home.

Why does it not originate there? Why did the people who cared most for
beauty and art, the Greeks, care so little for the home? And why do the
people who care most for the home--our Anglo-Saxons--care so little for
beauty and art? And, in such art-knowledge and art-growth as we have,
why is it least manifested at home? What is there in home-life, as we
know it, which proves inimical to the development of true beauty? If
there is some condition in home life which is inimical to art, is that
condition essential and permanent, or may it be removed without loss to
what is essential and permanent?

Here are questions serious and practical; practical because beauty is
an element of highest use as well as joy. Our love of it lies deep, and
rests on truest instinct; the child feels it passionately; the savage
feels it, we all feel it, but few understand it; and whether we
understand it or not we long for it in vain. We often make our churches
beautiful, our libraries and museums, but our domestic efforts are not
crowned with the same relative success.

The reasons for this innate lack of beauty in the home are not far to
seek. The laws of applied beauty reach deep, spread wide, and are
inexorable: Truth; first, last, and always--no falsehood, imitation, or
pretence: Simplicity; no devious meandering, but the direct clear
purpose and result: Unity, Harmony, that unerring law of relation which
keeps the past true to the whole--never too much here or there--all
balanced and at rest: Restraint; no riotous excess, no rush from
inadequacy to profusion.

If the student of art rightly apprehends these laws, his whole life is
richer and sounder as well as his art. If the art he studies is one
under definite laws of construction, he has to learn them, too; as in
architecture, where the laws of mechanics operate with those of
æsthetics, and there is no beauty if the mechanical laws are defied.

Architecture is the most prominent form of domestic art. Why is not
domestic architecture as good as public architecture? If the home is a
temple, why should not our hills be dotted with fair shrines worthy of
worship?

We may talk as we will of "the domestic shrine," but the architect does
not find the kitchen stove an inspiring altar. If it did inspire him,
if he began to develop the idea of a kitchen--a temple to Hygeia and
Epicurus, a great central altar for the libations and sacrifices, with
all appropriate accessories for the contributory labour of the
place--he could not make a pocket-edition of this temple, and stick it
on to every house in forced connection with the other domestic
necessities.

The eating-room then confronts him, a totally different _motif_.
We do not wish to eat in the kitchen. We do not wish to see, smell,
hear, or think of the kitchen while we eat. So the domestic architect
is under the necessity of separating as far as possible these
discordant purposes, while obliged still to confine them to the same
walls and roof.

Then come the bedrooms. We do not wish to sleep in the kitchen--or in
the dining-room. Nothing is further from our ideals than to confound
the sheets with the tablecloths, the bed with the stove, the dressing
table with the sink. So again the architect, whose kitchen-tendency was
so rudely checked by the dining-room tendency, is brought up standing
by the bedroom tendency, its demand for absolute detachment and
remoteness, and the necessity for keeping its structural limits within
those same walls and roof.

Then follows the reception-room tendency--we do not wish to receive our
visitors in the kitchen--or the bedroom--or exclusively in the
dining-room. So the parlour theme is developed as far as may be,
connected with the dining-room, and disconnected as far as possible
from all the other life-themes going on under that roof.

When we add to these the limits of space, especially in our cities, the
limits of money, so almost universal, and the limits of personal taste,
we may have clearly before us the reasons why domestic architecture
does not thrill the soul with its beauty.

Whenever it does, to any extent, the reason is as clear. The feudal
castle was beautiful because it had one predominant idea--defence; and
was a stone monument to that idea. Here you could have truth, and did
have it. Defence was imperative, absolute; every other need was
subsidiary; a fine type of castle could give room for unity,
simplicity, harmony, and restraint; and stirs us yet to delighted
admiration. But it was not a comfortable dwelling-house.

A cottage is also capable of giving the sense of beauty; especially an
old thatch-roofed cottage; mossy, mouldy, leaky, damp. The cottage is
an undifferentiated home; it is primarily a kitchen--with a bedroom or
two added--or included! Small primitive houses, like the white, square,
flat-roofed dwellings of Algiers, group beautifully, or, taken singly,
give a good bit of white against blue fire, behind green foliage.

But as a theme in itself, a thing to study and make pictures of, the
castle, the temple of war, is the most beautiful type of dwelling
place--and the least inhabitable. In our really comfortable homes we
have lost beauty, though we have gained in comfort. Would it be
possible to have comfort and beauty too; beauty which would thrill and
exalt us, delight and satisfy us, and which the art critic would dwell
upon as he now does on temple, hall, and church?

Let us here take up the other domestic arts; surrendering architecture
as apparently hopeless. We cannot expect our composers in wood and
stone to take a number of absolutely contradictory themes and produce
an effect of truth, unity, harmony, simplicity, and restraint; but may
we not furnish and decorate our homes beautifully? Perhaps we might;
but do we? What do we know, what do we care, for the elementary laws
which make this thing beautiful, that thing ugly, and the same things
vary as they are combined with others!

In the furnishing and decoration of a home we have room for more
harmony than in the exterior, because each room may be treated
separately according to its especial purpose, and we can accustom
ourselves to the æsthetic jar of stepping from one to another, or even
bring them all under some main scheme.

But here we are confronted by the enormous unrestricted weight of the
limitation which is felt least by the architect--personal taste. We do
not dictate much to our builders, most of us; but we do dictate as to
the inside of the house and all that is in it. The dominating influence
in home decoration is of course the woman. She is the final arbiter of
the textures, colours, proportions, sizes, shapes, and relations of
human production. How does she effect our output? What is her influence
upon art--the applied art that is found, or should be found, in
everything we make and use?

We may buy, if we can afford it, specimens of art, pictorial or
sculptural art, or any other, and place them in our houses; but the
mere accumulation of beautiful objects is not decoration; often quite
the contrary. There are many beautiful vases in the shop where you
bought yours; there is but one in the Japanese room--and there is
beauty.

The magpie instinct of the collector has no part in a genuine sense of
beauty. An ostentatious exhibit of one's valuable possessions does not
show the sense of beauty. A beautiful chamber is neither show-room nor
museum. That personal "taste" in itself is no guide to beauty needs but
little proof. The "taste" of the Flathead Indian, of the tattooed
Islander, of all the grades of physical deformity which mankind has
admired, is sufficient to show that a personal preference is no ground
for judgment in beauty.

Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not possessed equally
by all. The more primitive and ignorant a race, or class, the less it
knows of true beauty.

The Indian basket-makers wove beautiful things, but they did not know
it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and
they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they
do not consciously select it.

Our women are far removed from the primitive simplicity that produces
unconscious beauty; and they are also far removed from that broad
culture and wide view of life which can intellectually grasp it. They
have neither the natural instinct nor the acquired knowledge of beauty;
but they do have, in million-fold accumulation, a "personal taste." The
life of the woman in the home is absolutely confined to personal
details. Her field of study and of work is not calculated to develop
large judgment, but is calculated to develop intense feeling; and
feeling on a comparatively low plane. She is forced continually to
contemplate and minister to the last details of the physical wants of
humanity in ceaseless daily repetition. Whatever tendency to develop
artistic feeling and judgment she might have in one line of her work,
is ruthlessly contradicted by the next, and the next; and her range of
expression in each line is too small to allow of any satisfying growth.

The very rich woman who can purchase others' things and others'
judgment, or the exceptional woman who does work and study in some one
line, may show development in the sense of beauty; but it is not
produced at home. The love of it is there, the desire for it, most
cruelly aborted; and the result of that starved beauty-sense is what we
see in our familiar rooms.

Being familiar, we bear with our surroundings; perhaps even love them;
when we go into each other's homes we do not think their things to be
beautiful; we think ours are because we are used to them; we have no
appreciation of an object in its relation to the rest, or its lack of
relation.

The bottled discord of the woman's daily occupations if quite
sufficient to account for the explosions of discord on her walls and
floors. She continually has to do utterly inharmonious things, she
lives in incessant effort to perform all at once and in the same place
the most irreconcilable processes.

She has to adjust, disadjust, and readjust her mental focus a thousand
times a day; not only to things, but to actions; not only to actions,
but to persons; and so, to live at all, she must develop a kind of mind
that does _not object to discord_. Unity, harmony, simplicity, truth,
restraint--these are not applicable in a patchwork life, however
hallowed by high devotion and tender love. This is why domestic art is
so low--so indistinguishable.

When our great Centennial Exhibition was given us, a wave of beauty
spread into thousands of homes, but it did not originate there. The
White City by the lake was an inspiration to myriad lives, and wrought
a lovely change in her architecture and many other arts; but the Black
City by the Lake is there yet, waiting for another extra-domestic
uplifting.

The currents of home-life are so many, so diverse, so contradictory,
that they are only maintained by using the woman as a sort of universal
solvent; and this position of holding many diverse elements in solution
is not compatible with the orderly crystallisation of any of them, or
with much peace of mind to the unhappy solvent.

The most conspicuous field for the display of the beauty sense--or the
lack of it--in our home life, is in textile fabrics and their
application to the body. The House is the foundation of textile art.
People who live out of doors wear hides, if they wear anything. In the
shelter and peace of the house, developed by ever-widening commerce,
grew these wonderful textile arts, the evolution of a new plane for
beauty. We find in nature nothing approaching it, save in the limited
and passing form of spreading leaf and petal. To make a continuous
substance soft as flowers, warm as furs, brilliant as the sunset--this
was a great step in art.

Woven beauty is a home product, and in the house we are most free to
use and admire it. The "street dress," even the most unsophisticated,
is under some restrictions; but the house dress may be anything we
please. There is nothing in the mechanical limitations of house life to
pervert or check this form of loveliness. We are free to make and to
use the most exquisite materials, to wear the most pleasing of textures
and shapes.

Why, then, do we find in this line of development such hideously
inartistic things? Because the discords of domestic industries and
functions prevent a sense of harmony even here. Because the woman,
confined to a primitive, a savage plane of occupation, continues to
manifest an equally savage plane of æsthetic taste.

One of the most marked features of early savage decoration is in its
distortion and mutilation of the body to meet arbitrary standards of
supposed beauty. An idea of beauty, true or false, is apprehended, its
line of special evolution rapidly followed, and there is no knowledge
of physiology or grasp of larger harmonies of bodily grace to check the
ensuing mutilation.

The Zulus decorate their cattle by cutting the dewlap into fringe, and
splitting and twisting the growing horns into fantastic shapes. Some
savage women tie the gastrocnemius muscle tightly above and below, till
the "calf of the leg" looks like a Dutch cheese on a broomstick. Some
tie strings about the breasts till they dangle half detached; some file
the teeth or pluck out the eyebrows.

In the home, among women, still appear these manifestations of a crude
beauty-sense, unchecked by larger knowledge. Our best existent examples
are in the Chinese foot-binding custom, and ours of waist-binding. The
initial idea of the corset is in a way artistic. We perceive that the
feminine form has certain curves and proportions, tending thus and so;
and following the tendency we proceed to exaggerate those curves and
proportions and fix them arbitrarily. This is the same law by which we
conventionalise a flower for decorative purposes, turning the lily of
the field into the _fleur-de-lis_ of the tapestry. The Egyptians
did it, to an extreme degree, in their pictorial art, reducing the
human body to certain fixed proportions and attitudes.

The application of these principles to living bodies is peculiar to the
savage, and its persistence among our women is perhaps the strongest
proof of the primitive nature of the home. As women enter the larger
life of the world these limitations are easily outgrown; the
working-woman cannot make a conventionalised ornament of her body, and
the business woman does not care to; the really educated woman knows
better, and the woman artist would be bitterly ashamed of such an
offence against nature; only the home-bound woman peacefully maintains
it.

To the scientific student, man or woman, the sturdy reappearance of
this very early custom is intensely interesting; he sees in the "newest
fashion" of holding and binding the body a peculiar survival of the
very oldest fashion in personal decoration known to us. The latest
corset advertisement ranks ethnologically with the earliest Egyptian
hieroglyph, the Aztec inscriptions, and races far behind them.

The woman's love of beauty finds its freest expression along lines of
personal decorations, and there, as in the decoration of the house, we
see the same crippling influence.

She loves beautiful textures, velvet, satin, and silk, soft muslin and
sheer lawn; she loves the delicate fantasy of lace, the alluring
richness of fur; she loves the colour and sparkle of gems, the
splendour of burnished metal, and, in her savage crudity of taste, she
slaps together any and every combination of these things and wears them
happily.

A typical extreme of this ingenuous lack of artistic principles is the
recent, and still present, enormity of trimming lace with fur. This
combines the acme of all highly wrought refinement of texture and
exquisite delicacy of design, a fabric that suggests the subtleties of
artistic expression with a gossamer tenuity of grace; this, and dressed
hide with the hair still on, the very first cover for man's nakedness,
the symbol of savage luxury and grandeur, of raw barbaric wealth, which
suggests warmth, ample satisfying warmth and crude splendour in its
thick profusion! We cut up the warmth and amplitude into threads and
scraps which can only suggest the gleanings of a tan-yard rag-picker,
and use these shabby fragments to _trim lace_! Trim what is in
itself the sublimated essence of trimming, with the leavings of the
earliest of raw materials! Only the soul which spends its life in a
group of chambers connected merely by mechanical force; in a group of
industries connected merely by iron tradition, could bear a combination
like that--to say nothing of enjoying it. Domestic art is almost a
contradiction in terms.

The development of art, like the development of industry, requires the
specialisation, the life-long devotion, impossible to the arbitrary
combinations of home life. Where you find great beauty you find a great
civic sense, most clearly in that high-water mark of human progress in
this direction, ancient Greece. Within the limits of their cities, the
Greeks were more fully "civilised" than any people before or since.
They thought, felt, and acted in this large social contact; and so
developed a sufficient breadth of view, a wide, sweet sanity of mind,
which allowed of this free growth of the art-sense. Great art is always
public, and appears only in periods of high social development. The one
great art of the dark ages--religious architecture--flourished in that
universal atmosphere of "Christendom," the one social plane on which
all met.

The Greeks were unified in many ways; and their highly socialised minds
gave room for a more general development of art, as well as many other
social faculties.

Household decoration was not conspicuous, nor elaborate attire; and
while their women were necessarily beautiful as the daughters of such
men, it was the men whose beauty was most admired and immortalised. The
women stayed at home, as now, but the home did not absorb men, too, as
it does now. When art caters to private tastes, to domestic tastes, to
the wholly private and domestic tastes of women, art goes down.

The Home was the birthplace of Art, as of so many other human
faculties, but is no sufficing area for it. So long as the lives of our
women are spent at home, their tastes limited by it, their abilities,
ambitions, and desires limited by it, so long will the domestic
influence lower art.

"So much the worse for art!" will stoutly cry the defenders of the
home; and they would be right if we could have but one. We can have
both.

A larger womanhood, a civilised womanhood, specialised, broad-minded,
working and caring for the public good _as well as the private_,
will give us not only better homes, but homes more beautiful. The child
will be cradled in an atmosphere of harmonious loveliness, and its
influence will be felt in all life. This is no trifle of an
artificially cultivated æsthetic taste; it is one of nature's deepest
laws. "Art" may vary and suffer in different stages of our growth, but
the laws of beauty remain the same; and a race reared under those laws
will be the nobler.

These more developed women will outgrow the magpie taste that hoards
all manner of gay baubles; the monkey-taste that imitates whatever it
sees; the savage taste that distorts the human body; they will
recognise in that body one infinitely noble expression of beauty, and
refuse to dishonour it with ugliness.

They will learn to care for proportion as well as plumpness, for health
as well as complexion, for strength and activity as essentials to
living loveliness, and to see that no dress can be beautiful which in
any way contradicts the body it should but serve and glorify. We do not
know, because we have not seen, the difference to our lives which will
be made by this large sense of beauty in the woman--in the home; but we
may be assured that, while she stays continually there, we shall have
but our present stage of domestic art.




IX

DOMESTIC ETHICS


The relation of the home to ethics is so vital, so intimate, so
extensive, as to call for the utmost care and patience in its study.

The "domestic virtues" are well known to us, and well loved. We have a
general conviction that all our virtues as well as charity begin at
home; that the ethical progress of man is a steady stream flowing out
of the home, and as far as we compare one virtue with another, we
assume the domestic virtues to be the best.

In half the race we ask nothing but the domestic virtues; in the other
half we look for something further; but consider such civic and social
virtues as appear to be offshoots of the domestic. We call the home
"the cradle of all the virtues," and never imagine for a moment that it
can cradle anything else--in the line of ethics.

Now let us make a careful examination of this field; first establishing
a standard of human conduct and character, and then studying the
relation of the home to that standard. The same consideration referred
to in previous chapters is here most urgently pressed upon the reader:
that all the qualities found in the home do not necessarily originate
there. As a race rises and improves, its improvement appears in the
home, as elsewhere. But that improvement is in itself due to varying
conditions. The diffusion of intelligence following the discovery of
the art of printing lifted the general average mind, and so lifted the
home as well as other departments of life. But that increase of
intelligence did not originate in home life, and is in no way due to
its influence.

The sense of human liberty which spread rapidly among us in the early
years of the settlement of this country, following, as it did, the
splendid dash for religious liberty which brought so many of our
ancestors here, has borne fruit in our home life. We have more freedom
in the family relation than is found in older forms of government, but
this larger freedom did not originate in the home and is in no way to
be accredited to it.

Home-life, as such, does in itself tend to produce certain ethical
qualities; qualities not produced, or not in any such degree, by other
fields of life. Constant association with helpless infancy develops a
generous care and kindness--that is, it does so when the helpless
infants are one's own. The managers of foundling and orphan asylums do
not seem always to be so affected. Constant association with the
inevitable errors and mistakes of childhood develops patience and
sympathy, or tends to do so. There are qualities brought out in home
life which extend their influence into the life of the world. The young
man or woman who has had good home influence shows that advantage all
through life. But there are also qualities brought out in the world's
life apart from the home; and the man or woman affected by these shows
them in the home life. We find in our homes the gathered flowers of
civilisation, of Christianity, of progress in general; and
unconsciously accredit the homes with the production of these beautiful
results--quite erroneously.

The influence of religion, as we all know when we stop to think of it,
has done much more for us than the influence of the home. The
Canaanites had homes--yet gave their children to Moloch. The demand of
the idol had more power than the appeal of the child. The Hindoos have
homes, yet give their babies to the water, their widows to the fire.

Besides religion there are many other influences which affect human
character and conduct; the influences of our government, our education,
our business. We are seeking here to point out precisely what ethical
qualities are developed by home life, good or bad; and to show further
that the present condition of the home is not final, nor vitally
essential. We may so change the conditions of home life as to retain
all that modifies character for good, and to discard all that modifies
it for evil.

The home as a permanent institution in society, if rightly placed and
understood, works for good. The home in its non-essential conditions,
if wrongly placed in our scheme of thought, if misunderstood, if out of
proportion and loaded with anachronisms, works evil. In the complex
group of qualities which make up the human character to-day, for good
and ill, many influences are traceable; and we wish here to disentangle
from among them some lines of influence, and show what place is held by
the home in making us what we are and what we wish to be.

What is the preferred type of excellence in humanity according to our
social instincts and to the measure of history? We began as savages,
and the savage standard of ethics is easily grasped; we have progressed
a long way beyond that savage standard; but ours is still well within
the reach of common understanding. Without seeking for careful sequence
let us enumerate our principal human virtues:

Love; with derivatives of kindness, sympathy, courtesy, etc. Truth;
with honesty, accuracy, etc. Courage; connects with strength and
wisdom. Justice; with a right humility. Self-control; with endurance,
patience, and again with courtesy; also with temperance and chastity.
Honour; a high, inflexible standard of various virtues.

These are arbitrary general types, but do fairly enough for this study.
A human being possessed of these in high degree we should call "good."
They all combine well with one another, and have many derivatives, some
of which are above noted. Their common opposites are as easily given:

Hate; unkindness, coldness, rudeness. Falsehood; lying, dishonesty,
inaccuracy. Cowardice; connects with weakness and ignorance. Injustice;
this allows pride--rests on ignorance. Self-indulgence; followed by
intemperance, unchastity, impatience, and other vices. Dishonour;
meaning a low standard of virtues in general.

Man the savage had of these courage, in some lines; endurance and
patience, in some lines; civilised man surpasses him in these, and has
developed all the others. What are the conditions which have brought
forth this degree of virtue in us, and how does the home rank among
those conditions?

Let us first do it full justice. Mother-love is the foundation and
permanent force of home life; and, mother-love is, indeed, the parent
of all the love we know. Altruism was born of babyhood. The continued
existence of the child--of a succession of children; the permanent
presence of helplessness and its irresistible demands for care; this
forced us into a widening of the sympathies, a deepening of
sensitiveness to others' needs; this laid the foundations of human
love. In this sense, the home is the cradle of one of our very greatest
virtues. Love began with the mother; but it should not stop with her.
"Mother-love" is precisely limited to its own children.

Few, indeed, are the mothers who love other women's children. As
"mother" is a synonym for all kindness, so "stepmother" is a synonym
for all unkindness. Folklore and fairy-tale indicate old fact. Infant
helplessness and orphan need are not only what appeals to the
mother--it is most the blood-tie, the physical relation.

Civilisation and Christianity teach us to care for "the child,"
motherhood stops at "my child."

Still, in the home we do find the nursery of all the lines of family
affection, parental, filial, fraternal, and these are good. Hearts able
to love ten could more easily take in twenty; the love of one's own
parents spread to our present care for the aged; the power of loving
grew, and, as soon as it overstepped the limits of the home, it grew
more rapidly. We have learned to love our neighbours--if not as
ourselves, at least, better than strangers. We have learned to love our
fellow-citizens, fellow-craftsmen, fellow-countrymen. To-day the first
thrills of international good-will are stealing across the world--and
we are extending our sympathy even to the animals.

All this beautiful growth of love began at home; but the influence of
the home, as it now exists upon the growth, is not so wholly
gratifying. The love that we call human, the love of one another, the
love Christ teaches us, is extra-domestic. We are not told, "Inasmuch
as you have done it to your own families you have done it unto me." We
are not exhorted to an ever-increasing intensity of devotion to our own
blood-relations.

Both the teaching of our religion and the tendency of social progress
call for a larger love, and the home, in its position of arrested
development, primitive industry, and crippled womanhood, tends rather
to check that growth than to help it. The man's love for his family
finds expression in his labour for other people--he serves society, and
society provides for him and his dear ones; so good will spreads and
knits; comradeship and fellow-feeling appear, friendship brings its
pure height of affection; this is the natural line of development in
the great social virtue, love.

But the woman, still expressing her love for her family in direct
personal service, misses all that. The primitive father, to feed the
child, went forth himself and killed some rabbit--and the primitive
mother cooked it: love, in grade A. The modern father, to feed his
child, takes his thousandth part in some complex industry, and receives
his thousand-fold share of the complex products of others' industry,
and so provides for the child far more richly than could the savage:
love, in grade Z. But the modern mother--if we can call her so by
courtesy--to feed her child still does nothing but cook for it, still
loves in grade A; and the effect of that persistence of grade A is to
retard the development of grade Z. Mother-love is the fountain of all
our human affection; but mother-love, _as limited by the home_,
does not have the range and efficacy proper to our time. The home, as
at present maintained, checks the growth of love.

As to Truth. This is a distinctly modern virtue. It comes in slowly,
following power and freedom. The weak lie, a small beast hides; the
lion does not hide. The slave lies--and the courtier; the king does not
lie--he does not need to.

The most truthful nations are the most powerful. The most truthful
class is the most powerful. The more truthful sex is the more powerful.
Weakness, helplessness, ignorance, dependence, these breed falsehood
and evasion; and, in child, servant, and woman, the denizens of the
home, we have to combat these tendencies. The standard of sincerity of
the father may be taught the son; but the home is not the originator of
that standard. In this, as in other virtues, gain made in quite other
fields of growth is necessarily transmitted to the home; but fair
analysis must discriminate between the effect of religion, of
education, of new social demands, and the effect of the home as such.

Courage comes along two main lines--by exposure to danger, and by
increase of strength. The home, in its very nature, is intended to
shield from danger; it is in origin a hiding place, a shelter for the
defenceless. Staying in it is in no way conducive to the growth of
courage. Constant shelter, protection, and defence may breed
gratitude--must breed cowardice. We expect timidity of "women and
children"--the housemates. Yet courage is by no means a sex attribute.
Every species of animal that shows courage shows it equally in male and
female--or even more in mother than in father. "It is better to meet a
she-bear robbed of her whelps than a fool in his folly." This dominant
terror--the fool--is contrasted with the female bear--not the male.
Belligerence, mere combativeness, is a masculine attribute; but courage
is not.

The cowardice of women is a distinctly home product. It is born of
weakness and ignorance; a weakness and an ignorance by no means
essential feminine attributes, but strictly domestic attributes. Keep a
man from birth wrapped in much cloth, shut away from sky and sun, wind
and rain, continually exhausting his nervous energy by incessant
activity in monotonous little things, and never developing his muscular
strength and skill by suitable exercise of a large and varied nature,
and he would be weak. Savage women are not weak. Peasant women are not
weak. Fishwives are not weak. The home-bound woman is weak, as would be
a home-bound man. Also, she is ignorant. Not, at least not nowadays,
ignorant necessarily of books, but ignorant of general life.

It is this ignorance and this weakness which makes women cowards;
cowards frank and unashamed; cowards accustomed to be petted and
praised, to be called "true woman" because they scream at that
arch-terror of the home--a mouse. This home-bred cowardice, so admired
in women, is of necessity transmitted to their sons as well as
daughters. It is laughed out of them and knocked out of them, but it is
born into them, relentlessly, with every generation. As black mothers
must alter the complexion of a race, so must coward mothers alter its
character. Apart from fighting--where the natural combative
sex-tendency often counts as courage--our men are not as brave as they
would be if their mothers were braver. We need courage to-day as much
as we ever needed it in our lives. Courage to think and speak the
truth; courage to face convention and prejudice, ridicule and
opposition. We need courage in men and women equally, to face the
problems of the times; and we do not get that courage from the home.

The sense of Justice is one of the highest human attributes; one of the
latest in appearance, one of the rarest and most precious. We love and
honour justice; we seek in some main lines of life to enforce it, after
a fashion; but many of our arrangements are still so palpably unjust
that one would think the virtue was but dreamed of, as yet unborn.
Justice follows equality and freedom. To apprehend it at all the mind
must first perceive the equal, and then resent the unequal. We must get
a sense of level, of balance, and then we notice a deflection. As a
matter of social evolution our system of legal justice springs from the
primitive market place, the disputes of equals, the calling in of a
third party to adjudicate. The disputants know instinctively that an
outsider can see the difficulty better than an insider. Slowly the
arbiter was given more power, more scope; out of much experience came
the crystallisation of law. "Justice!" was the cry of the lowest before
the highest; and the greatest kings were honoured most for this great
virtue.

The field for justice has widened as the state widened; it has reached
out to all classes; its high exercise distinguishes the foremost
nations of our times. Yet even in the teeth of the law-courts injustice
is still common; in everyday life it is most patent.

We have made great progress in the sense of justice and fair play; yet
we are still greatly lacking in it. What is the contribution of
domestic ethics to this mighty virtue? In the home is neither freedom
nor equality. There is ownership throughout; the dominant father, the
more or less subservient mother, the utterly dependent child; and
sometimes that still lower grade--the servant. Love is possible, love
deep and reciprocal; loyalty is possible; gratitude is possible;
kindness, to ruinous favouritism, is possible; unkindness, to all
conspiracy, hate, and rebellion is possible; justice is not possible.

Justice was born outside the home and a long way from it; and it has
never even been adopted there.

Justice is wholly social in its nature--extra-domestic--even
anti-domestic. Just men may seek to do justly in their homes, but it is
hard work. Intense, personal feeling, close ties of blood, are inimical
to the exercise of justice. Do we expect the judge upon the bench to do
justice, dispassionate, unswerving, on his own child--his own wife--in
the dock? If he does, we hail him as more than mortal. Do we expect a
common man--not a judge with all the training and experience of his
place, but a plain man--to do justice to his own wife and his own child
in the constant intimacy of the home? Do we expect the mother to do
justice to the child when the child is the offender and the mother the
offended? Where plaintiff, judge, and executioner are lodged in one
person; where there is no third party--no spectators even--only
absolute irresponsible power, why should we--how could we--expect
justice! We don't. We do not even think of it. No child cries for
"Justice!" to the deaf walls of the home--he never heard of it.

He gets love--endless love and indulgence. He gets anger and punishment
with no court of appeal. He gets care--neglect--discourtesy--affection--
indifference--cruelty--and sometimes wise and lovely training--but none
of these are justice. The home, as such, in no way promotes justice;
but, in its disproportionate and unbalanced position to-day, palpably
perverts and prevents it.

Allied to justice, following upon large equality and recognition of
others, comes that true estimate of one's self and one's own powers
which is an unnamed virtue. "Humility" is not it--to undervalue and
depreciate one's self may be the opposite of pride, but it is not a
virtue. A just estimate is not humility. But call it humility for
convenience' sake; and see how ill it flourishes at home. In that
circumscribed horizon small things look large. There is no general
measuring point, no healthy standard of comparison.

The passionate love of the wife, the mother, and equally of the
husband, the father, makes all geese swans. The parents idealise their
children; and the children, even more restricted by the home
atmosphere--_for they know no other_--idealise the parents. This
is sometimes to their advantage--often the other way. Constant study of
near objects, with no distant horizon to rest and change the focus,
makes us short-sighted; and, as we all know, the smallest object is
large if you hold it near enough. Constant association with one's
nearest and dearest necessarily tends to a disproportionate estimate of
their values.

There is no perspective--cannot be--in these close quarters. The
infant prodigy of talent, praised and petted, brings his production
into the cold light of the market, under the myriad facets of the
public eye, to the measurement of professional standards--and no most
swift return to the home atmosphere can counterbalance the effect of
that judgment day. A just estimate of one's self and one's work can
only be attained by the widest and most impersonal comparison. The
home estimate is essentially personal, essentially narrow. It
sometimes errs in underrating a world-talent; but nine times out of ten
it errs the other way--overrating a home-talent. Humility, in the
sense of an honest and accurate estimate of one's self, is not a
home-made product. A morbid modesty or an unfounded pride often is. The
intense self-consciousness, the prominent and sensitive personality
developed by home life, we are all familiar with in women.

The woman who has always been in close personal relation with
someone,--daughter, sister, wife, mother,--and so loved, valued, held
close, feels herself neglected and chilly when she comes into business
relations. She feels personal neglect in the broad indifference of
office or shop; and instantly seeks to establish personal relations
with all about her. As a business woman she outgrows it in time. It is
not a sex-quality, it is a home-quality; found in a boy brought up
entirely at home as well as in a girl. It tends to a disproportionate
estimate of self; it is a primitive quality, common to children and
savages; it is not conducive to justice and true social adjustment.

Closely allied to this branch of character is the power of
self-control. As an initial human virtue none lies deeper than this;
and here the home has credit for much help in developing some of the
earlier stages of this great faculty. Primitive man brought to his
dawning human relation a long-descended, highly-developed Ego. He had
been an individual animal "always and always," he had now to begin to
be a social animal, a collective animal, to develop the social
instincts and the social conduct in which lay further progress.

The training of the child shows us in little what history shows us in
the large. What the well-bred child has to learn to make him a
pleasing member of the family is self-control. To restrain and adjust
one's self to one's society--that is the line of courtesy--the line of
Christianity--the line of social evolution. The home life does indeed
teach the beginning of self-control; but no more. As compared with the
world, it represents unbridled license. "In company" one must wear so
and so, talk so and so, do so and so, look so and so. To "feel at home"
means relaxation of all this.

This is as it should be. The home is the place for personal relief and
rest from the higher plane of social contact. But social contact is
needed to develop social qualities, constant staying at home does not
do it.

The man, accustomed to meet all sorts of people in many ways, has a far
larger and easier adjustment. The woman, used only to the close contact
of a few people in a few relations, as child, parent, servant,
tradesman; or to the set code of "company manners," has no such healthy
human plane of contact.

"I never was so treated in my life!" she complains--and she never
was--at home. This limits the range of life, cuts off the widest
channels of growth, overdevelops the few deep ones; and does not
develop self-control. The dressing-gown-and-slippers home attitude is
temporarily changed for that of "shopping," or "visiting," but the
childish sensitiveness, the disproportionate personality, remain
dominant.

A too continuous home atmosphere checks in the woman the valuable
social faculties. It checks it in the man more insidiously, through his
position of easy mastery over these dependents, wife, children,
servants; and through the constant catering of the whole _ménage_
to his special tastes. If each man had a private tailor shop in his
back yard he would be far more whimsical and exacting in his personal
taste in clothes. Every natural tendency to self-indulgence is steadily
increased by the life service of an entire wife. This having one whole
woman devoted to one's direct personal service is about as far from the
cultivation of self-control as any process that could be devised.

The man loves the woman and serves her--but he serves her _through
his service of the world_--and she serves him direct. He can fuss
and dictate as to details, he can develop all manner of notions as to
bacon, or toast, or griddle cakes; the whole cuisine is his, he
supports it, it is meant to please him, and under its encompassing
temptation he increases in girth and weight; but not in self-control.
He may be a wise, temperate, judicious man, but the home, with its
disproportionate attention to personal desires, does not make him so.

No clearer instance could be given of the effect of domestic ethics. In
this one field may be shown the beneficent effects of the early home
upon early man, the continued beneficent effects of what is essential
in the home upon modern man; and the most evil effects of the domestic
rudiments upon modern man. The differing ages and sexes held together
by love, yet respecting one another's privacy, demand of one another
precisely this power of self-control. Children together, with no
adults, become boisterous and unruly; adults together, with no
children, become out of sympathy with childhood; the sexes, separated,
tend to injurious excesses; but the true home life checks excess,
develops what is lacking, harmonises all.

What does the morbid, disproportioned, overgrown home life do? It
tends to develop a domineering selfishness in man and a degrading
abnegation in woman--or sometimes reverses this effect. The smooth,
unconscious, all-absorbing greed which the unnaturally developed home
of to-day produces in some women, is as evil a thing as life shows.
Here is a human creature who has all her life been loved and cared for,
sheltered, protected, defended; everything provided for her and nothing
demanded of her except the exercise of her natural feminine functions,
and some proficiency in the playground regulations of "society."

The degree of sublimated selfishness thus produced by home life is
quite beyond the selfishness we so deplore in men. A man may be--often
is--deplorably selfish in his home life; but he does not expect all the
world to treat him with the same indulgence. He has to give as well as
take in the broad, healthy, growing life of the world.

The woman has her home-life to make her selfish, and has no world life
to offset it. Men are polite to her on account of her sex--not on
account of any power, any achievement, any distinctive human value, but
simply because she is a woman. Her guests are necessarily polite to
her. Her hosts are necessarily polite to her, and so are her
fellow-guests. Her servants are necessarily polite to her. Her
children also; if they are not she feels herself abused, denied a
right.

The home and its social tributaries steadily work to develop a
limitless personal selfishness in which the healthy power of
self-control is all unknown. One way or the other swings the pendulum;
here the woman pours out her life in devotion to her husband and
children; in which case she is developing selfishness in them with as
much speed and efficacy as if she were their worst enemy; and here
again the woman sits, plump and fair, in her padded cage, bedizening
its walls with every decoration; covering her own body with costly and
beautiful things; feeding herself, her family, her guests; running from
meal to meal as if eating were really the main business of a human
being. This is the extreme.

Our primitive scheme requires that the entire time of the
woman-who-does-her-own-work shall be spent in ministering to the
physical needs of her family; and in the small minority who have other
women to do it for them, that she shall still have this ministry her
main care--and shall have no others. It is this inordinate demand for
the life and time of a whole woman to keep half a dozen people fed,
cleaned, and waited on, which keeps up in us a degree of
self-indulgence we should, by every step of social development, have
long since outgrown.

The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and mother does not
ensure right nourishment--that we have shown at length; but it does
ensure that every human soul thus provided for shall give far too much
thought to what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be clothed.
The yielding up of a woman's life to the service of these physical
needs of mankind does not develop self-control, nor its noble line of
ensuing virtues--temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endurance.

See the child growing up under this disproportionate attention; fussy,
critical, capricious, always thinking of what he wants and how he wants
it. The more his mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he
knows no better than to help himself to the offered life. See the
husband, criticising the coffee and the steak; or so enjoying and
praising them that the happy wife eagerly spends more hours in
preparing more dishes that John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate
atmosphere. All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it is a
hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly maintains a degree of
personal devotion to one's appetites which would disappear under a
system of living suited to our age.

Self-control is developed by true home life; by true family love.
Family, love, unmodified by social relation, gives also the family
feud; the unconscionably narrow pride of the clansman; the home life of
the first century, arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us
its constant contribution of first-century ethics.

As to honour--that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive ethical sense;
applied so rigidly to this, so little to that; showing so variously;
"business honour," "military honour," "professional honour," "the
honour of a gentleman"--what is the standard of honour in the home?

The only "honour" asked of the woman is chastity; quite a special
sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in any great degree of the man.

If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate sharply in its
preferred exponent. But apart from that virtue, what sense of honour do
we find in the home-bound woman? Is it to keep her word inflexibly? A
woman's privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the weaker?
Would that some dream of this high grace could stand between the angry
woman and the defenceless child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn
eavesdropping, to regard the letter of another person as inviolate?

The standard of honour in the home is not that of "an officer and a
gentleman." The things a decent and well-educated woman will sometimes
do to her own children, do cheerfully and unblushingly, are flatly
dishonourable; but she does not even know it. And the things she does
outside the home, with only her home-bred sense of honour to guide her,
are equally significant. To slip in front of others who are standing in
line; to make engagements and break them; to even engage rooms and
board, and then change her plans without letting the other party know;
thus entailing absolute money loss to a perfectly innocent person,
without a qualm; this is frequently done by women with a high standard
of chastity; but no other sense of honour whatever.

The home is the cradle of all the virtues, but we are in a stage of
social development where we need virtues beyond the cradle size. The
virtues begun at home need to come out and grow in the world as men
need to do--and as woman need to do, but do not know it. The ethics of
the home are good in degree. The ethics of human life are far larger
and more complex.

Our moral growth is to-day limited most seriously by the persistent
maintenance in half the world of a primitive standard of domestic
ethics.




X

DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT


Long is the way from the primal home, with its simple child-_motif_, to
the large and expensive house of entertainment we call home to-day. The
innocent "guest-chamber" early added to the family accommodations has
spread its area and widened its demands, till we find the ultra-type of
millionaire mansion devoting its whole space, practically, to the
occupation of guests--for even the private rooms are keyed up to a
comparison with those frankly built and furnished for strangers. The
kitchen, the dining-room, the pantry, the table-furniture of all sorts,
are arranged in style and amplitude to meet the needs of guests. The
sitting-room becomes a "parlour," the parlour a "drawing-room" with
"reception-room" addition; and then comes the still more removed
"ballroom"--a remarkable apartment truly, to form part of a home. Some
even go so far as to add a theatre--that most essentially public of
chambers--in this culminating transformation of a home to a house of
entertainment.

From what once normal base sprang this abnormal growth? How did this
place of love and intimacy, the outward form of our most tender and
private relations, so change and swell to a place of artificial
politeness and most superficial contact? The point of departure is not
hard to find; it lies in that still visible period when hospitality was
one of our chief virtues.

Of all the evolving series of human virtues none is more easily studied
in its visible relation to condition and its rapid alterations than
hospitality. Moreover, though considered a virtue, it is not so
intermingled with our deepest religious sanction as to be painful to
discuss; we respect, but do not worship it.

Hospitality is a quality of human life, a virtue which appears after a
certain capacity for altruism is developed; not a very high degree, for
we find a rigid code of hospitality among many savage tribes; and which
obtains in exact proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of
travelling.

We still find its best type among the Bedouin Arabs and the Scotch
Highlanders; we find it in our own land more in the country than the
city, more in the thinly settled and poorly roaded south than in the
more thickly settled and better roaded north; and most of all on the
western frontier, where mountain and desert lie between ranch and
ranch.

To call out the most lively sense of hospitality the traveller must be
weary (that means a long, hard road), and "distressed"--open to injury,
if not hospitably received. To have a fresh, clean, rosy traveller drop
in after half an hour's pleasant stroll does not touch the springs of
hospitality. The genuine figure to call out this virtue is the
stranger, the wanderer, the pilgrim.

Hospitality will not stand constant use. The steady visitor must be a
friend; and friendship is quite a different thing from hospitality.
That finds its typical instance in the old Scotch chief sheltering the
hunted fugitive; and defending him against his pursuers even when told
that his guest was the murderer of his son. As guest he was held
sacred; he had claimed the rights of hospitality and he received them.
Had he returned to make the same demand every few days, even without
renewing his initial offence, it is doubtful if hospitality would have
held out.

A somewhat thin, infrequent virtue is hospitality at its heights,
requiring intervals of relaxation. "Withdraw thy foot from thy
neighbour's house, lest he weary of thee and hate thee," says the
proverb of the very people where the laws of hospitality were sacred;
and "the stranger within thy gates" came under the regular provision of
household law.

Hospitality became a sort of standing custom under feudalism, as part
of the parental care of the Lord of the Land; and thus acquired its
elements of pride and ostentation. Each nobleman owned all the land
about him; the traveller had to claim shelter of him either directly or
through his dependents, and the castle was the only place big enough
for entertainment. The nobleman saw to it that no other person on his
domain should be able to offer much hospitality. So the Castle or the
Abbey had it all.

A little of this spirit gave character to the partly danger-based
southern hospitality. It was necessary to the occasional stranger on
the original and legitimate grounds; it became a steady custom to the
modern Lord of the Manor, none of whose subsidiary fellow-citizens had
the wherewithal to feed and shelter guests. But hospitality, even in
that form, is not what issues cards and lays red carpet under awnings
from door to curb.

Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor to dinner--the
dinner where the plates are named and numbered and the caterer ready
with due complement of each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and
apologise--"I'm sorry, but you must excuse me, I have to dress for
dinner!" and "Why, of course! I forgot it was so late!--dear me! the
Jenkinses will have come before me if I don't hurry home!" On what
ground, then, is that dinner given--why are the Jenkinses asked that
night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality, is it the still
sacred spirit of friendship?

Are the people we so expensively and elaborately entertain--and who so
carefully retaliate, card for card, _plat_ for _plat_ and dollar for
dollar--are these the people whom we love? Among our many guests is an
occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to come and see us
_when we are not entertaining_!

Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression, the drawing
together that follows recognition, the manifest kinships of the
outspoken soul. In friendship we discriminate, we particularise, we
enjoy the touch and interchange of like characteristics, the gentle
stimulus of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally,
spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of a casual
propinquity that gives rein to the unforced thought. More friendships
are formed in the prolonged association of school-life or business
life, in the intimacy of a journey together or a summer's camping, than
ever grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friendship may
coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in spite of it, but is
neither cause nor result of that strange process.

What, then, is "entertainment," to which the home is sacrificed so
utterly--which is no part of fatherhood, motherhood, or childhood, of
hospitality or friendship?

On what line of social evolution may we trace the growth of this
amazing phenomenon; this constant gathering together of many people to
eat when they are not hungry, dance when they are not merry, talk when
they have nothing to say, and sit about so bored by their absurd
position that the hostess must needs hire all manner of paid performers
wherewith to "entertain" them?

Here is the explanation: humanity is a relation. It is not merely a
number of human beings, like a number of grains of sand. The human
being, to be really human, must be associated in various forms; grouped
together in the interchange of function. The family relation, as we
have seen, does not in itself constitute humanity; human relations are
larger.

Man, as a separate being, the personal man, must have his private house
to be separate in. Man, as a collective being, the social man, must
have his public house to be together in. This does not mean a drinking
place, but any form of building which shelters our common social
functions. A church is a public house--in it we meet together as human
beings; as individuals, not as families; to perform the common social
function of worship. All religions have this collective nature--people
come together as human beings, under a common impulse.

The home is a private house. That belongs to us separately for the
fulfilment of purely personal functions. Every other form of building
on earth is a public house, a house for people to come together in for
the fulfilment of social functions. Church, school, palace, mill, shop,
post office, railway station, museum, art gallery, library, every kind
of house except the home is a public house. These public houses are as
essential to our social life and development as the private house is to
our physical existence.

Inside the home are love, marriage, birth, and death; outside the home
are agriculture, manufacture, trade, commerce, transportation, art,
science, and religion. Every human--_i.e._, social--process goes
on outside the home, and has to have its appropriate building. In these
varied forms of social activity, humanity finds its true expression;
the contact and interchange, the stimulus and relief, without which the
human soul cannot live.

Humanity _must_ associate, that is the primal law of our being. This
association, so far in history, has been almost entirely confined to
men. They have associated in war, in work, in play. Men have always
been found in groups, on land and sea, doing things together;
developing comradeship, loyalty, justice; enjoying the full swing of
human faculties. But women, with the one partial exception of the
privileges of the church, have been denied this most vital necessity of
human life--association. Every woman was confined separately, in her
private house, to her most separate and private duties and pleasures;
and the duties and pleasures of social progress she was utterly denied.
The church alone gave her a partial outlet; gave her a common roof for
a common function, a place to come together in; and to the church she
has flocked continually, as her only ground of human association.

But as society continued to evolve, reaching an ever-higher degree of
interdependent complexity, developing in the human soul an ever-growing
capacity and necessity for wide, free, general association, and
transmitting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as well as
the son, the enormous pressure had to find some outlet. "What will
happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable body?" is the old
question, and the answer is "The irresistible force will be resisted
and the immovable body be moved." That is exactly what has happened.
The irresistible force of the public spirit has met the immovable body
of the private house--and that great, splendid, working social force
has been frittered away in innumerable little processes of private
amusement; the quiet, beautiful, private home has been bloated and
coarsened in immeasurable distention as a place of public
entertainment.

There is more than one line of tendency, good and bad, at work to bring
about this peculiar phenomenon of domestic entertainment; but the major
condition, without which it could not exist, is the home-bound woman;
and the further essential, without which it could not develop to the
degree found in what we call "society," is that the home-bound woman be
exempt from the domestic industries, exempt from the direct cares of
motherhood, exempt from any faintest hint of the great human
responsibility of mutual labour; exempt from any legitimate connection
with the real social body; and so, still inheriting the enormously
increasing pressure of the social spirit, she pours out her energies in
this simulacrum of social life we still call "social."

What is the effect, or rather what are some of the effects, of this
artificial game of living upon the real course of life? And in
particular how does it affect the home, and how does the home affect
it? In the first place this form of human association, based upon the
activities of otherwise idle women, and requiring the home as its
vehicle of expression, tends to postpone marriage. The idle woman,
contributing nothing to the household labours or expenses, requires to
be wholly supported by her husband. This would be a check on marriage
even if she stayed at home twirling her thumbs; for he would have to
provide women to wait on her, on him, on the children, in default of
her service as "house-wife." He could not marry as soon as the man
whose wife, strong and skilled in house-service, held up her end of the
business, as does the farmer's and mechanic's wife to-day.

But when to the expense of maintaining a useless woman is added the
expense of entertaining her useless friends; when this entertainment
takes the form, not of hospitality sharing the accommodations of the
home, the food of the family, but of providing extra rooms, furniture,
dishes, and servants; of special elaboration of costly food; and of a
whole new gamut of expensive clothing wherein to entertain and be
entertained--then indeed does marriage recede, and youth wither and
blacken in awaiting it.

Current fiction, current jokes, current experience, and all the
background of history and literature, show us this strong and vicious
tendency at work; and ugly is the work it does. No personal
necessities, no family necessities, call for the expenses lavished on
entertainment. Once started, the process races on, limited by no law of
nature, for it is an unnatural process; excess following excess, in
nightmare profusion. Veblen in his great book "The Theory of the
Leisure Class," treats of the general development of this form of
"conspicuous waste," but this special avenue of its maintenance is open
to further study.

Women who work in their homes may be ignorant, uncultured, narrow; they
may act on man as a check to mental progress; they may retard the
development of their remaining industries and be a heavy brake on the
wheels of social progress; they may and they do have this effect; but
they are at least honest workers, though primitive ones. Their homes
are held back from full social development, but they are legitimate
homes. Their husbands, if selfish and vicious, waste money and life in
the saloons, finding the social contact they must have somewhere; but
the wives, getting along as they can without social contact, meet the
basic requirements of home life, and offer to the honest and
self-controlled young man a chance to enjoy "the comforts of a home,"
and to save money if he will. I am by no means pointing out this grade
of woman's labour as desirable; that is sufficiently clear in previous
chapters; but it is in origin right, and, though restricted, not
abnormal.

Domestic entertainment is abnormal. It is an effort to meet a natural
craving in an unnatural way. It continually seeks to "bring people
together" because they are unnaturally kept apart; and to furnish them
with entertainment in lieu of occupation. Any person whose work is too
hard, too long, too monotonous, or not in itself attractive, needs
"relaxation," "amusement," "recreation"; but this does not account in
the least for domestic entertainment. That is offered to people who do
not work at all. Those of them who do, part of the time, as business
men sufficiently wealthy to be "in society," and yet sufficiently human
to keep on in real social activities, are not relaxed, amused, or
recreated by the alleged entertainment.

Those who most conspicuously and entirely give themselves up to it are
most wearied by it. They may develop a morbid taste for the game, which
cannot be satisfied without it; but neither are they satisfied within
it.

The proofs of this are so patent to the sociologist as to seem tedious
in enumeration; one alone carries weight enough to satisfy any
questioner--that is the ceaseless and rapid contortions of invention
with which the "entertainment" varies.

If the happy denizens of the highest "social circles" sat serene and
content like the gods upon Olympus, banqueting eternally in royal calm,
argument and criticism would fall to the ground. If they rose from
their eternal banqueting, refreshed and strong, recreated in vigour and
enthusiasm, and able to plunge into the real activities of life, then
we might well envy them, and strive, with reason, to attain their
level. But this is in no wise the case. Look for your evidence at the
requisites of entertainment in any age of sufficient wealth and peace
to maintain idlers, and in no age more easily typical than our own, and
see the convulsive and incessant throes of change, the torrent of
excess, the license, the eccentricity, the sudden reaction to this and
that extreme, with which the wearied entertainers seek to devise
entertainment that will entertain.

The physiologist knows that where normal processes are arrested
abnormal processes develop. The persistent energy of the multiplying
cell finds expression in cyst and polypus as readily as in good muscle
and gland; and, whereas the normal growth finds its natural limit and
proportion in the necessary organic interchange with other working
parts of the mechanism, no such healthy check acts upon the abnormal
growth.

Legs and arms do not grow and stretch indefinitely, putting out
wabbling, pendulous eccentricities here and there; but a tumour grows
without limit and without proportion; without use, and, therefore,
without beauty. It takes no part in the bodily functions, and,
therefore, is a disease. Yet it is connected with the body, grows in
it, and swells hugely upon stolen blood. Social life has this
possibility of morbid growth as has the physical body.

All legitimate social functions check and limit each other, as do our
physical functions. No true branch of the social service can wax great
at the expense of the others. If there are more in any trade or
profession than are needed, the less capable are dropped out--cannot
maintain a place in that line of work. Our use to each other is the
natural check and guide in normal social growth. This whole field of
domestic entertainment is abnormal in its base and direction, and
therefore has no check in its inordinate expansion. As long as money
can be found and brains be trained to minister to its demands the
stream pours on; and all industry and art are corrupted in the service.

True social intercourse, legitimate amusement, is quite another matter.
Human beings must associate, in innumerable forms and degrees of
intimacy. Perfect friendship is the most intense, the closest form, and
our great national and international organisations the largest and
loosest. Between lies every shade of combination, temporary and
permanent, deep and shallow, all useful and pleasant in their place. A
free human being, rightly placed in society, has first his work--or her
work--the main line of organic relation. That means special
development, and all affiliations, economic and personal, that rest on
that specialisation.

Then come the still larger general human connections, religious,
political, scientific, educational, in which we join and work with
others in the great world-functions that include us all. Play is almost
as distinctively a human function as work--perhaps quite as much so;
and here again we group and re-group, in sports and games, by "eights,"
by "nines," by "elevens," and all progressive associations. Then, where
the play is so subtle and elaborate as to require a life's work, as in
the great social function of the drama, we have people devoting their
time to that form of expression, though they may seek their own
recreation in other lines.

All natural mingling to perform together--as in the harvest dances and
celebrations of all peoples--or to enjoy together the performance of
others, as when we gather in the theatre, this is legitimate human
life; and, while any one form may be overdeveloped, by excessive use,
as an unwise athlete may misuse his body, it is still in its nature
right, and good, if not misused.

But the use of the home as a medium of entertainment is abnormal in
itself, in its relation, or, rather, in its total lack of relation to
the real purpose of the place. The happy privacy of married love is at
once lost. The quiet wisdom, peace, and loving care which should
surround the child are at once lost. The delicate sincerity of personal
expression, which should so unerringly distinguish one's dress and
house, is at once lost. The only shadow of excuse for cumbering the
home with crude industries--our claim that we do this so as to more
accurately meet the needs of the family--is at once lost. The whole
household machinery, once so nobly useful, and still interesting, as a
hand-loom or spinning wheel, is prostituted to uses of which the primal
home had no conception.

In an ideal home we should find, first, the perfect companionship of
lovers; then the happy, united life of father, mother, and child, of
brother and sister; then all simple, genuine hospitality; then the
spontaneous intercourse of valued friends--the freedom to meet and
mingle, now more, now less, in which, as character develops, we slowly
find our own, and our whole lives are enriched and strengthened by
right companionship.

Right here is the point of departure from the legitimate to the
illegitimate; from what is natural, true, and wholly good to this
avenue of diseased growth. As we reach out more and more for a wider
range of contact--a chance of more varied association--we should leave
the home and find what we seek in its own place: the general functions
of human life, the whole wide field of human activity. In school, in
college, the growing soul finds at once possibilities of contact
impossible at home.

True association is impossible without common action. We do not sit
voiceless and motionless, shaking hands with each other's souls. True
and long-established friends and lovers may do this for a season.
"Silence is the test of friendship," someone has said; but friendship
and love require something more than this for birth and maintenance.
The "ties" of love and friendship are found in the common memories and
common hopes, the things we have done, do, and will do, for and with
each other.

The home is for the family, and at most, a few "familiar" friends. The
wider range of friendship, actual and potential, that the human soul of
to-day requires, is not possible at home. See the broad graded list of
a man's school friends and college friends, classmates, and fellows in
club and society, associates in games and sports, business friends of
all degrees, friends and associates in politics; he has an enormous
range of social contact, from every grade of which he gets some good,
and, out of the whole, some personal friends he likes to have come
freely to his home.

Contrast with this the woman's scale--the average woman, she whose
"sphere" is wholly in the home. By nature--that is, by human
nature--she has the same need and capacity for large association. Being
pruned down to a few main branches, confined almost wholly to the basic
lines of attachment known equally to the savage, she pours a passionate
intensity of feeling into her narrow range. The life-long give-and-take
with a friend of whose private life one knows nothing is impossible to
her. She must monopolise, being herself monopolised from birth.

This intensity of feeling, finally worn down by the rebuff it must
needs meet, gives place in the life of the woman who is able to
"entertain," to the "dear five hundred friends" of that sterile
atmosphere. It is no longer the free reaching out of the individual
toward those who mean help and strength, breadth and change and
progress, rest and relaxation. In the varied life of the world we are
brought in contact with many kinds of people, in different lines of
work, and are drawn to those who belong to us. In the monotonous life
of "society" we are brought in contact with the same kind of people, or
people whose life effort is to appear the same--all continually engaged
in doing the same thing. If any new idea jars the monotony, off rushes
the whole crowd after it--bicycle, golf, or ping-pong--till they have
made it monotonous, too.

No true and invigorating social intercourse can take place among people
who are cut off from real social activities, whose medium of contact is
the utterly irrelevant and arbitrary performance of what they so
exquisitely miscall "social functions." The foundation error lies in
the confinement of a social being to a purely domestic scale of living.
By bringing into the home people who have no real business there, they
are instantly forced into an artificial position. The home is no place
for strangers. They cannot work there, they cannot play there, so they
must be "entertained." So starts the merry-go-round. The woman must
have social contact, she cannot go where it is in the normal business
of life, so she tries to drag it in where she is; forcing the social
life into the domestic. The domestic life is crowded out by this
foreign current, and, as there is no place for legitimate social
activities, in any home or series of homes, however large and costly,
the illegitimate social activities are at once set up.

The train of evils to the health of society we are all acquainted with,
though not with their causes. Sociology is yet too new to us for
practical application. We are too unfamiliar with normal social
processes to distinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly
under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of everyone that it
would seem easy to understand.

The human being's best growth requires a happy, quiet, comfortable
home; with peace and health, order and beauty in its essential
relations. The human being also requires right social relation, the
work he is best suited to, full range of expression in that work, and
intercourse free and spontaneous with his kind. Women are human beings.
They are allowed the first class of relations--the domestic; but denied
the other--the social. Hence they are forced to meet a normal need in
an abnormal way, with inevitable evil results.

We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury and
extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health, of the defrauded
home, the withering family life, the black shadows beyond that; but
there are others we do not see. Large among these is our loneliness.
The machinery of domestic entertainment is paradoxically in our way. We
are for ever and for ever flocking together, being brought together,
arranging to meet people, to be met by people, to have other people
meet each other, and meanwhile life passes and we have not met.

"How I wish I could see more of you!" we sigh to the few real friends.
Your friend may be at the same dinner--taking out someone else, or,
even taking you out--in equal touch with neighbours at either side and
eyes opposing. Your friend may be at the same dance--piously keeping
step with many another; at the same reception, the same tea, the same
luncheon--but you do not meet. As the "society" hand is gloved that
there be no touching of real flesh and blood, so is the society soul
dressed and defended for the fray in smooth phrase and glossy smile--a
well-oiled system, without which the ceaseless press and friction would
wear us raw, but within which we do anything but "meet."

For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the bringing out of
the best there is in us, for the maintenance of a pure and restful
home-life and the development of an inspiring and fruitful social life,
we need some other medium of association than domestic entertainments.
And we are rapidly finding it. The woman's club is a most healthy field
of contact, and the woman's clubhouse offers a legitimate common ground
for large gatherings.

The increasing number of women in regular business life alters the
whole position. The business woman has her wider range of contact
during the day, and is glad to rest and be alone with her family at
night. If she desires to go out, it is to see real friends, or to some
place of real amusement. When all women are honestly at work the
"calling habit" will disappear perforce, with all its waste and
dissimulation.

Given a healthy active life of true social usefulness for all women,
and given a full accommodation of public rooms for public gatherings,
and the whole thing takes care of itself. The enormous demand for
association will be met legitimately, and the satisfied soul will
gladly return from that vast field of social life to the restful quiet,
the loving intimacy, the genuineness of home-life, with its constant
possibilities of real hospitality and the blessings of true friendship.




XI

THE LADY OF THE HOUSE


The effect of the house upon women is as important as might be expected
of one continuous environment upon any living creature. The house
varies with the varying power and preference of the owner; but to a
house of some sort the woman has been confined for a period as long as
history. This confinement is not to be considered as an arbitrary
imprisonment under personal cruelty, but as a position demanded by
public opinion, sanctioned by religion, and enforced by law.

In the comparative freedom to "walk abroad" of our present-day
civilised women, we too quickly forget the conditions immediately
behind us, when even the marketing for the household was done by men,
and the conditions still with us for many millions of women in many
countries who are house-bound for life.

To briefly recount the situation, we find in the pre-human home the
mother sharing the hole or nest with her young, also sharing the
outside task of getting food for them. In some species the father
assists the mother, he never does it all. In other cases the father is
no assistance, even a danger, seeking in cannibal infanticide to eat
his own young; the mother in this case must feed and defend the young,
as well as feed herself, and so must leave home at frequent intervals.

The common cat is an instance of this. She is found happily nursing the
kittens in her hidden nest among the hay; but you often find the
kittens alone while the mother goes mousing, and a contributary Thomas
you do not find.

As we have before seen, our longer period of infancy and its
overlapping continuity, a possible series of babies lasting twenty
years or so, demanded a permanent home; and so long as the mother had
sole charge of this progressive infant party she must needs be there to
attend to her maternal duties. This condition is what we have in mind,
or think we have in mind, when maintaining the duty of women to stay at
home.

Wherever woman's labour is still demanded, as among all savages, in the
peasant classes where women work in the fields, and in our own recent
condition of slavery, either the mother takes her baby with her, or a
group of babies are cared for by one woman while the rest are at work.
Again, among our higher classes, almost the first step of increasing
wealth is to depute to a nurse the mother's care, in order that she may
be free from this too exacting claim. The nurse is a figure utterly
unknown to animals, save in the collective creatures, like the bee and
ant; a deputy-mother, introduced by us at a very early period. But this
sharing of the mother's duties has not freed the woman from the house,
because of quite another element in our human life. This is the custom
of ownership in women.

The animal mother is held by love, by "instinct" only; the human mother
has been for endless centuries a possession of the father. In his pride
and joy of possession, and in his fear lest some other man annex his
treasure, he has boxed up his women as he did his jewels, and any
attempt at personal freedom on their part he considered a revolt from
marital allegiance.

The extreme of this feeling results in the harem-system, and the
crippled ladies of China; wherein we find the women held to the house,
not by their own maternal ties, of which we talk much but in which we
place small confidence, but by absolute force.

This condition modifies steadily with the advance of democratic
civilisation, but the mental habit based upon it remains with us. The
general opinion that a woman should be in the home is found so lately
expressed as in the works of our present philosopher, Mr. Dooley. In
his "Expert Evidence" he says, "What the coort ought to 've done was to
call him up and say 'Lootgert, where's your good woman?' If Lootgert
cudden't tell, he ought to be hanged on gineral principles; f'r a man
must keep his wife around the house, and when she isn't there it shows
he's a poor provider."

The extent and depth of this feeling is well shown by a mass of popular
proverbs, often quoted in this connection, such as "A woman should
leave her house three times--when she is christened, when she is
married, and when she is buried" (even then she only leaves it to go to
church), or again, "The woman, the cat, and the chimney should never
leave the house." So absolute is this connection in our minds that
numbers of current phrases express it, the Housewife--Hausfrau, and the
one chosen to head this chapter--The Lady of the House.

Now what has this age-long combination done to the woman, to the mother
and moulder of human character; what sort of lady is the product of the
house?

Let us examine the physical results first. There is no doubt that we
have been whitened and softened by our houses. The sun darkens, the
shade pales. In the house has grown the delicate beauty we admire, but
are we right in so admiring?

The highest beauty the world has yet known was bred by the sun-loving
Athenians. Their women were home-bound, but their men raced and
wrestled in the open air. No argument need be wasted to prove that air
and sun and outdoor exercise are essential to health, and that health
is essential to beauty. If we admire weakness and pallor, it by no
means shows those qualities to be good; we can admire deformity itself,
if we are taught to.

Without any reference to cause or necessity, it may be readily seen
that absolute confinement to the house must have exactly the same
effect on women that it would on men, and that effect is injurious to
the health and vigour of the race. It is possible by continuous outdoor
training of the boys and men to counteract the ill effect of the indoor
lives of women; but why saddle the race with difficulties? Why not give
our children strong bodies and constitutions from both sides?

The rapid and increasing spread of physical culture in modern life is
helping mend the low conditions of human development; but the man still
has the advantage.

This was most convincingly shown by the two statues made by Dr. Sargent
for the World's Fair of 1893 from an extended series of measurements of
college boys and girls. Thousands and thousands of specimens of our
young manhood and young womanhood were carefully measured, and there
stand the two white figures to show how we compare in beauty--the men
and women of our time.

The figure of the man is far and away more beautiful than that of the
woman. It is better proportioned as a whole; she is too short-legged,
too long-waisted, too narrow-chested. It is better knit, more strongly
and accurately "set up." She does not hang together well at all--the
lines of connection are weak and wavering, and in especial does she
lack any power and grace in the main area, the body itself, the torso.
There is the undeveloped chest and the over-developed hips; and between
them, instead of a beautifully modelled trunk, mere shapeless tissues,
crying mutely for the arbitrary shape they are accustomed to put on
outside! We are softer and whiter for our long housing; but not more
truly beautiful.

The artist seeks his models from the stately burden-bearing,
sun-browned women of Italy; strong creatures, human as well as
feminine. The house life, with its shade, its foul air, its overheated
steaminess, its innumerable tiring small activities, and its lack of
any of those fine full exercises which built the proportions of the
Greeks, has not benefited the body of the lady thereof; and in injuring
her has injured all mankind, her children.

How of her mind? How has the mental growth of the race been affected by
the housing of women? Apply the question to men. Think for a moment of
the mental condition of humanity, if men too had each and every one
stayed always in the home. The results are easy to picture. No
enlargement of industry, only personal hand-to-mouth labour: not a
trade, not a craft, not a craftsman on earth; no enlargement of
exchange and commerce, only the products of one's own field, if the
house-bound were that much free: no market, local, national, or
international; no merchant in the world.

No transportation, that at once; _no roads_--why roads if all men
stayed at home? No education--even the child must leave home to go to
school; no art, save the squaw-art of personal decoration of one's own
handmade things. No travel, of course, and so no growth of any human
ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and peace. In short, no human life
at all--if men, all men, had always stayed at home. Merely the life of
a self-maintained family--the very lowest type, the type we find most
nearly approached by the remote isolated households of the "poor
whites," of the South. Even they have some of the implements and
advantages of civilisation, they are not utterly cut off.

The growth of the world has followed the widening lives of men, outside
the home. The specialised trade, with its modification of character;
the surplus production and every widening range of trade and commerce;
the steadily increasing power of distribution, and transportation, with
its increased area, ease, and speed; the ensuing increase in travel now
so general and continuous; and following that the increase in our
knowledge and love of one another; all--all that makes for
civilisation, for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on toward
the race ideal--takes place outside the home. This is what has been
denied to the lady of the house--merely all human life!

Some human life she must needs partake of by the law of heredity,
sharing in the growth of the race through the father; and some she has
also shared through contact with the man in such time as he was with
her in the house, to such a degree as he was willing and able to share
his experience. Also her condition has been steadily ameliorated, as
he, growing ever broader and wiser by his human relationships, brought
wisdom and justice and larger love into his family relationship. But
the gain came from without, and filtered down to the woman in most
niggardly fashion.

Literature was a great world-art for centuries and centuries before
women were allowed to read--to say nothing of write! It is not long
since the opinion was held that, if women were allowed to write, they
would but write love letters! In our last century, in civilised
Christian England, Harriet Martineau and Jane Austen covered their
writing with their sewing when visitors came in; writing was
"unwomanly!"

The very greatest of our human gains we have been the slowest to share
with woman: education and democracy.

We have allowed them religion in a sense--as we have allowed them
medicine--to take; not to give! They might have a priest as they might
have a doctor, but on no account be one! Religion was for man to
preach--and woman to practise.

In some churches, very recently, we are at last permitting women to
hold equal place with men in what they deem to be the special service
of God, but it is not yet common. Her extra-domestic education has been
won within a lifetime; and there are still extant many to speak and
write against it, even in the Universities--those men of Mezozoic
minds! And her place as active participant in democratic government is
still denied by an immense majority, on the ground--the same old
underlying ground--that it would take her from the house! Here, clear
and strong, stands out that ancient theory, that the very existence of
womanhood depends on staying in the house.

We have seen what has been denied to woman by absence from the world;
what do we find bestowed upon her by the ceaseless, enclosing presence
of the house? How does staying in one's own house all one's life affect
the mind? We cannot ask this question of a man, for no man has ever
done it except a congenital invalid. Nothing short of paralysis will
keep a man in the house. He would as soon spend his life in petticoats,
they are both part of the feminine environment--no part of his. He will
come home at night to sleep, at such hours as suit him. He likes to eat
at home, and brings his friends to see the domestic group--house, wife,
and children; all, things to be fond and proud of, things a man wishes
to own and maintain properly. But for work or play, out he goes to his
true companions--men, full-grown human creatures who understand each
other; in his true place--the world, our human medium.

The woman, with such temporary excursions as our modern customs permit,
works, plays, rests, does all things in her house, or in some
neighbouring house--the same grade of environment. The home atmosphere
is hers from birth to death. That this custom is rapidly changing I
gladly admit. The women of our country and our time are marching out of
the home to their daily work by millions, only to return to them at
night with redoubled affection; but there are more millions far, many
more millions, who are still housewives or ladies of houses.

The first result is a sort of mental myopia. Looking always at things
too near, the lens expands, the focus shortens, the objects within
range are all too large, and nothing else is seen clearly. To spend
your whole time in attending to your own affairs in your own home
inevitably restricts the mental vision; inevitably causes those same
personal affairs to seem larger to you than others' personal affairs or
the affairs of the nation.

This is a general sweeping consequence of being house-bound; and it is
a heavily opposing influence to all human progress. The
little-mindedness of the house-lady is not a distinction of sex. It is
in no essential way a feminine distinction, but merely associatively
feminine in that only women are confined to houses.

A larger range of interest and care instantly gives a resultant
largeness of mind, in women as well as men. Such free great lives as
have been here and there attained by women show the same broad human
characteristics as similar lives of men. It can never be too frequently
insisted upon, at least not in our beclouded time, that the whole area
of human life is outside of, and irrelevant to, the distinctions of
sex. Race characteristics belong in equal measure to either sex, and
the misfortune of the house-bound woman is that she is denied time,
place, and opportunity to develop those characteristics. She is
feminine, more than enough, as man is masculine more than enough; but
she is not human as he is human. The house-life does not bring out our
humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human progress lie outside.

In the mind of the lady of the house is an arrangement of fact and
feeling, which is untrue because it is disproportionate. The first
tendency of the incessant home life is to exaggerate personality. The
home is necessarily a hotbed of personal feeling. There love grows
intense and often morbid; there any little irritation frets and wears
in the constant pressure like a stone in one's shoe. The more isolated
the home, the more cut off from the healthy movement of social
progress, as in the lonely farmhouses of New England, the more we find
those intense eccentric characters such as Mary E. Wilkins so perfectly
portrays. The main area of the mind being occupied with a few people
and their affairs, a tendency to monomania appears. The solitary farmer
is least able to escape this domestic pressure, and therefore we find
these pathological conditions of home life most in scattered farms.

Human creatures, to keep healthy, _must_ mingle with one another.
The house-bound woman cannot; therefore she does not maintain a
vigorous and growing mind. Such contact as she has is mainly through
church opportunities; and along all such lines as are open to her she
eagerly flocks, finding great relief therein. But compare the
interchange between a group of house-ladies, and a corresponding group
of men--their husbands perhaps. Each of these men, touching the world
through a different trade, has an area of his own; from which he can
bring a new outlook to the others. Even if all are farmers, in which
case there is much less breadth and stimulus in their intercourse, they
still have some connection with the moving world. They seek to meet at
some outside point, the store, the blacksmith's shop, the railroad
station, the post-office; the social hunger appeasing itself as best it
may with such scraps of the general social activities as fall to it.
But the women, coming together, have nothing to bring each other but
personalities. Some slight variation in each case perhaps, a little
difference in receipts for sponge-cake, cures for measles, patterns for
clothes, or stitches for fancy-work. (Oh, poor, poor lives! where fancy
has no work but in stitches, and no play at all!)

The more extended and well-supplied house merely gives its lady a more
extended supply of topics of the same nature. She may discuss
candle-shades instead of bed-quilts, "entrées" instead of "emptin's";
ferns for the table instead of "yarbs" for the garret; but the
distinction is not vital. It is still the lady prattling of her
circumambient house, as snails might (possibly do!) dilate upon the
merits of their ever-present shells. The limitations of the house as an
area for a human life are most baldly dreary and crippling in the lower
grades, the great majority of cases, where the housewife toils, not yet
become the lady of the house. Here you see grinding work, and endless
grey monotony. Here are premature age, wasting disease, and early
death. If a series of photographs could be made of the working
housewives in our country districts, with some personal account of the
"poor health" which is the main topic of their infrequent talk; we
should get a vivid idea of the condition of this grade of house-bound
life.

The lady is in a different class, and open to a different danger. She
is not worn out by overwork, but weakened by idleness. She is not
starved and stunted by the hopeless lack of expression, but is, on the
contrary, distorted by a senseless profusion of expression. There is
pathos even to tears in the perforated cardboard fly-traps dangling
from the gaudy hanging lamp in the farmhouse parlour; the little
weazened, withered blossom of beauty thrust forth from the smothered
life below. There is no pathos, rather a repulsive horror, in the mass
of freakish ornament on walls, floors, chairs, and tables, on specially
contrived articles of furniture, on her own body and the helpless
bodies of her little ones, which marks the unhealthy riot of expression
of the overfed and underworked lady of the house.

Every animal want is met, save those of air and exercise, though
nowadays we let her out enough to meet those, if she will do it in
games and athletic sports--anything that has not, as Veblen puts it,
"the slightest taint of utility." She is a far more vigorous lady
physically, than ever before. Also, nowadays, we educate her; in the
sense of a large supply of abstract information. We charge her battery
with every stimulating influence during youth; and then we expect her
to discharge the swelling current in the same peaceful circuit which
contented her great-grandmother! This gives us one of the most
agonising spectacles of modern times.

Here is a creature, inheriting the wide reach of the modern mind; that
socially-developed mind begotten of centuries of broadest human
intercourse; and, in our later years of diffused education, rapid
transit, and dizzying spread of industrial processes, increasing its
range and intensity with each generation. This tremendous engine, the
healthy use of which requires contact with the whole field of social
stimulus to keep up its supplies, and the whole field of social
activity for free discharge, we expect to find peaceful expression in
its own single house. There is of course a margin of escape--there must
be.

In earlier decades the suppressed activity of this growing creature
either still found vent in some refined forms of household industry, as
in the exquisite embroideries of our grandmothers, or frankly boiled
over in "society." The insatiate passion of woman for "society" has
puzzled her unthinking mate. He had society, the real society of large
human activities; but he saw no reason why she should want any. She
ought to be content at home, in the unbroken circle of the family.
While the real labours of the house held her therein she stayed,
content or not; but, free of those, she has reached out widely in such
planes as were open to her, for social contact. As women, any number of
women, failed to furnish any other stimulus than that she was already
overfilled with--they being each and all mere ladies of houses--she was
naturally more attracted to the more humanly developed creature, man.

Man's power, his charm, for woman is far more than that of sex. It is
the all-inclusive vital force of human life--of real social
development. She has hung around him as devotedly as the cripple tags
the athlete. When women have their own field of legitimate social
activity, they retain their admiration for really noble manhood, but
the "anybody, Good Lord!" petition is lost forever. A hint is perhaps
suggested here, as to the world-old charm for women, of the priest and
soldier. Both are forms of very wide social service--detached,
impersonal, giving up life to the good of the whole--infinitely removed
from the close clinging shadow of the house!

In our immediate time the progress of industry has cut the lady off
from even her embroidery. Man, alert and inventive, follows her few
remaining industries relentlessly, and grabs them from her, away from
the house, into the mill and shop where they belong. But she, with ever
idler hands, must stay behind. He will furnish her with everything her
heart can wish--but she must stay right where she is and swallow it.

    _"Lady Love! Lady Love! wilt thou be mine?
    Thou shalt neither wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine!
    But sit on a cushion and sew a gold seam
    And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream!"_

This amiable programme, so exquisitely ludicrous, when offered to the
world's most inherently industrious worker, becomes as exquisitely
cruel when applied. The physical energies of the mother--an enormous
fund--denied natural expression in bodily exertion, work morbidly in
manifold disease. The social energies, boundless, resistless, with
which she is brought more in contact every year, denied natural
expression in world-service, work morbidly inside the painfully
inadequate limits of the house.

Here we have the simple explanation of that unreasonable excess which
characterises the lady of the house. The amount of wealth this amiable
prisoner can consume in fanciful caprices is practically unlimited. Her
clothing and ornament is a study in itself. Start any crazy fad or
fashion in this field, and off goes the flood of self-indulgence, the
craving for "expression," absurdity topping extravagance. There is
nothing to check it save the collapse of the source of supplies.

A modern "captain of industry" has a brain so socially developed as to
require for its proper area of expression an enormous range of social
service. He gets it. He develops great systems of transportation,
elaborate processes of manufacture, complex legislation or financial
manoeuvres. Without reference to his purpose, to the money he may
acquire, or the relative good or evil of his methods, the point to be
noted is that he is exercising his full personal capacity.

His sister, his wife, has a similar possibility of brain activity, and
practically no provision for its exercise. So great is the growth, so
tremendous the pressure of live brains against dead conditions, that in
our current life of to-day we find more and more women pouring wildly
out into any and every form of combination and action, good, bad, and
indifferent. The church sewing circle, fair, and donation party no
longer satisfy her. The reception, dinner, ball, and musicale no longer
satisfy her. Even the splendid freedom of physical exercise no longer
satisfies her. More and more the necessity for full and legitimate
social activity makes itself felt; and more and more she is coming out
of the house to take her rightful place in the world.

Not easily is this accomplished, not cheaply and safely. She is
breaking loose from the hardest shell that ever held immortal seed. She
is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which
has accumulated through the centuries; and she is opposed from without
by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if
prejudice were made of anything real.

The obsequious terror of a child, cowed by the nurse's bugaboo, is more
reasonable than our docile acquiescence in the bonds of prejudice. It
is pleasantly funny, knowing the real freedom so easily possible, to
see a strong, full-grown woman solemnly state that she cannot pass the
wall of cloudy grandeur with Mrs. Grundy for gate-keeper, that seems to
hem her in so solidly. First one and then another reaches out a
courageous hand against this towering barricade, touches it, shakes it,
finds it not fact at all, but merely feeling--and passes calmly
through. There is really nothing to prevent the woman of to-day from
coming out of her old shell; and there is much to injure her, if she
stays in.

The widespread nervous disorders among our leisure-class women are
mainly traceable to this unchanging mould, which presses ever more
cruelly upon the growing life. Health and happiness depend on smooth
fulfilment of function, and the functional ability of a modern woman
can by no means be exercised in this ancient coop.

The effect of the lady of the house upon her husband is worth special
study. He thinks he likes that kind of woman, he stoutly refuses to
consider any other kind; and yet his very general discontent in her
society has been the theme of all observers for all time. In our time
it has reached such prominence as to be commented upon even in that
first brief halcyon period, the "honeymoon." _Punch_ had a piteous
cartoon of a new-married pair, sitting bored and weary on the beach,
during their wedding journey. "Don't you wish some friend would come
along?" said she. "Yes," he answered--"or even an enemy!"

Men have accepted the insufficiencies and disagreeablenesses of "female
society" as being due to "the disabilities of sex." They are not, being
really due to the disability of the house-bound. Love may lead a man to
"marry his housekeeper," and we condemn the misalliance; but he makes a
housekeeper of his wife without criticism. The misalliance is still
there.

A man, a healthy, well-placed man, has his position in the world and in
the home, and finds happiness in both. He loves his wife, she meets his
requirements as a husband, and he expects nothing more of her. His
other requirements he meets in other ways. That she cannot give him
this, that, and the other form of companionship, exercise,
gratification, is no ground of blame; the world outside does that. So
the man goes smoothly on, and when the woman is uncertain, capricious,
exacting, he lays it to her being a woman, and lets it go at that.

But she, for all field of exertion, has but this house; for all kinds
of companionship, this husband. He stands between her and the world, he
has elected to represent it to her, to be "all the world" to her. Now,
no man that ever lived, no series or combination of husbands that
widowhood or polyandry ever achieved can be equivalent to the world.
The man needs the wife and has her--needs the world and has it. The
woman needs the husband--and has him; needs the world--and there is the
husband instead. He stands between her and the world, with the best of
intentions, doubtless; but a poor substitute for full human life.

"What else should she want?" he inquires in genuine amazement. "I love
her, I am kind to her, I provide a good home for her--she has her
children and she has me--what else should she want?"

What else does he want? He has her--the home and the children--does
that suffice him? He wants also the human world to move freely in, to
act fully in, to live widely in, and _so does she_.

And because she cannot have it, because he stands there in its stead,
she demands of him the satisfaction of all these thwarted human
instincts. She does not know what ails her. She thinks he does not love
her enough; that if he only loved her enough, stayed with her enough,
she would be satisfied. No man can sit down and love a woman eighteen
hours a day, not actively. He does love her, all the time, in a
perfectly reasonable way, but he has something else to do.

He loves her for good and all; it is in the bank, to draw on for the
rest of life, a steady, unfailing supply; but she wants to see it and
hear it and feel it all the time, like the miser of old who "made a
bath of his gold and rolled in it."

The most glaring type of this unfortunate state of mind in recent
fiction is that of the morbid Marna in the "Confessions of a Wife"--a
vivid expression of what it is to be a highly-concentrated,
double-distilled wife--_and nothing else_! No shadow of interest
had she in life except this man; no duty, no pleasure, no use, no
ambition, no religion, no business--nothing whatever but one embodied
demand for her Man. He was indeed all the world to her--and he didn't
like it.

If the woman was fully developed on the human side she would cease to
be overdeveloped on the feminine side. If she had her fair share of
world-life she would expect of her husband that he be a satisfactory
man, but not that he be a satisfactory world, which is quite beyond
him. Cannot men see how deeply benefited they would be by this change,
this growth of woman? She would still be woman, beautiful, faithful,
loving; but she would not be so greedy, either for money or for love.

The lady of the house may be most softly beautiful, she may be utterly
devoted, she may be unutterably appealing; but all her centuries of
cherished existence have but brought us to _Punch's_ "Advice to
Those About to Marry": "Don't!"

The world's incessant complaint of marriage, mockery of marriage,
resistance, outbreak, and default, gives heavy proof that that great
human institution has serious defects. The blame has generally been
laid on man. Suppose we now examine the other fact, the equal factor,
and see if there is not some essential error in her position. This
might furnish a wide field of study in the leisure hours of The Lady of
the House.




XII

THE CHILD AT HOME


There are upon earth many millions of people--most of them children.
Mankind has been continuous upon earth for millions of years; children
have been equally continuous. Children constitute a permanent class,
the largest class in the population. There are men, there are women,
there are children, and the children outnumber the adults by three to
two.

In the order of nature, all things give way before the laws and
processes of reproduction; the individual is sacrificed to the race.
Natural forces, working through the unconscious submission of the
animal, tend steadily to improve a species through its young.

Social forces, working through our conscious system of education, tend
to improve our species through its young. Humanity is developed age
after age through a gradual improvement in its children; and since we
have seen this and learned somewhat to assist nature by art, humanity
develops more quickly and smoothly.

Every generation brings us more close to recognition of this great
basic law, finds us more willing to follow nature's principle and bend
all our energies to the best development of the child. We early learned
to multiply our power and wisdom by transmission through speech, and,
applying that process to the child, we taught him what we knew, saving
to humanity millennial periods of evolution by this conscious short-cut
through education.

Nature's way of teaching is a very crude one--mere wholesale capital
punishment. She kills off the erring without explanation. They die
without knowing what for, and the survivors don't know, either. We, by
education, markedly assist nature, transmitting quick knowledge from
mouth to mouth, as well as slow tendency from generation to generation.
More and more we learn to collect race-improvement and transmit it to
the child, the most swift and easy method of social progress. To-day,
more than ever before, are our best minds giving attention to this
vital problem--how to make better people. How to make better bodies and
better minds, better tendencies, better habits, better ideas--this is
the study of the modern educator.

Slowly we have learned that the best methods of education are more in
modifying influence than in transmitted facts; that, as the proverb
puts it, "example is better than precept." The modifying influences of
social environment have deeper and surer effect on the human race than
any others, and that effect is strongest on the young. Therefore, we
attach great importance to what we call the "bringing up" of children,
and we are right. The education of the little child, through the
influences of its early environment, is the most important process of
human life.

Whatever progress we make in art and science, in manufacture and
commerce, is of no permanent importance unless it modifies humanity for
the better. That a race of apes should live by agriculture,
manufacture, and commerce is inconceivable. They would cease to be apes
by so living; but, _if they could_, those processes would be of no
value, the product being only apes. We are here to grow, to become a
higher and better kind of people. Every process of life is valuable in
proportion to its contributing to our improvement, and the process that
most contributes to our improvement is the most important of human
life. That process is the education of the child, and that education
includes all the influences which reach him, the active efforts of
parent and teacher, the unconscious influence of all associates, and
the passive effect of the physical environment.

All these forces, during the most impressionable years of childhood,
and most of them during the whole period, are centered in the home. The
home is by all means the most active factor in the education of the
child. This we know well. This we believe devoutly. This we accept
without reservation or inquiry, seeing the power of home influences,
and never presuming to question their merit.

In our general contented home-worship we seem to think that a home--any
home--is in itself competent to do all that is necessary for the right
rearing of children. Or, if we discriminate at all, if we dare admit by
referring to "a good home" that there are bad ones--we then hold all
the more firmly that the usual type of "a good home" is the perfect
environment for a child. If this dogma is questioned, our only
alternative is to contrast the state of the child without a home to
that of the child with one. The orphan, the foundling, the neglected
child of the street is contrasted with the well-fed and comfortably
clothed darling of the household, and we relapse into our profound
conviction that the home is all right.

Again the reader is asked to put screws on the feelings and use the
reason for a little while. Let us examine both the child and the home,
with new eyes, seeing eyes, and consider if there is no room for
improvement. And first, to soothe the ruffled spirit and quiet alarm,
let it be here stated in good set terms that the author does NOT
advocate "separating the child from the mother," or depriving it of the
home. Mother and child can never be "separated" in any such sense as
these unreasoning terrors suggest. The child has as much right to the
home as anyone--_more_, for it was originated for his good. The
point raised is, whether the home, as it now is, is the best and only
environment for children, and, further, whether the home as an
environment for children cannot be improved.

What is a child? The young of the human species. First, a young animal,
whose physical life must be conserved and brought to full development.
Then, a young human, whose psychical life, _the_ human life, must
be similarly cared for.

How does the home stand as regards either branch of development? In
what way is it specifically prepared for the use, enjoyment, and
benefit of a child? First, as to the structure of the thing, the house.
We build houses for ourselves, modifying them somewhat according to
climate, position, and so on. How do we modify them for children? What
is there in the make-up of any ordinary house designed to please,
instruct, educate, and generally benefit a child? In so far as he
shares our own physical needs for shelter and convenience he is
benefited; but, _as a child_, with his own specific necessities,
desires, and limitations, what has the architect planned for the
child--what have the mason and carpenter built for the child? Is there
anything in the size and proportion, the material, the internal
arrangement, the finish and decoration, to hint of the existence of
children on earth?

The most that we find, in the most favoured houses, is "a sunny
nursery." In one home of a thousand we find one room out of a dozen
planned for children. What sort of an allowance is this for the largest
class of citizens? Suppose our homes had, among the more expensive
ones, one room for the adult family to flock into, and all the rest was
built and arranged for children! We should think ourselves somewhat
neglected in such an arrangement. But we are not as numerous as our
children, nor as important; and, in any case, the home _belongs_
to the child; he is the cause of its being; it is for him,
hypothetically, that we marry and start a home.

What, then, is the explanation of this lack of special provision for
the real founder of the home? This utter unsuitability of the house to
the child, and the child to the house, finds its crowning expression in
our cities, where house-owners refuse to let their houses to families
with children! What are houses for? What are homes for? For children,
first, last, and always! How, then, have we come to this vanishing
point of absurdity? What paradoxical gulf stretches between these
houses where "no children need apply" and the rest of the houses.
_There is no visible difference in their plans and construction._
No houses are built for children; and these particular landlords simply
accent the fact, and try to limit the use of the house to the persons
for whom it was intended--the adults.

What is there in the presence of children in a house to alarm the
owner? "They are so destructive," he will tell you; "they are
mischievous, they are noisy. Other tenants object to them. They injure
the house when old enough to run about, and squall objectionably when
babies." All this is true enough. Most babies are a source of distress
to their immediate neighbours because of their painful wailing, and
most little children continue to cause distress by their noise in play
and shrieks under punishment. Is all this outcry necessary? Must the
poor baby suffer by night and day; must the small child bang and yell,
and must it be punished so frequently? Why is the process of getting
acclimated to the world so difficult and agonising? Is there really no
way that the experience of all the ages may be turned to account to
facilitate the first years of a child's life?

Our behaviour to the child rests on several assumptions which are, at
least, not proven. We assume that he has to be sick. We assume that he
has to be naughty. We assume that life is hard and unpleasant, anyway,
and that, the sooner he learns this and gets broken into it, the
better. There is no more reason why a child should be sick than a calf
or colt. Infancy is tender, and needs care, but it is not a disease.
The Egyptian mother loves her baby, no doubt, though it goes blind
through her ignorance and neglect--she knows nothing of ophthalmia, and
lets the flies crawl over its helpless face, even while she loves it.
We scorn and pity her ignorance, but we accept the colic, disorders of
teething, and all the train of "preventable diseases" which kill off
our babies, precisely as she accepts ophthalmia.

We have not learned yet how to make a baby the happy, contented,
smoothly developing little animal that he should be. Some of us do
better than others, but the knowledge of one is no gain to the rest,
being confined to one family. Slowly the wider human care, the larger
love, the broader knowledge, of doctor, nurse, and teacher are
penetrating the innermost fortress of the home, and teaching the mother
how to care for the child. The home did not teach her, and never would.
In the untouched homes of ancient Eastern races, countless generations
of mothers transmit the same traditional mistakes, love in the same
blind way, and weep the same loss as unprofitably as they did ten
thousand years ago.

In the homes of civilised races, where the light of social progress is
most fully felt, we see the most improvement; but even here the
pressure of growing knowledge is still combated by the jealous
arrogance of the untaught mother, and the measureless inertia of the
home.

In plain fact, what does the average home offer to the newcomer, the
utterly defenceless baby, the all-important Coming Generation? See
physical conditions first. To what sort of world is the new soul
introduced? To a place built and furnished for several mixed and
conflicting industries; not to a place planned for babies--aired,
lighted, heated, coloured, and kept quiet to suit the young brain and
body; but a building meant for a number of grown people to cook in,
sweep and dust in, wash and iron in, cut and sew in, eat and wash
dishes in, see their friends in, dress, undress, and sleep in; and
incidentally, in the cracks and crevices of all these varied goings on,
to "bring up" children in.

In that very small percentage of families where a nursery is arranged
for children, and a nurse and a nursery-governess do deputy service for
the always alleged "mother's care," we find some provision made for
children; but of what sort? This deputy is inferior to the mother, save
in a certain rule-of-thumb experience which enables her to "manage
children." Her knowledge of infant hygiene is not much greater, nor of
infant psychology. Look, for instance, at the babies of our richer
classes, as we see them continually in the streets and parks. Our only
alternative from the home is the street, we having as yet no place for
our babies. If near a park so much the better, but in general the
sidewalk must serve, for rich or poor.

As one immediate physical condition, examine the dress of these babies
and young children; this among parents of wealth, and, presumably,
intelligence. See the baby in the perambulator so rolled and bedded in,
so tucked and strapped, that he cannot move anything but perhaps a
stiffly projecting arm. Think of an adult cocooned in this manner,
unable to roll, stir, turn, in any way relieve the pressure or change
the attitude. And, when you have considered the sensations of a tough
and patient adult frame, think further of those of a soft, tender,
active, and impatient baby body.

The dress of a baby or little child bears no relation to his immediate
comfort or to the needs of his incessant growth. Among our wisest
parents there is to-day a new custom, happily increasing, of barefoot
freedom, of dirt-proof overalls, of a chance for beautiful, unconscious
growth; but this does not reach the vast majority of suffering little
ones. It does not spread because of the seclusion and irresponsible
dominance of the separate home; and further--because of the low-grade
intelligence of the home-bound mother.

She whose condition of arrested development makes her unquestioningly
submit to the distortion, constriction, weight, and profusion of
fashion in clothing for her own body, is not likely to show much sense
in dressing a child. Beautiful fabrics, rich textures, expensive
adornments, she heaps upon it. She wishes it to look pretty, according
to her barbaric taste; and she disfigures the grave, sweet beauty of a
baby face, the lovely moving curves of the little body, with heavy
masses of stiff cloth, starched frippery, and huge, nodding, gaily
decorated hats that would please an Ashantee warrior.

If some cartoonist would give us a copy of the Sistine Mother and Child
in the costume of our mothers and children, showing those immortal
cherub faces blinking obliquely from under flopping hat brims and rich
plumes, perhaps we might in sudden shocked perception see with what
coarse irreverence we disfigure our blessed little ones.

The child does not find in the home any assurance of health, beauty, or
free growth. He, and especially she, must wear the dainty garments on
which our misguided mother love so wastefully lavishes itself; and must
then be restricted in all natural exercise lest they be torn or soiled.
To dress a little child so that he may be perfectly comfortable, and
grow in absolute freedom, has not occurred to the home-bound mother.

Neither has she learned how to feed it. If the home is the best place
for children, if the home is the best place for the preparation of
food, would it not seem as if in all these long, long years we might
have evolved some system of feeding little children so as to keep them
at least alive--to say nothing of their being healthy?

The animal mother, guided by her unspoiled instinct, does manage to
feed her young, and to teach it how to feed itself. The human mother,
long since cut off from that poor primitive guidance, and proudly
refusing to put knowledge in its place, feeds the baby in accordance
with her revered domestic traditions, and calls in the doctor to remedy
her mistakes. One man, in Buffalo, has recently saved fifteen hundred
babies in a year, lowering the annual death rate by that amount, by
public distribution of directions for preparing milk. He was not a
mother. He was not shut up in a home. He studied and he taught in the
light of public progress, in a growing world; and succeeded in
filtering some of this saving knowledge into the darkness of fifteen
hundred homes.

The average child is not fed properly; and there is nothing in the home
to teach the mother how. She must learn outside, but she is not willing
to. She still believes, and her husband with her, in the infallible
power of "a mother's love" and "a mother's care"; and our babies are
buried by thousands and thousands without our learning anything by the
continual sacrifice. This is owing to the isolation of the home. If
there were any general knowledge, general custom, association,
comparison; if mothers considered their enormous responsibility _as a
class_, instead of merely as individuals, this could not be.
Knowledge and experience have to be gathered by wide and prolonged
study; they do not come by an infinite repetition of the same private
experiments.

We have to-day the first stirring of this great multitude of separately
concealed experimenters toward that association and exchange of view,
that carefully recorded observation, that reasonable study, which are
necessary for any human advance. Our mothers are beginning to come out
of their isolation into normal human contact; to take that first step
toward wisdom--the acknowledgment of ignorance; and to study what
little is known of this new science, Child-culture.

But it is only a beginning, very scant and small, and ridiculed
unmercifully by the great slow dead-weight of the majority. The
position of the satirist of modern motherhood is a safe and easy one.
To ally one's self with the great mass of present humanity, and the far
greater mass of the past, of all our hoary and revered traditions, and
to direct this combined weight against the first movement of a new
idea--this is an old game. Humanity has thus resisted every step of its
own progress; but, though it makes that progress difficult and slow, it
cannot wholly prevent it.

If the home and the home-bound mother do not ensure right food or
clothing for the child, what do they offer in safety, and in the
increasing educational influence which early environment must have? As
to safety--the shelter of the home--we have already seen that even to
the adult the home offers no protection from the main dangers of our
time: disease, crime, and fire or other accident. The child not only
shares these common dangers, but is more exposed to them, owing to more
absolute confinement to the home and greater susceptibility. Whatever
we suffer from sewer-gas, carbonic dioxide, or microbes and bacteria,
the child suffers more.

He breathes the dust of our carpets, and eats it if we do not watch
him. "I can't take my eyes off that child one minute," cries the
admiring mamma, "or he'll be sure to put something in his mouth!" That
a perfectly clean place might be prepared for a creeping baby, where
there was nothing whatever he could put in his mouth, has never
occurred to her. The child shares and more than shares every danger of
the home, and furthermore suffers an endless list of accidents peculiar
to his limitations. Even our dull nerves are roused to some sort of
response by the terrible frequency of accidents to little children.

I have here a number, taken from one newspaper in one city during one
year; not exhaustive daily scrutiny either; merely a casual collection:

"Mother and Baby Both Badly Burned." A three-year-old baby this--a
match, a little night-dress flaming, struggle, torture, death! "Choked
in Mother's Arms" is the next one; the divine instinct of Maternity
giving a two-year-old child half a filbert to eat. It was remarked in
the item that the "desolate couple" had lost two other little ones
within two months. It did not state whether the two others were
accidentally murdered by a mother's care.

"Child's Game Proved Fatal" is the next. Three-years-old twins were
these; "playing fire engine in the parlour while their mother prepared
the midday meal."

One climbed on the table and lit a newspaper at a gas jet, and set fire
to the other. It is then related "Both children cried out, but their
mother, thinking they were only playing, did not hasten to find what
was the matter." "The child died at 3 P.M." is the conclusion.

"Accidentally Killed His Baby" follows. The fond father, holding his
two-year-old son on his knee, shot and killed him with a revolver
"which he believed to be empty."

"Escaping Gas Kills Baby"--"Boy Has Cent in His Throat"--"Insane
Mother's Crime"--"Drowns her Eight-year-old Daughter"--and here a
doctor says, "It would be an excellent idea for every family to have a
little book giving briefly prompt antidotes for various poisons.
Physicians know that there are scores of cases of accidental poisoning
never heard of outside the family concerned. I've had several cases of
poisoning by an accidental dose of chloroform and aconite liniment, and
one woman gave her child muriatic acid that was kept for cleaning the
marbles."

Another "Mother and Child Burned"--"Child Scratched by a 60-foot
Fall"--(this one was saved by striking several clothes-lines after she
fell out of the window)--"Kitten was Life Preserver"--another fall out
of a window, but the child was holding a kitten, and her head struck on
it--so only the kitten was smashed.

"A Governor's Child badly Hurt"--"will probably prove fatal," this was
a two-story drop over a staircase; and shows that it is not only in the
homes of the poor that these things happen. Another "Baby Burned"
follows--this poor little one was left strapped into its carriage, and
set fire to by an enterprising little brother.

"Tiny Singer Fell Dead" describes a five-year-old boy as singing a
selection from "Cavalleria Rusticana" as a means of entertaining a
party of young friends--and burst a blood-vessel in the brain. Then
there is a story of a grisly murder in which a tiny child testifies as
to seeing her father kill her mother; the child was not hurt--physically.
And then a bit of negative evidence quite striking in its way,
describing "The Mother of Twenty-five Children" and incidentally
stating "of these only three sons and four daughters are now living."
Seven out of twenty-five does not seem a large proportion to survive
the perils of the home.

These are a few, a very few, instances of extreme injury and death.
They are as nothing to the wide-spread similar facts we do not hear of;
and as less than nothing to the list of minor accidents to which little
children are constantly exposed in the shelter of the home. We bar our
windows and gate our stairs in some cases; but our principal reliance
is on an unending watchfulness and a system of rigid discipline.
"Children need constant care!" we maintain; and "A child must be taught
to mind instantly, for its own protection." A child is not a
self-acting poison or explosive. If he were in an absolutely safe place
he might be free for long, bright, blessed hours from the glaring
Argus-eyed watchfulness which is so intense an irritant. Convicts under
sentence of death are in their last hours kept under surveillance like
this, lest they take their own lives. Partly lest the child injure
himself among the many dangers of the home, and partly lest he injure
its frail and costly contents, he grows up under "constant watching."
If this is remitted, he "gets into mischief" very promptly. "Mischief"
is our broad term for the natural interaction of a child and a home.
The inquiry of the young mind, and the activity of the young body,
finding no proper provision made for them, inevitably fall foul of our
complicated utensils, furniture, and decorations, and what should be a
normal exercise becomes "mischief."

Our chapter of accidents here leads us to the great underlying field of
education. Say that the child lives to grow up, during these wholly
home-bound years; in spite of wrong clothing, wrong feeding, and the
many perils we fatuously call "incident to babyhood" (when they are
only incident to our lack of proper provision for babyhood). If he
battles through his infancy and early childhood successfully, what has
he gained from his early environment in education? What are the main
facts of life, as impressed upon every growing child by his home
surroundings?

The principal fact is eating. This he learns perforce by seeing his
mother spending half her time on that one business; by seeing so much
house-space given to it; by the constant arrival of food supplies,
meat, groceries, milk, ice, and the rest; and excursions to get them.
The instincts of early savagery, which every child has to grow through,
are heavily reinforced by the engrossing food-processes of the home.

They do not necessarily please him or her, either. The child does not
grow up with a burning ambition to be a cook. Whether the ever-present
kitchen business was run by the mother or by a servant, it was not run
joyously and proudly; nor was it run in such wise as to really teach
the child the principles of hygiene in food-values and preparation. If
the family is a wealthy one the child is not allowed in the kitchen
perhaps, but is the more impressed by the complicated machinery of the
dining-room, and that elaborate cult of special "manners" used in this
sacred service of the body. Thus and thus must he eat, and thus handle
his utensils; and if the years and the tears spent in acquiring these
Eleusinian mysteries make due impression on the fresh brain tissue,
then we may expect to find the human being more impressed by the art of
eating than by any other.

And so we do find him. The children of the kitchen are differently
affected from the children of the dining-room. These last, of our
"upper classes," receive the indelible stamp of the tri-daily ritual,
and go through the rest of life thinking more highly of "table manners"
than of any other line of conduct, for the reason that they were more
incessantly, thoroughly, and importunately taught that code than any
other. To handle a fork properly is insisted upon far more imperatively
than to properly handle a temper.

The principal business of the home being the care of the body, and this
accomplished through these archaic domestic industries, the unending
up-current of young life, which should so steadily purify and uplift
the world, in every generation is steeped anew in this exaggeration of
physical needs and caprices.

Beyond the overwhelming cares of the table the other home industries
involve the care and replenishment of furniture and clothes. Hour after
hour, day after day, the child sees his mother devoting her entire life
to attendance upon these things--the daily cleaning, the weekly
cleaning, the spring and fall cleaning, the sewing and mending at all
times.

These things must be done, by some people, somewhere; but must they be
done by all people, that is by all women, the people who surround the
child, and all the time? Must the child always associate womanhood with
house-service; and assume, necessarily assume, that the main business
of life is to be clean, well-dressed, and eat in a proper manner?

If the mother is not herself the house-servant--what else is she? What
does the growing brain gather of the true proportions of life from his
dining-room-and-parlour mamma? Her main care, and talk, is still that
of food and clothes; and partly that of "entertainment," which means
more food and more clothes.

Can we not by one daring burst of effort imagine a home where there was
still the father and mother love, still the comfort, convenience, and
beauty we so enjoy, still the sweet union of the family group, and yet
no kitchen? Perhaps even, in some remote dream, no dining-room? Where
the mother was a wise, strong, efficient human being, interested in and
working for the progress of humanity; and giving to her baby, in these
sweet hours of companionship, some true sense of what life is for and
how it works. No, we cannot imagine it, most of us. We really cannot.
We are so indelibly kitchen-bred, or dining-room-bred, that mother
means cook, or at least housekeeper, to our minds; and family means
dinner-table.

So grows the child in the home. In the school he learns something of
social values, in the church something, in the street something; from
his father, who is a real factor in society, something; but in the home
he learns by inexorably repeated impressions of every day and hour,
that life, this deep, new, thrilling mystery of life consists mainly of
eating and sleeping, of the making and wearing of clothes. We are
irresistibly reminded of the strange text, "Take no thought of what ye
shall eat or what ye shall drink or wherewithal ye shall be clothed." A
little difficult to follow this command when mother does nothing else!




XIII

THE GIRL AT HOME


What is the position of the home toward us in youth? We have seen
something of its effect upon the child, the wholly helpless child, who
knows no other place or power. We have seen something of its effect
upon the woman in her life-long confinement there. Between childhood
and maturity comes youth; holding what is left of the child's pure
heart and vivid hopes, and what begins to stir of man's or woman's
power. The gain of a race, if there is a gain, must make itself felt in
youth--more strength, more growth, more beauty, a larger conscience, a
sounder judgment, a more efficient will.

Each new generation must improve upon its parents; else the world
stands still or retrogrades. In this most vivid period of life how does
the home meet the needs of the growing soul? The boy largely escapes
it. He is freer, even in childhood; the more resistant and combative
nature, the greater impatience of pain, makes the young male far harder
to coerce. He sees his father always going out, and early learns to
view the home from a sex-basis, as the proper place for women and
children, and to push incessantly to get away from it.

From boy to boy in the alluring summer evenings we hear the cry, "Come
on out and have some fun!" Vainly we strive and strive anew to "keep
the boys at home." It cannot be done. Fortunately for us it cannot be
done. We dread to have them leave it, and with good reason, for well we
know there is no proper place for children in the so long unmothered
world; but even in danger and temptation they learn something, and
those who struggle through their youth unscathed make better men than
if they had been always softly shielded in the home.

The world is the real field of action for humanity. So far humanity has
been well-nigh wholly masculine; and the boy, feeling his humanity,
pushes out into his natural field, the world. He learns and learns,
from contact with his kind. He learns about all sorts of machinery, all
manner of trades and businesses. He has companions above him and below
him and beside him, the wide human contact in which we grow so rapidly.
If he is in the city he knows the city, if he is in the country he
knows the country, far more fully than his sister. A thousand
influences reach him that never come to her, formative influences, good
and bad, that modify character. He has far less of tutelage, espionage,
restraint; he has more freedom by daylight, and he alone has any
freedom after dark. All the sweet, mysterious voices of the night, the
rich, soft whisperings of fragrant summer, when the moon talks and the
young soul answers; the glittering, keen silence of winter nights, when
between blue-black star-pointed space and the level shine of the snow
stands but one living thing--yourself--all this is cut off from the
girl. The real intimacy with nature comes to the soul alone, and the
poor, over-handled girl soul never has it.

In some few cases, isolated and enviable, she may have this common
human privilege, but not enough to count. She must be guarded in the
only place of safety, the home. Guarded from what? From men. From the
womanless men who may be prowling about while all women stay at home.
The home is safe because women are there. Out of doors is unsafe
because women are not there. If women were there, everywhere, in the
world which belongs to them as much as to men, then everywhere would be
safe. We try to make the women safe in the home, and keep them there;
to make the world safe for women and children has not occurred to us.
So the boy grows, in the world as far as he can reach it, and the girl
does not grow equally, being confined to the home. In very recent
years, within one scant century, we are letting the girls go to school,
even to college. They pour out into the larger field and fill it at
once. Their human faculties have some chance to grow as well as the
over-emphasised feminine ones; and in our schools and colleges youth of
both sexes finds the room, stimulus, and exercise it could not find at
home.

The boy who does not go to college goes to business, to work in some
way. To find an able-bodied intelligent boy in a home between breakfast
and supper would argue a broken leg. But girls we find by thousands and
thousands; "helping mother," if mother does the work; and if there are
servants to do the work, the girl does--what?

What is the occupation of the daughter of the house? Let us suppose her
to be healthy. Let us suppose her to have a fair share of ability and
education. She has no longer the school or the college, she has only
the home. Not that she is physically confined there. She may go out by
daylight, giving careful account of her steps, and visit other girls in
their homes. She may receive visits, both from girls and boys; and she
may go out continually to all manner of entertainments. Perhaps she is
expected to dust the parlour, to arrange the flowers, to "keep up her
music." She has enough to eat, enough and more than enough to wear; but
what exercise has she for body or brain? Perhaps in games and dances
she keeps her body active--but what sort of occupation is that for a
young human creature of this century, a creature of power? The young
woman has the same race inheritance of ability, the same large
brain-growth, as the man. The physical improvement of our times is
reflected in them too; fine stalwart girls we see, tall, straight,
broad-shouldered. She has had, in specific education, the same mental
training as the boy.

How would her brother be content with a day's work of dusting the
parlour and arranging the flowers; of calling and being called on?
Amusement is good, sometimes necessary; best and most necessary to the
tired, unhappy, and overworked. But youth--healthy, happy, and
vigorous, full of the press of unused power and the accumulating
ambition of all the centuries--why should youth waste its splendour in
such unsatisfying ways?

If you ask the father, he will merely say that it is the proper
position for a girl; he is "able to support her," she does not "have to
work," she can amuse herself, and as for a field for her abilities--she
will find that in her own home when she is married. Ask her mother--and
she will tell you, making a sad confession all unknowingly--"let her
enjoy herself now; she will have care enough later." There is a tacit
agreement that girls shall have all the "good time" possible while they
are girls, that they may have it to remember! Does this "good time"
satisfy the girl? Is she happy in her father's home, just passing the
time till she moves into her husband's?

Sometimes she is. Her education has been strong to make her so. The
home atmosphere of predominant clothes and food has been about her from
the cradle, and she still has clothes and food, and may elaborate them
without limit. She may devote as much time to the adornment of the
table as she wishes; and if her inclination take her also to the
kitchen, perhaps even to the cooking school, that is more than well.
She may also devote herself to the parlour and its adornment; but most
naturally of all to the adornment of her own young body--all these are
proper functions of the home. She may love and serve her immediate dear
ones also, to any extent; that is the basic principle of it all, that
is occupation enough for any girl. Yes, there is occupation enough as
far as filling time goes; but how if it does not satisfy? How if the
girl wants something else to do--something definite, something
developing?

This is deprecated by the family. "Work" is held by all to be a thing
no mortal soul should do unless compelled by want. We speak sadly,
tenderly, of the poor girl whose father died and left her unprovided
for, wherefore "she had to work." We have not learned to see that some
kind of work is necessary to all human creatures to use their powers;
not mere tread-mill repetition of small, useless things, but such range
of action as shall exercise all the faculties. And least of all have we
learned to see that a human soul, to be healthy, must love and care for
more than its own blood relations.

What the girl, as a normal human being, wants is full exercise in large
social relation; things to think about, feel, and do, which do not in
any way concern the home. Race-babyhood may be content at home--it was
first made for babies. But as we grow up into our modern human range of
power, no home can or ought to content us. We need not, therefore,
cease to love it, need not neglect or ignore it. We simply need
something more. That is the great lack which keeps girlhood
unsatisfied; the call of the human soul for its full field of action,
the world. We try to meet this lack by a surfeit of supplies for lower
needs.

Since we first began to force upon our girl baby's astonished and
resisting brain the fact that she was a girl; since we curbed her
liberty by clothing and ornament calculated only to emphasise the fact
of sex, and by restrictions of decorum based upon the same precocious
distinction, we have never relaxed the pressure. As if we feared that
there might be some mistake, that she was not really a girl but would
grow up a boy if we looked the other way, we diligently strove to
enforce and increase her femininity by every possible means. So by the
time her womanhood does come it finds every encouragement, and the
humanhood which should predominate we have restricted and forbidden.
Moreover, whatever of real humanness she does manifest we persist in
regarding as feminine.

For instance, the girl wants friends, social contact. She cannot
satisfy this want in normal lines of work, in the natural contact of
the busy world, so she tries to meet it on the one plane allowed--in
what we call "Society." Her own life being starved, she seeks to touch
other lives as far and fast as possible. Next to doing things one's
self is the association with others who can do them. So the girl
reaches out for friends. Women friends can give her little; their lives
are empty as her own, their talk is of the same worn themes--their
point of view either the kitchen or the parlour. Therefore she finds
most good in men friends; they are human, they are doing something. All
this is set down to mere feminine "desire to attract"; we expect it,
and we provide for it. Our "social" machinery is largely devoted to
"bringing young people together"; not in any common work, in large
human interests, but in such decorated idleness, with music, perfume,
and dance, as shall best minister to the only forces we are willing to
promote.

Is the girl satisfied? Is it really what she wants, all she wants? If
she were a Circassian slave, perhaps it would do. For the daughter of
free, active, intelligent, modern America it does not do; and therefore
our girls in ever-increasing numbers are leaving home. It is not that
they do not love their homes; not that they do not want homes of their
own in due season; it is the protest of every healthy human soul
against the-home-and-nothing-else.

Our poorer girls are going into mills and shops, our richer ones into
arts and professions, or some educational and philanthropic work. We
oppose this proof of racial growth and vitality by various economic
fallacies about "taking the bread out of other women's mouths"--and in
especial claim that it is "competing with men," "lowering wages" and
the like. We talk also, in the same breath, or the next one, about "the
God-given right to work"--and know not what we mean by that great
phrase.

To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity
of one's powers is necessary for human development. It is no benefit to
a human being to keep him, or her, in down-wrapped idleness, it is a
gross injury. If a man could afford to put daughters and wife to bed
and have them fed and washed like babies, would that be a kindness?
"They do not have to walk!" he might say. Yes, they do have to, else
would their muscles weaken and shrink, and beauty and health disappear.
For the health and beauty of the body it must have full exercise. For
the health and beauty of the mind it must have full exercise. No normal
human mind can find full exercise in dusting the parlour and arranging
the flowers; no, nor in twelve hours of nerve-exhaustion in the
kitchen. Exhaustion is not exercise.

"But they are free to study--to read, to improve their minds!" we
protest. Minds are not vats to be filled eternally with more and ever
more supplies. It is _use_, large, free, sufficient use that the
mind requires, not mere information. Our college girls have vast
supplies of knowledge; how can they use it in the home? Could a college
boy apply his education appropriately to "keeping house"--and, if not,
how can the girl? Full use of one's best faculties--this is health and
happiness for both man and woman.

But how about those other people's wages?--will be urged. Productive
labour adds to the wealth of the world, it does not take away. If
wealth were a fixed quantity, shared carefully among a lot of
struggling beggars, then every new beggar would decrease the other's
share.

To work is to _give_, not to beg. Every worker adds to the world's
wealth, increases everyone's share. Of course there are people whose
"work" is not of value to anyone; who simply use their power and skill
to get other people's money away from them; the less of these the
better. That is not productive labour. But so long as we see to it that
the work we do is worth more than the pay we get, our consciences may
be clean; we give to the world and rob no one. As to the immediate
facts that may be alleged, "overcrowded labour market," "over-production,"
and such bugaboos, these are only facts as watered stock and stolen
franchises are facts; not economic laws, but criminal practices. A
temporary superficial error in economic conduct need not blind us to
permanent basic truth, and the truth which concerns us here is that a
human creature must work for the health and power and pleasure of it;
and that all good work enriches the world.

So the girl need not stay at home and content her soul with chocolate
drops lest some other girl lose bread. She may butter that bread and
share the confections, by her labour, if it be productive. And by wise
working she may learn to see how unwise and how unnecessary are the
very conditions which now hold her back. At present she is generally
held back. Her father will not allow her to work. Her mother needs her
at home. So she stays a while longer. If she marries, she passes out of
this chapter, becoming, without let or change, "the lady of the house."
If she does not marry, what then? What has father or mother, sister or
brother, to offer to the unmarried woman? What is the home to her who
has no "home of her own"?

The wife and mother has a real base in her home: distorted and
overgrown though it may have become, away in at the centre lies the
everlasting founder--in the little child. Unnecessary as are the
mother's labours now, they were once necessary, they have a base of
underlying truth. But what real place has a grown woman of twenty-five
and upwards in anyone else's home? She is not a child, and not a
mother. The initial reason for being at home is not there. What
business has she in it? The claim of filial devotion is usually
advanced to meet this question. Her parents need her. And here comes
out in glaring colours the distinction between girl and boy, between
man's and woman's labour.

Whatever of filial gratitude, love, and service is owed to the parent
is equally owed by boy and girl. If there is a difference it should be
on the boy's side, as he is more trouble when little and less
assistance in the house when big. Now, what is the accepted duty of the
boy to the parents, when they are old, feeble, sick, or poor? First, to
maintain them, that is, to provide for them the necessaries of life and
as much more as he can compass. Then, to procure for them service and
nursing, if need be. Also himself to bestow affection and respect, and
such part of his time as he can spare from the labour required to
maintain them. This labour he performs like a civilised man, by the
service of other people in some specialised industry; and his ability
to care for his parents is measured by his ability to perform that
larger service.

What is the accepted duty of the girl to the parents in like case? She
is required to stay at home and wait upon them with her own hands,
serve them personally, nurse them personally, give all her time and
strength to them, and this in the old, old uncivilised way, with the
best of intentions, but a degree of ability measured by the lowest of
averages.

It is the duty of the child to care for the infirm parent--that is not
questioned; but how? Why, in one way, by one child, and in so different
a way by another? The duty is precisely the same; why is the manner of
fulfilling it so different? If the sick and aged mother has a capable
son to support her, he provides for her a house, clothing, food, a
nurse, and a servant. If she has but a daughter, that daughter can only
furnish the nurse and servant in her own person, skilled or unskilled
as the case may be; and both of them are a charge upon the other
relatives or the community for the necessaries of life. Why does not
the equally capable daughter _do more_ to support her parent when
it is necessary? She cannot, if she is herself the nurse and servant.
Why does she have to be herself the nurse and servant? Because she has
been always kept at home and denied the opportunity to take up some
trade or profession by which she could have at once supported herself,
her parents, and done good service in the world. Because "the home is
the place for women," and in the home is neither social service nor
self-support.

There is another and a darker side to this position. The claim of
exclusive personal service from the daughter is maintained by parents
who are not poor, not old, not sick, not feeble; by a father who is
quite able to pay for all the service he requires, and who prefers to
maintain his daughter in idleness for his own antiquated masculine
pride--and by a mother who is quite able to provide for herself, if she
choose to; who is no longer occupied by the care of little children,
who does not even do house-service, but who lives in idleness herself,
and then claims the associate idleness of her daughter, on grounds past
finding out. Perhaps it is that an honourably independent daughter,
capable, respected, well-paid, valuable to the community, would be an
insupportable reproach to the lady of the house. Perhaps it is a more
pathetic reason--the home-bound, half-developed life, released from the
immediate cares, which, however ill-fulfilled, at least gave sanction
to her position, now seeks to satisfy its growing emptiness by the
young life's larger hope and energy. This may be explanation, but is no
justification.

The value and beauty of motherhood depend on the imperative needs of
childhood. The filial service of the child depends on the imperative
needs of the parent. When the girl is twenty-one and the mother is
forty-five, neither position holds. The amount of love and care needed
by either party does not require all day for its expression. The young,
strong, well-educated girl should have her place and work, equally with
her brother. Does not the mother love her son, though he is in
business? Could she not manage to love a daughter in business, too? It
is not love, far less is it wisdom, which so needlessly immolates a
young life on the altar of this ancient custom of home-worship. The
loving mother is not immortal. What is to become of the unmarried
daughter after the mother is gone?

What has the home done to fit her for life. She may be rich enough to
continue to live in it, not to "have to work," but is she, at fifty,
still to find contentment in dusting the parlour and arranging the
flowers, in calling and receiving calls, in entertaining and being
entertained? Where is her business, her trade, her art, her profession,
her place in life? The home is not the whole of life. It is a very
minor part of it--a mere place of preparation for living. To keep the
girl at home is to cut her off from life.

More and more is this impossible. The inherited power of the ages is
developing women to such an extent that by the simple force of
expansion they are cracking the confining walls about them, bursting
out in all directions, rising under the enormous pressure that keeps
them down like mushrooms under a stone. The girl has now enough of
athletic training to strengthen her body, balance her nerves, set her
tingling with the healthy impulse to _do_. She has enough mental
training to give some background and depth to her mind, with the habit
of thinking somewhat. If she is a college girl, she has had the
inestimable privilege of looking at the home _from outside_, in
which new light and proportion it has a very different aspect.

The effort is still made by proud and loving fathers, unconscious of
their limitations, to keep her there afterward, and by loving mothers
even more effectually. They play upon the strings of conscience, duty,
and affection. They furnish every pleasant temptation of physical
comfort, ease, the slow corruption of unearned goods. To oppose this
needs a wider range of vision and a greater strength of character than
the daughter of a thousand homes can usually command.

The school has helped her, but she has not had it long. The college has
helped her more, but that is not a general possession as yet, and has
had still shorter influence. Strong, indeed, is the girl who can decide
within herself where duty lies, and follow that decision against the
combined forces which hold her back. She must claim the right of every
individual soul to its own path in life, its own true line of work and
growth. She must claim the duty of every individual soul to give to its
all-providing society some definite service in return. She must
recognise the needs of the world, of her country, her city, her place
and time in human progress, as well as the needs of her personal
relations and her personal home. And, further, using the parental claim
of gratitude and duty in its own teeth, she must say: "Because I love
you I wish to be worthy of you, to be a human creature you may be proud
of as well as a daughter you are fond of. Because I owe you care and
service when you need it, I must fit myself now to render that care and
service efficiently. Moreover, my duty to you is not all my duty in the
world. Life is not merely an aggregation of families. I must so live as
to meet all my duties, and, in so doing, I shall better love and serve
my parents."

Conscience is strong in women. Children are very violently taught that
they owe all to their parents, and the parents are not slow in
foreclosing the mortgage. But the home is not a debtor's prison--to
girls any more than to boys. This enormous claim of parents calls for
examination.

Do they in truth do all for their children; do their children owe all
to them? Is nothing furnished in the way of safety, sanitation,
education, by that larger home, the state? What could these parents do,
alone, in never so pleasant a home, without the allied forces of
society to maintain that home in peace and prosperity. These lingering
vestiges of a patriarchal cult must be left behind. Ancestor-worship
has had victims enough. Girls are human creatures as well as boys, and
both have duties, imperative duties, quite outside the home.

One more protest is to be heard: "Most girls marry. Surely they might
stay at home contentedly until they leave it for another." Yes, most
girls marry. All girls ought to--unless there is something wrong with
them. And, being married, they should have homes. But, to have a home
and enjoy it, is one thing; to stay in it--the whole time--is quite
another. It is the same old assumption that woman is a house-animal;
that she has no place in the open, no business in the world. If the
girl had a few years of practical experience in the world she would be
far better able to enjoy and appreciate her own home when she had one.
At present, being so much restricted where she is, she very often
plunges from the frying-pan into the fire, simply from too much home.

"Why should she have married that fellow!" cries the father; "I gave
her a good home--she had everything she wanted." It does not enter the
mind of this man that a woman is something more than a rabbit. Even
rabbits, well-fed rabbits, will gnaw and dig to get out--they like to
run as well as eat. Also, the girl whose character has time to "set" a
little in some legitimate business associations, instead of being held
in everlasting solution at home, will be able to face the problems of
domestic industry and expense with new eyes.

No men, with practical sense and trained minds, would put up for a week
with the inchoate mass of wasted efforts in the home; and, when women
have the same trained minds and practical sense, they will not put up
with it much longer. For the home's sake, as well as her own sake, the
girl will profit by experience in the working world.

Once she learns the pleasure and power of specialisation, the benefits
of organisation, the advantages of combination, the whole tremendous
enginery of civilised life, she can no more drop back into her
ancestral cradle than her brother could turn into an Arcadian shepherd,
piping prettily to his fleecy charge.




XIV

HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN


In our peculiar and artificial opposition of "the Home" and "the
World," we have roughly ascribed all the virtues to the first, and all
the vices to the second. "The world, the flesh, and the devil" we still
associate, forgetting that home is the very temple of the flesh, and in
no way impervious to the devil. Sin is found at home as generally as
elsewhere--must be, unless women are sinless and men absolved on
entering the sacred door.

There are different sins and virtues, truly, as we have seen in the
chapter on Domestic Ethics. There is less fighting at home, as there is
but one man there. There is less stealing, the goods being more in
common, only sometimes a sly rifling of pockets by the unpaid wife. A
man pays his housekeeper, or his housemaids, because he has to; and he
pays, and pays highly, the purely extortionate women of pleasure; but
sometimes he forgets to pay his wife, and sometimes she steals. The
home has patience, chastity, industry, love. But there is less justice,
less honour, less courage, less truth; it does not embrace all the
virtues. Such as it is, strong for good and also very weak for some
good, possibly even showing some tendencies to evil, what is its
influence on men?

The boy baby feels it first; and that we have touched on. The home
teaches the boy that women were made for service, domestic service,
that the principal cares and labours of life are those which concern
the body, and that his own particular tastes and preferences are of
enormous importance. As fast as he gets out of the home and into the
school, he learns quite other things, getting his exaggerated infant
egotism knocked out of him very suddenly, and, as he gets out of school
and into business, also into politics, he learns still further of the
conditions of life. Proportion changes, perspective changes; he grows
to have a very different view of life from the woman's view. The same
thing happening to a man and a woman produces a widely varying effect;
what is a trifle in the day's large activities to him is an event of
insistent pressure to her; and, here, in the eternal misunderstanding
between the home-bred woman and the world-bred man, lie the seeds of
ceaseless trouble. The different range of vision of the occupant of the
home and the occupant of the world makes it impossible for them to see
things similarly. We are familiar with the difference, but have always
considered it a distinction of sex.

We have called the broader, sounder, better balanced, more fully
exercised brain "a man's brain," and the narrower, more emotional and
personal one "a woman's brain"; whereas the difference is merely that
between the world and the house. The absolute relation between any
animal's brain and his range of activity is patent to the zoölogist,
and simply furnishes the proof of its law of development. The greater
the extent and complexity of any creature's business, the greater the
mental capacity, of course.

We are familiar with the mental effect of living on small islands--"the
insular mind," "insular prejudice" are well known terms. The smaller
the island, the more deprived of contact and association with the rest
of the world, the greater the insularity of mind. The Englishman is
somewhat affected by the size of his country; the Manxman still more,
and the dwellers on the lighthouse rock most of all. Our homes are not
physically isolated, save on scattered farms and ranches--where the
worst results are found; but they are isolated in their interests and
industries.

The thought used every day is thought about half a dozen people and
their concerns, mainly their personal bodily care and comfort; the
mental processes of the woman must needs be intensified in personality
as they are limited in range. Hence her greater sensitiveness to all
personal events, and that quick variation in attitude so inevitable in
a mind whose daily work involves continual and instant change.
_Varium et mutabile!_ murmurs the man sagely--"A woman's privilege
is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he
had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to
sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so,
backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night--he
too would become adept in the lightning-change act.

The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special
ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests--and so grows
broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a
distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He
is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a
varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few
more.

The home-bred brain of the woman continually puzzles and baffles the
world-bred brain of the man; and from the beginning of their
association it has an effect upon him. In childhood even he sees his
sister serving in the home functions far more than he is required to
do; she is taught to "clean up" where he is not; different values are
assigned to the same act in boy or girl, and he is steadily influenced
by it. The first effect of the home on the boy is seen very young in
his contempt for girls, and girls' play or work. When, after a period
of separation wherein he has consorted as far as possible only with
boys and men, he is again drawn towards the girl on lines of
sex-attraction, a barrier has risen between them which is never wholly
removed.

He has immense areas of experience utterly unknown to her. His words
and acts in a given case are modified by a thousand memories and
knowledges which she has not; so word and act differ sharply, though
the immediate exciting cause be the same. The very terms they use have
different weight and meaning; the man must pick and choose and adopt a
different speech in talking to a woman. He loves, he admires, he
venerates; and from this attitude considering all her foolishness and
ignorance as feminine and therefore charming, he is thus taught to
worship ignoble things.

Charles Reade in his "Peg Woffington" describes that strong, brave,
intelligent, and most charming woman as starting and screaming at a
very distant rat--and her lover being therefore more strongly attracted
to her. Every sign of weakness, timidity, inability to understand and
do, is deemed feminine and admired. Yet we all know that the best love
is that which exalts, that which truly respects as well as fondly
enjoys.

The smallness of the home-bound woman is not so injurious as the still
smaller nature of the harem-bound, by as much as the home is larger and
freer than the harem; but just as harem women limit man's growth, so do
home women in slighter degree. The influence of women upon men is
enormous. The home-bound mother limits the child and boy; the
home-bound girl limits the youth; and the home-bound wife keeps up the
pressure for life. It is not that women are really smaller-minded,
weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that whosoever, man or
woman, lives always in a small dark place, is always guarded,
protected, directed, and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed
and weakened by it.

The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman.
In proportion as man is great, as his interests are world-wide and his
abilities high, is he injured by constant contact with a smaller mind.
The more ordinary man feels it less, being himself nearer to the
domestic plane of thought and action; but the belittling effect is
there all the time.

If the boy's mother commanded as wide a range of action as his father;
if her work were something to honour and emulate as well as her dear
self something to love, the boy would never learn to use that bitter
term "only mother." The father is a soldier, and the boy admires and
longs to follow in great deeds. The father is a captain of industry--a
skilled tradesman, a good physician--the boy has the father to love,
and the work to admire as well. The father is something to other
people, as well as all in all to him; and the boy has a new respect for
him, seeing him in the social relation as well as the domestic. But his
mother he sees only in the domestic relation and is early taught by the
father himself, that he is "to take care of her!" Think of it! Teaching
a child that he is to take care of his mother! A full-grown able-bodied
woman will take a child of ten out with her at night--"to protect her!"

The exquisite absurdity of this position has no comparison or parallel.
Think of a cow protected by a calf! A bear by a cub--a cat by a kitten!
A tall, swift mare by a lanky colt! An alert, sharp-toothed collie by a
tumbling, fat-pawed pup! How can a boy respect a thing that he, a
child, can take care of! He can love, and does. He can take care of,
and does. He can later on support, and does; and even--this in a recent
instance of this sublime monstrosity--he can "give away" _his own
mother_ in marriage! No wonder he so soon learns to say "only mother!"
When she is _not_ only mother, but mother and much besides, a real
human being, usefully exercising her human faculties, the boy will make
a better man.

Again, if his sister shared every freedom and advantage of childhood;
were equally educated, not only in school, but in play, and in the
ever-stimulating experiences of daily life, he would feel far
differently toward her.

See two children on a journey, the mother holding fast to the girl from
beginning to end, only the car seat and window for her; the boy on the
steps, the platform, running about the station, asking questions of
brakeman and engineer, learning all the time. The boy gets five times
as much out of life as the girl, and he knows it. It is not long before
he is ashamed to play with girls, and one cannot blame him.

Then comes the sweetheart. A new deep love, a great overmastering
reverence for the Woman, rises in his heart. In the light of that love
he accepts her as she is, glorifying and idealising every weakness,
every limitation, because it is hers. This is not well. He could love
her just as well, better, if his reverence were better deserved, if the
dignity of sex were enhanced by the dignity of a wise, strong, capable
human being.

Of course the man feels that he would not love her as well if she were
different. So he felt in past ages when she was even more feminine,
even less human. So he will feel in coming ages, when she is truly his
equal, a strong and understanding friend, a restful and stimulating
companion, as well as the beautiful and loving woman. We have always
been drawn together by love and always will be. The beautiful Georgian
slave is beloved, the peasant lass, the princess; man loves woman, and
she need not fear any change in that.

Our error lies in a false estimate of womanhood and manhood. The home,
its labours, cares, and limitations we have called womanly; and
everything else in life manly; wherefore if a woman manifested any
power, ambition, interest, outside the home, that was unwomanly and
must cost her her position as such. This is entirely wrong.

A woman is a woman and attractive to the men of her place and time,
whether she be a beaded Hottentot, a rosy milkmaid, a pretty
schoolma'am, or a veiled beauty of the Zenana.

We are taught that man most loves and admires the domestic type of
woman. This is one of the roaring jokes of history. The breakers of
hearts, the queens of romance, the goddesses of a thousand devotees,
have not been cooks.

Women in general are attractive to men, but let a woman be glaringly
conspicuous--the great singer, dancer, actress--immediately she has
lovers without number. The best-loved women of all time have not been
the little brown birds at home, by any means. Of course, when a man
marries the queen of song he expects her to settle at once to the nest
and remain there. But does he thereafter maintain the same degree of
devotion that he bestowed before? It is not easy, after all, to
maintain the height of romantic devotion for one's house-servant--or
even one's housekeeper. The man loves his wife; but it is in spite of
the home--not because of it. And wherever the shadow of unhappiness
falls between them, wherever the sad record of sorrow and sin is begun,
it is too often because love strays from that domestic area to follow a
freer bird in a wider field.

It is not marriage which brings this danger, it is domestic service; it
is not the perfect and mutual ownership of love, nor the sanction of
law and religion; it is the one-sided ownership wherein the wife
becomes the private servant, cook, cleaner, mender of rents, a valet,
janitor, and chambermaid. Even as such she has more practical claim to
respect than the wife who does not do this work nor any other; who is
not the servant of the house, but merely its lady; who has absolutely
no claim to human honour, no place in the social scheme, except that of
the female.

Thus we find that the influence of the home upon man, as felt through
the home-restricted woman, is not always for the best; and that even,
as supposedly increasing the woman's charm, it does not work.

What follows further of the influence of the home upon man directly?
How does it modify his personal life and development? The boy grows and
breaks out of the home. It has for him a myriad ties--but he does not
like to be tied. He strikes out for himself. If he is an English boy of
the upper classes he is cut off early and sent to a boarding school;
later he has "chambers" of his own. If an American, he simply goes into
business, and in most cases away from home, boarding for a while. Then
he loves, marries, and sets up a home of his own; a woman-and-child
house, which he gladly and proudly maintains and in many ways enjoys.

So satisfied are we in our convictions regarding this status that we
really and practically worship the home and family, holding it to be a
man's first duty to maintain them. No man does it more patiently and
generously than the American, and he is supported in his position by
all the moral opinion of our world. He is "a good family man" we say,
and can say no more. To stay at home evenings is especially desirable;
the more of life that can be spent at home the better, we think, for
all concerned. Now what is the real effect upon the man? Is the home,
as we have it, satisfying to the real needs of man's nature; and if
not, could it be improved?

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his
universal absence from it. It is not only that his work takes him out
(and he sees to it that it does!) but the man who does not "have to
work" also goes out, for pleasure.

The leisure classes in any country have no necessity upon them to leave
home, yet their whole range of uneasy activity is to get outside, or to
furnish constant diversion and entertainment, to while away the hours
within. A human creature must work, play, or rest. Men work outside,
play outside, and cannot rest more than so long at a time.

The man maintains a home, as part of his life-area, but does not
himself find room in it. This is legitimate enough. It should be
equally true of the woman. No human life of our period can find full
exercise in a home. Both need it, to rest in; to work from; but not to
stay in.

This we find practically worked out in the average man's attitude
toward the home. He provides it, cheerfully, affectionately, proudly;
at any cost of labour, care, and ingenuity; but if he has to stay in it
too much, he knows it softens and enfeebles him.

So he goes out, to meet men, to work and live as far as he can; and
when he wants "a real good time,"--rest, recreation, healthful
amusement,--he goes altogether with "the boys." The distant camp in the
woods, the mountain climb, the hunting trip,--real rest and pleasure to
the man are found with men away from home.

There is a sort of strain in the constant association with the smaller
life, as there is in the painful keeping step with shorter legs; a
slow, soft, gentle downward pull, against which every active man
rebels. But he is bound to it, for life. The immutable laws of sex hold
him to the woman; and as she is so he must be, more or less.

He is bound to the home by the needs of the child, and by the physical
convenience and necessity of the place. If it were all that it should
be, it would offer to the man rest, comfort, stimulus, and inspiration.
In so far as it does, it is right. In so far as it does not, it is
wrong. The ideal home shines clear and bright, at the end of the day's
work. Peace and happiness, relief from all effort and anxiety, the calm
replenishment of food and sleep, the most delightful companionship. In
some cases it gives all this in fact. In many, many others the man has
to descend in coming home--to come down to it instead of up. In it is a
whole new field of cares, worries, and labours. The primitive machinery
of the place, so imperfectly managed by the inexpert average woman,
jars rudely on his specialised consciousness. The children are his
pride and joy--that is as it should be. But when their lack of
intelligent care robs him of his rest at night; and their lack of
intelligent education, makes them an anxiety and a distress instead of
a comfort; that is as it should not be.

He does not bring his deficiencies in business home to his wife and
expect her to walk the floor at night with them. The systematised man's
work is done for the day, and he comes home to shoulder a share of the
unsystematised inadequate woman's work. When the woman of exceptional
ability keeps the whole house running smoothly, has no trouble with
servants, no trouble with the children, then the influence of the home
on man is pure beneficence. Such cases are most rare. So used are we to
the contrary, so besotted in our blind adoration of ancient
deficiencies, that we exhort the young couple to face "the cares and
troubles of married life" as if they really were an essential part of
it. They have nothing to do with married life. They are the cares and
troubles of our antiquated, mischievous system of housekeeping.

If men in their business were still using methods of a million years
ago, they would need some exhortation too. It is marvellous that the
same man who casts upon the scrap heap his most expensive machinery to
replace it with still better, who constantly adjusts and readjusts his
business to the latest demands of our rapidly changing time, can go
home and contentedly endure the same petty difficulties which his
father and his grandfather and all his receding ancestors endured in
turn.

The inadequacy of the home, the gross imperfections of its methods and
management have anything but a helpful influence on men. Necessary
difficulties are to be borne or overcome, but to suffer with a sickle
when a steam reaper is to be had is contemptible rather than elevating.
There will be some pathetic protest here that it is a man's duty to
help woman bear the troubles and difficulties of the home. The woman
ardently believes this, and the man too, sometimes. Of all incredible
impositions this is the most astounding.

Here we see half the human race, equally able with the other half
(equal does not mean similar, remember!), content to see every industry
on earth taken away from them, save house-service and child-culture,
growing up in the full knowledge and acceptance of this field of
labour, generally declining to study said industries before undertaking
them, cheerfully undertaking them without any pretense of efficiency,
and then calling upon the other half of the world, upon men, who do
everything else that is done to maintain our civilisation, to help them
do their work!

We object to seeing the man harness the woman to the plough, and we are
right. It is a poor way to work. A horse is more efficient, a
steam-plough still better. It is time that we objected to the woman's
effort to harness the man to the home, in all its cumbrous old-world
inefficiencies. It is not more labour that the home wants, it is better
machinery and administration.

Some hold that the feebleness of woman has a beneficent effect on man,
draws out many of his nobler qualities. He should then marry a
bed-ridden invalid--a purblind idiot--and draw them all out!

The essential weakness and deficiencies of the child are quite
sufficient to call out all the strength and wisdom of both parents,
without adding this travesty of childhood, this pretended helplessness
of a full-grown woman. The shame of it! That a mother, one who needs
every attainable height of wisdom and power, should forego her own
human development--to make good her claim on man for food and clothes
and draw out his nobler qualities! The virtue of parentage is to be
measured by its success, not by the amount of effort and sacrifice
expended.

Granting that the care of the body is woman's especial work; the
feeding, clothing, and cleaning of the world; she should by this time
have developed some system of doing it which would make it less of a
burden to the man as well as the woman. It is most discreditable to the
business sense of a modern community that these vitally important life
processes should be so clumsily performed, at such heavy cost of time,
labour, and money.

The care and education of children are legitimately shared by the
father. In this a man and his wife are truly partners. They engage in a
common business and both labour in it. At present the man by no means
does his share in this all-important work, save as he does it
collectively, through school and college; there the woman is in
default.

In the early years the man gives little thought and care to the child,
this being supposed to be perfectly well attended to by the woman. That
it is not, we may readily see; but the man can by no means assist in
it; because he is so overburdened already in the material provision for
the home.

The enormous and unnecessary expense of our domestic processes
constitutes so excessive a drain on man's energy that it would be
cruel, as well as useless, to expect him to do more.

With the reduction in expense which we have shown to be possible,
lessening the cost of living by two-thirds and adding to productive
labour by nearly half, the home, instead of being an unconscionable
burden and ceaseless care, would become what it should be: an easily
attained place of complete rest, comfort, peace, and invigoration.

The present influence of the home on men is felt most through this
inordinate expense. The support of the family we have laid entirely
upon man, thus developing in the dependent woman a limitless capacity
for receiving things, and denying her the power to produce them. If
this result remained in its simple first degree it would be bad enough;
requiring of the man the maintenance of himself, a healthy able-bodied
woman, and all the children, instead of having a vigorous helpmate, to
honourably support herself, and do her share toward supporting her own
children.

This result is cumulative, however. The confinement of the woman
to the home, when she does not labour, results in her becoming a
parasite, and the appetite of a parasite is insatiable. She has no
sense of what we call "the value of money,"--meaning how much labour
it represents,--because she never laboured for it. She received it from
her father, all unthinking of where he got it, as is natural to a
child; and she continues to be a child, receiving as unthinkingly from
her husband. This position we consider right, even beautiful; man
stoutly maintains it himself, and considers any effort of the woman to
support herself as a reflection on him. He has arrogated to himself as
a masculine function the power of producing wealth; and considers it
"unfeminine" for a woman to do it; and as indicating a lack of
manliness in him.

He should "consider the ant," in this capacity, or the bee; and see
that a purely masculine functionary has no other occupation whatsoever.
He should consider also the male savage--he is "masculine" enough
surely; but he is little else. Last, nearest, and most practical he
should consider the immense majority of women all over the world to-day
who labour in the home. The Lady of the House is a pure parasite,
almost wholly detrimental in her influence, but the Housewife is one of
the hardest workers on earth. She works unceasingly; as Mrs. Diaz put
it years ago, in a thoughtful husband's sudden consideration of his
wife's working hours--"No noonings--no evenings--no rainy days!" She
works harder and longer than the man, in a miscellaneous shifting field
of effort far more exhausting to vitality than his specialised line;
_and she bears children too_! If any man could make a boast equal
to that of the mother of nine children--(whose son told me this
himself) that she had never missed washing on Monday _but
twice_--there might be some ground for the claim of superior
strength.

In this kind of home--and it is still the rule on earth--what is the
influence on man? Does this grade and amount of labour on the part of
women lighten the burden, as we so fondly and proudly assume? It shows
great ignorance of economic values to assume it.

The poorer a man is, the more he has to pay for everything. In this
nine-tenths of our population where the woman works in the home, the
man works harder and gets less comfort for his money than among those
more successful men able to maintain a parasite. He sustains to the
fullest degree all the economic disadvantages we have previously
enumerated--the last extreme of wasteful purchase, the lowest stage of
industrial exchange. With him, a self-supporting wife would at once
double the family income, and the benefits of organised labour and
purchase would reduce their expenses at the same time. The unnecessary
expenses of a poor man's home are far greater in proportion than those
of the rich man; and his enjoyment of the place is less.

He has always a tired wife, an unprogressive wife, a wife who cannot be
to him what a strong, happy, growing woman should be. If she had eight
hours (to take even the custom of our labour-wasting time) of
specialised work, to be done with and left with eagerness for the
beloved home, she would have a far fresher and more stimulating mind
than she has after her ceaseless, confusing toils in the confined
domestic atmosphere. The two, together, could afford a better house.
The two, together, with twice the money and half the expense for food,
could furnish their children with far better care than the overworked
and undereducated housewife can give them.

The result upon the man would be pleasant, indeed. A clean, pretty,
quiet home--not full of smell and steam and various messy industries,
but simply a place to rest in when he comes to it. A wife as glad to be
at home as he. Children also glad of the reunion hour, and the mother
and father both delighted to be with their children. What is there in
this a man should dread?

Would not such a home be good to come to, and would not its influence
be wholly pleasant? Our Puritanism shrinks at the idea of homes being
wholly pleasant. They should be something of a trial, we think, for our
soul's good. The wife and mother ought to be tired and overworked,
careworn, dirty, anxious from hour to hour as she tries to "mind the
children" and all her other trades as well. The man ought to be
contented with the exhausted wife, the screaming babies, the ill-cooked
food, the general weary chaos of the place, the endless demand on his
single purse.

Is he? What is the average workingman's attitude toward this supposed
haven of rest? The statistics of the temperance society are enough to
show us the facts. A man does not like that kind of a place--and why
should he?

He is tired, working for six or ten; and to go from his completed
labour of the day, back to his wife's uncompleted labour of the day and
night, does not rest him. He wants companionship. She cannot give it
him. Her talk is of the suds, the coal, the need of shoes, clothes,
furniture, utensils--everything!

He wants amusement, she cannot give it him. An exhausted woman, taken
every day, is not entertaining. The children are, or should be, in bed.
The wife wants rest and companionship, and amusement, too; but that is
another story. We are considering the man. She must stay at home in any
case, the home being her place; but he does not have to, and out he
goes.

The instinctive demands of a highly developed human creature, a social
creature, are strong within him; needs as vital as the needs of the
body, and utterly unsatisfied at home. Out he goes, and to the one
pleasant open door--the saloon. Ease, freedom, comfort, pleasant
company, talk of something new, amusement--these are the main needs;
and if a stimulating drink is the necessary price, there is nothing in
the average man's ill-fed stomach, overdeveloped personal selfishness,
or untrained conscience, to refuse it.

The measureless results in evil we all know well. Many are the noble
souls devoting their life's efforts to the closing of the saloon, the
driving back of erring man to the safe and supposedly all-satisfying
shelter of the home. We do not dream that it is the home which drives
him there.

One thing we have divined at last; that insufficient and ill-chosen
food, villainously cooked, is one great cause of man's need for
stimulants. Under this much illumination we now strive mightily to make
man's private cook a better cook. If every man's wife were a Delmonico,
if his appetites were catered to with absolute skill and ingenuity,
would that teach him temperance and self-control?

The worse the private cook, the greater the physical need for
stimulant. The better the private cook, the greater the self-indulgence
developed in the happy Epicurean. But good or bad, no man of any grade
can get the social stimulus he needs by spending every evening with his
cook!

That is the key to the whole thing. Your cook may be "a treasure," she
may cater to your needs most exquisitely, she may also be the mother of
your children, as has been the case from the earliest times; but she is
none the less your own personal servant, and as such not your social
equal. You may love her dearly and honour her in her female capacity,
also honour the excellence of her cooking, but you are not satisfied
with her conversation or her skill in games.

The influence of the home with a working wife is not all that could be
desired; and we may turn with some hope of better things to the home
with a parasite wife. Here certainly the man comes home to rest and
peace and comfort, and to satisfying companionship with the "eternal
feminine." Here is a woman who is nothing on earth but a woman, not
even a cook. Here, of course, the food is satisfactory; the children
all a father's heart could wish, having the advantage of the incessant
devotion of an entire mother; the machinery of the home, so painfully
prominent to the workingman, is here running smoothly and unseen; and
the whole thing is well within the means of the proud "provider."

What the food supply is in the hands of the housemaid we have seen.
What the child is in the hands of the nursemaid, we may see anywhere.
The parasitic woman by no means uses the time free of housework to
devote herself to her children. A mother is essentially a worker. When
a woman does not work it dries the very springs of motherhood. The
idler she is, the less she does for her children. The rich man's
children are as often an anxiety and disappointment to him as the poor
man's.

The expense of the place is a thing of progressive dimensions. The home
of the parasitic woman is a bottomless pit for money. She is never
content. How could a human creature be content in such an unnatural
position? She is supplied with nourishment; she has such social
stimulus as her superficial contact with her kind affords, but nothing
comes out; there is no commensurate action.

In the uneasy distress of this position her only idea of relief is to
get something more; if she is not satisfied after one dinner, get or
give another dinner; if not satisfied with one dress, get two, get
twenty, get them all! If the home does not satisfy, by all means get
another one in the country; perhaps that will feel different; try first
one and then the other. If the two, or three, should pall, get a yacht,
go to some other country, get more things to put in the home or on
one's pretty body; get, get, get! and never a thought of the ease and
freedom and joy that would come of Doing. Not of playing at doing, with
a hot poker or a modelling tool--but really doing human work. It does
not occur to her, and it does not occur to him. He thinks it right and
beautiful to maintain the dainty domestic vampire, and pours forth his
life's service to meet her insatiate demands. All the reward he asks is
her love and faith, her sweet companionship.

May we look, then, in homes of this class for an ideal influence on
man? Consecrating his life to the business of not only feeding and
clothing, but profusely decorating and amusing a useless woman,--does
this have an elevating effect on him? When he thinks of how charming
she will look in the costly fur, the lace, the jewels, how she will
enjoy the new home, the new carriage, the new furniture; of her fresh
and ceaseless delight in her "social functions"--does his heart leap
within him?

He performs wonders in business, honest or dishonest, useful to mankind
or cruel; he slowly relinquishes the ideals of his youth, devotes his
talents to whatever will make the most money, even prostitutes his
political conscience, and robs the city and the state, in order to meet
the demands of that fair, plump, smiling Queen of the Home.

And she gives in return--? Her influence is--? The working wife does
not lift a man up very high. The parasite wife pulls him down. The home
of the working wife gives to boy and man the impression that women are
servants. The home of the idle wife gives to boy and man the impression
that women are useless and rapacious; but, we must have them because
they are women.

This is the worst that the home shows us, and is, fortunately, confined
to a minority of cases. But it is none the less an evil influence of
large extent. It leaves to the woman no functions whatever save those
of the female, and, as exaggeration is never health, does not improve
her as a female.

The really restful and stimulating companionship of man and wife, the
general elevating social intercourse between men and women, is not to
be found in the homes of the wealthy any more than in those of the
poor. The demands upon the man are unending, and the returns in good to
body or mind bear no proportion to the expense. The woman who has no
other field of usefulness or growth than a home wherein she is not even
the capable servant, cannot be the strong, noble, uplifting creature
who does good to man; but rapidly becomes the type most steadily
degrading.




XV

HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS


If there is one fact more patent than another in regard to social
evolution, it is that our gain is far greater in material progress than
in personal. The vast and rapid increase in wealth, in power, in
knowledge, in facility and speed in production and distribution; the
great spread of political, religious, and educational advantages; all
this is in no way equalled by any gain in personal health and personal
happiness.

The world grows apace; the people do not keep pace with it. Our most
important machines miss much of their usefulness because the brain of
the workman has not improved as rapidly as the machine. Great systems
of transportation, involving intricate mechanical arrangement, break
continually at this, their weakest link--the human being. We create and
maintain elaborate systems of justice and equity, of legislation,
administration, education; and they are always open to failure in this
same spot--the men are not equal to the system.

The advance in public good is far greater than the advance in private
good. We have improved every facility in living; but we still live
largely as before--sick, feeble, foolishly quarrelling over small
personal matters, unaware of our own great place in social evolution.
This has always been known to us and has been used only to prove our
ancient theory as to the corrupt and paltry stuff humanity is made of.
"Frail creatures of dust, and feeble as frail," is our grovelling
confession; and to those who try to take comfort in our undeniable
historic gains, it has been triumphantly pointed out that, gain as we
would, "the human heart" was no better--"poor human nature" was
unimprovable. This is utterly untrue.

Human nature has changed and improved in tremendous ratio; and, if its
improvement has been strangely irregular, far greater in social life
than in personal life, it is for a very simple reason. All these large
social processes which show such marked improvement are those wherein
people work together in legitimate specialised lines in the world.
These personal processes which have not so improved, the parts of life
which are still so limited and imperfectly developed, may be fully
accounted for by their environment--the ancient and unchanging home.
Bring the home abreast of our other institutions; and our personal
health and happiness will equal our public gains.

Once more it must be stated that the true home, the legitimate and
necessary home, the home in right proportion and development, is wholly
good. It is at once the beautiful beginning, the constant help, and one
legitimate end of a life's work. To the personal life, the physical
life, this is enough. To the social life, it is not. If human duty had
no other scope than to maintain and reproduce this species of animal,
that duty might be accomplished in the home. The purely maternal
female, having no other reason for being than to bear and rear young; a
marauding male, to whom the world was but a hunting ground wherein to
find food for his family--these, and their unimproved successors, need
nothing more than homes. But human duty is not so limited. These
processes of reproduction are indeed essential to our human life, as
are the processes of respiration and digestion, but they do not
constitute that life, much less conclude it.

As human beings, our main field of duty lies in promoting social
advance. To maintain ourselves and our families is an animal duty we
share with the other animals; to maintain each other, and, by so doing
to increase our social efficiency, is human duty, first, last, and
always. We have always seen the necessity for social groups, religious,
political, and other; we have more or less fulfilled our social
functions therein; but we have in the main supposed that all this
common effort was merely for the greater safety and happiness of homes;
and when the interests of the home and those of the state clashed, most
of us have put home first.

The first person to learn better was that very earliest of social
servants, the soldier. He learned first of all to combine for the
common good, and though his plane of service was the lowest of all,
mere destruction, the group sentiments involved were of the highest
order. The destructive belligerence of the male, and his antecedent
centuries of brute combat, made fighting qualities most prominent; but
the union and organisation required for successful human warfare called
out high social qualities, too. The habit of acting together
necessarily develops in the brain the power and desire to act together;
the fact that success or failure, life or death, advantage or injury,
depends on collective action, necessarily develops the social
consciousness. This modification we find in the army everywhere,
gradually increasing with race-heredity; and, long since, so far
overwhelming the original egoism of the individual animal, that the
common soldier habitually sacrifices his life to the public service
without hesitation.

The steps in social evolution must always be made in this same natural
order, from one stage of development to another, by means of existing
qualities. Primitive man had no altruism, he had no honour, his courage
was flickering and wholly personal; he had no sense of order and
discipline, of self-control and self-sacrifice; but he had a strong
inclination to fight, and by means of that one tendency he was led into
relations which developed all those other qualities.

It is easy to see that this stage of our social development was
diametrically opposed by the home. The interests of the home demanded
personal service; the habits of the home bred industry and patience;
the influence of the inmates of the home, of the women and children,
did not promote martial qualities. So our valorous ancestor promptly
left home and went a-fighting, for thousands and thousands of years,
while human life was maintained by the women at home.

When men gradually learned to apply their energies to production,
instead of destruction; learning in slow, painful, costly ages that
wealth was in no way increased by robbing, nor productive strength by
slaughter; they were able to apply to their new occupations some of the
advantageous qualities gained in the old. Thus industry grew, spread,
organised, and the power and riches and wisdom of the world began to
develop.

As far back as history can go we find some men producing, even while a
large and important caste was still fighting. The warriors sought
wealth by plundering other nations, not realising that if the other
nations had been all warriors there would have been nothing to plunder.
Slowly the wealth-makers overtook the wealth-takers, caught up with
them, passed them; and now the greater part of the masculine energy of
the world is devoted to productive industry in some form, and the army
is recruited from the lowest ranks of life.

In this new field of social service, productive industry, what is the
influence of the home? At first it was altogether good. To wean the man
from his all too-natural instinct to wander, kill, and rob, the
attractions of home life were needed. To centre and localise his pride
and power, to make him bend his irregular expansive tendencies to the
daily performance of labour, was a difficult task; and here again he
had to be led by the force of existing qualities. The woman was the
great drawing power here, the ease and comfort of the place, the
growing love of family, and these influences slowly overcame the
warrior and bound him to the plough.

Thus far the home influence led him up, and, in turn, his military
qualities lifted the home industries from the feminine plane to the
human. To produce wealth for the home to consume was a better position
than that of living by plunder; but we should have small cause to glory
in the march of civilisation if that was all we had done.

Just as the fierce and brutal savage, entering into military
combination, under no better instincts than self-defence and natural
belligerence, yet learned by virtue of that combination new and noble
qualities; so the still fierce and brutal soldier, entering into
industrial combination under no better instincts than those of
sex-attraction and physical wants in increasing degree, yet learned, by
virtue of this form of union, new qualities even more valuable to the
race.

The life of any society is based on the successful interaction of its
members, rather than the number of its families. For instance, in those
vast, fat, ancient empires, where a vast population, scattered over
wide territory, supported local life in detached families, by
individual effort; there was almost no national life, no general sense
of unity, no conscious connection of interests. The one tie was
taxation; and if some passing conqueror annexed a province, the only
change was in the tax-collector, and the people were not injured unless
he demanded more than the previous one.

A vital nation must exist in the vivid common consciousness of its
people; a consciousness naturally developed by enlarging social
functions, by undeniable common interests and mutual services. If any
passing conqueror were to annex--or seek to annex--a portion of our
vast territory, he would find no slice of jellyfish, no mere cellular
existence with almost no organised life. He would find that every last
and least part of the country was vitally one with the whole, and would
submit to no dismemberment. This social consciousness, on which our
civilised life depends, in the growth of which lies social progress, is
not developed in the home. On the contrary it is opposed by it. Up to a
certain level the home promotes social development. Beyond that level
it hinders it, if allowed to do so.

Self-interest drove men into military combination--where they learned
much. Family interest drove them into industrial activity, and even
allowed a low form of combination. But social interest is what leads us
all farthest and highest; the impulse to live, not for self-preservation
only, not for reproduction only, but for social progress. It should not
be hard to see that these apparently dissimilar and opposed interests
can only be harmonised by the dominance of the greatest. The man who
would strive for his own advantage at the expense of his family, we
call a brute. The man who strives for the advantage of his family at
the expense of his country--we should call a traitor! Yet this is the
common attitude of the citizen of to-day, and in this attitude he is
maintained and extolled by the home! The soldier who would seek to save
his own life to the injury of the army we promptly shoot. If he should
seek to save his home at the same risk, we should still dishonour and
punish him.

The army, very highly developed in a very low scheme of action, knows
that neither self nor family must stand for a moment against the public
service. Industry is not so well organised as warfare, and so our scale
of industrial virtues is not so high. We degrade and punish for
"conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman"; but we take no
cognisance of "conduct unbecoming a manufacturer and a gentleman,"
unless he is an open malefactor. Yet a manufacturer is a far higher and
more valuable social servant than a soldier of any grade. We do not yet
know the true order of importance in our social functions, nor their
distinctly organic nature.

With our proven capacity, why do we manifest so little progress in
industrial organisation and devotion? A student of prehuman evolution,
one familiar only with nature's long, slow, stumbling process of
developing by exclusion--like driving a flock of sheep by killing those
who went the wrong way--might answer the question in this manner: That
we have not been engaged in industrial processes long enough to develop
the desired qualities. This is usually considered the evolutionary
standpoint; and from it we are advised not to be impatient, and are
told that a few thousand years' more killing will do much for us.

But social evolution takes place on quite other grounds. We have added
education to heredity; mutual help to the cruel and wasteful processes
of elimination. The very essence of social relation is its transmission
of individual advance to the collective. Physical evolution acts only
through physical heredity; we have that in common with all animals; but
we have also social heredity, that great psychic current of transmitted
wisdom and emotion which immortalises the gains of the past and
generalises the gains of the present.

A system of free public education does more to develop the brains of a
people than many thousand years of "natural selection," and does not
prevent natural selection, either.

The one capacity wherein the world does not progress as it should is
the power of social intelligence; of a rational, efficiently acting,
common consciousness. Our "body politic" is like that of a vigorous,
well-grown idiot. We have all the machinery for large, rich, satisfying
life; and inside is the dim, limited mind, incapable of enjoyment or
action. It has been found in recent years that idiocy may result from a
too small skull; the bones have not enlarged, and the brain, compressed
and stunted, cannot perform its functions. In one case this was most
cruelly proven, by an operation upon an old man, from birth and idiot.
His skull was opened and so treated as to give more room to the
imprisoned brain, and, with what hopeless horror can be imagined, the
man became intelligently conscious at last--conscious of what his life
had been!

There is some similar arrest in the development of the social
consciousness; else our cities would not sit gnawing and tearing at
themselves, indifferent to dirt, disease, or vice, and enjoying only
physical comfort. If any operation should give sudden new light to this
long-clouded civic brain, we might feel the same horror of the years
behind us, but not the same hopelessness--society is immortal.

It is here suggested that one check to the social development proper to
our time is the pressure of the rudimentary home. We are quite willing
to admit that a home life we consider wrong, as the Chinese or Turkish,
can paralyse a nation. We have even come to see that the position of
women is a good gauge of progress. Is it so hard, then, to admit at
least a possibility that the position of our women, the nature of our
homes, may have some important influence upon our social growth? There
is no demand that we destroy the home, any more than that we destroy
the women, _but we must change their relative position_.

The brain is the medium of social contact, the plane of human
development. The savage is incapable of large relation because his
mental area is not big enough; he is not used to such extensive
combinations. Where the brain is accustomed only to incessant
consideration of its own private interests, and to direct personal
service of those interests, it is thereby prevented from developing the
capacity for seeing the public interests, and for indirect collective
service of those interests. The habit, continuous and unrelieved, of
thinking in a small circuit checks the power to think in a large
circuit.

This arrested brain development, this savage limitation to the
personal, and mainly to the physical, is what we have so rigidly
enforced upon women. The primitive home to the primitive mind is
sufficient; but the progress of the mind requires a commensurate
progress of the home--and has not had it. Owing to our peculiar and
unnatural division of life-area, half the race has been free to move
on, and so has accomplished much for all of us; but the other half,
being confined to the same position it occupied in the infancy of
society, has been denied that freedom and that progress. Owing again to
the inexorable reunion of these divided halves in each child, physical
heredity does what it can to bridge the gulf, the ever-widening gulf;
pouring into the stationary woman some share of the modern abilities of
social man; and also forcing upon the moving man some share of the
primitive disabilities of the domestic woman. We thus have a strange
and painful condition of life.

Social progress, attained wholly by the male, gives to the
unprogressive woman unrest, discontent, disease. The more society
advances, the less she can endure her ancient restrictions. Hence
arises much evil and more unhappiness. Domestic inertia, maintained by
the woman, gives to the progressive man a tremendous undertow of
private selfishness and short-sightedness. Hence more evil, far more;
for the social processes are the most important; and a deeper
unhappiness too; for the shame of the social traitor, the helplessness
of the home-bound man who knows his larger duty but cannot meet it, is
a higher plane of suffering than hers, and also adds to hers
continually.

All this evil and distress is due not at all to the blessed influence
of the true home, suited to our time, but to the anything but blessed
influence of a home suited to the Stone Age--or perhaps the Bronze! It
is not in the least necessary. The change we require does not involve
the loss of one essential good and lovely thing. It does not injure
womanhood, but improves it. It does not injure childhood, but improves
it. It does not injure manhood, but improves that too.

What is the proposed change? It is the recognition of a new order of
duties, a new scale of virtues; or rather it is the practical adoption
of that order long since established by the facts of business, the
science of government, and by all great religions. Our own religion in
especial, the most progressive, the most social, gives no sanction
whatever to our own archaic cult of home-worship.

What is there in the teachings of Christianity to justify--much less
command--this devotion to animal comfort, to physical relations, to the
A B C of life? In his own life Christ rose above all family ties; his
disciples he called to leave all and follow him; the devotion he
recognised was that of Mary to the truth, not of Martha to the
housekeeping; and the love he taught, that love which is the beginning
and the end of Christian life, is not the love of one's own merely, but
of the whole world. "Whoso careth not for his own is worse than an
infidel"--truly. And whoso careth only for his own is _no better_!

Besides--and this should reconcile the reluctant heart--this antiquated
method of serving the family _does not serve them to the best
advantage_. In what way does a man best benefit his family? By staying
at home and doing what he can with his own two hands--whereby no family
on earth would ever have more than the labour of one affectionate
amateur could provide; or by going out from the home and serving other
people in a specialised trade--whereby his family and all families are
gradually supplied with peace and plenty, supported and protected by
the allied forces of civilisation?

In what way does a woman best benefit her family? By staying at home
and doing what she can with her own two hands--whereby no family ever
has more than the labour of one affectionate amateur can provide--or by
enlarging her motherhood as man has enlarged his fatherhood, and giving
to her family the same immense advantages that he has given it? We have
always assumed that the woman could do most by staying at home. Is this
so? Can we prove it? Why is that which is so palpably false of a man
held to be true of a woman? "Because men and woman are different!" will
be stoutly replied. Of course they are different--in sex, _but not in
humanity_. In every human quality and power they are alike; and the
right service of the home, the right care and training of the child,
call for human qualities and powers, not merely for sex-distinctions.

The home, in its arbitrary position of arrested development, does not
properly fulfil its own essential functions--much less promote the
social ones. Among the splendid activities of our age it lingers on,
inert and blind, like a clam in a horse-race.

It hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot, by keeping the modern
child under the tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social
conscience of the man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of
the domestic conscience of the woman. It hinders by its enormous
expense; making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to
mankind; whereas, in our stage of civilisation, they should have been
long since reduced to a minor incident.

Consider what the mere protection and defence of life used to cost,
when every man had to be fighter most of his life. Ninety per cent.,
say, of masculine energy went to defend life; while the remaining ten,
and the women, in a narrow, feeble way, maintained it. They lived, to
be sure, fighting all the time for the sorry privilege. Now we have
systematised military service so that only a tiny fraction of our men,
for a very short period of life, need be soldiers; and peace is
secured, not by constant painful struggles, but by an advanced economic
system. "Eternal vigilance" may be "the price of liberty," but it is a
very high price; and paid only by the barbarian who has not risen to
the stage of civilised service.

Organisation among men has reduced this wasteful and crippling habit of
being every-man-his-own-soldier. We do not have to carry a rifle and
peer around every street-corner for a hidden foe. As a result the
released energy of the ninety per cent. men, a tenth being large
allowance for all the fighting necessary, is now poured into the
channels that lead to wealth, peace, education, general progress.

Yet we are still willing that the personal care of life, the service of
daily physical needs, shall monopolise as many women as that old custom
of universal warfare monopolised men! Ninety per cent. of the feminine
energy of the world is still spent in ministering laboriously to the
last details of bodily maintenance; and the other tenth is supposed to
do nothing but supervise the same tasks, and flutter about in fruitless
social amusement. This crude waste of half the world's force keeps back
human progress just as heavily as the waste of the other half did.

By as much as the world has grown toward peace and power and unity
since men left off spending their lives in universal warfare, will it
grow further toward that much-desired plane when women leave off
spending their lives in universal house-service. The mere release of
that vast fund of energy will in itself increase all the facilities of
living; but there is a much more important consequence.

The omnipresent domestic ideal is a deadly hinderance to the social
ideal. When half our population honestly believe that they have no
duties outside the home, the other half will not become phenomenal
statesmen. This cook-and-housemaid level of popular thought is the
great check. The social perspective is entirely lost; and a million
short-sighted homes, each seeing only its own interests, cannot singly
or together grasp the common good which would benefit them all.

That the home has improved as much as it has is due to the freedom of
man outside it. That it is still so clumsy, so inadequate, so wickedly
wasteful of time, of money, of human life, is due to the confinement of
woman inside it.

What sort of citizens do we need for the best city--the best state--the
best country--the best world? We need men and women who are
sufficiently large-minded to see and feel a common need, to work for a
common good, to rejoice in the advance of all, and to know as the
merest platitude that their private advantage is to be assured
_only_ by the common weal. That kind of mind is not bred in the
kitchen.

A citizenship wherein all men were either house-servants or idlers
would not show much advance. Neither does a community wherein all
women, save that noble and rapidly increasing minority of
self-supporting ones, are either house-servants or idlers. Our progress
rests on the advance of the people, all the people; the development of
an ever-widening range of feeling, thought, action; while its flowers
are found in all the higher arts and sciences, it is rooted firmly in
economic law.

This little ganglion of aborted economic processes, the home, tends to
a sort of social paralysis. In its innumerable little centres of egoism
and familism are sunk and lost the larger vibrations of social energy
which should stimulate the entire mass. Again, society's advance rests
on the personal health, sanity, and happiness of its members. The home,
whose one justification is in its ministering to these, does not
properly fulfil its purpose, and cannot unless it is managed on modern
lines.

Social progress rests on the smooth development of personal character,
the happy fulfilment of special function. The home, in its ceaseless
and inexorable demands, stops this great process of specialisation in
women, and checks it cruelly in men. A man's best service to society
lies in his conscientious performance of the work he is best fitted
for. But the service of the home demands that he do the work he is best
paid for. Man after man, under this benumbing, strangling pressure, is
diverted from his true path in social service, and condemned to
"imprisonment with hard labour for life."

The young man, for a time, is comparatively free; and looks forward
eagerly to such and such a line of growth and large usefulness. But let
him marry and start a home, and he must do, not what he would--what is
best for him and best for all of us; but what he must--what he can be
sure of pay for. We have always supposed this to be a good thing, as it
forced men to be industrious. As if it was any benefit to society to
have men industrious in wrong ways--or useless ways, or even slow,
stupid, old-fashioned ways!

Human advance calls for each man's best, for his special faculties, for
the work he loves best and can therefore do best and do most of. This
work is not always the kind that commands the greater wages; at least
the immediate wages he must have. The market will pay best for what it
wants, and what it wants is almost always what it is used to, and often
what is deadly bad for it. Having a family to support, in the most
wasteful possible way, multiplies a man's desire for money; but in no
way multiplies his ability, his social value.

Therefore the world is full of struggling men, putting in for one and
trying to take out for ten; and in this struggle seeking continually
for new ways to cater to the tastes of the multitude, and especially to
those of the rich; that they may obtain the wherewithal to support the
ten, or six, or simply the one; who though she be but one and not a
worker, is quite ready to consume more than any ten together! Social
advantage is ruthlessly sacrificed to private advantage in our life
to-day; not to necessary and legitimate private interests either; not
to the best service of the individual, but to false and scandalously
wasteful private interests; to the maintenance and perpetuation of
inferior people.

The position is this: the home, as now existing, costs three times what
is necessary to meet the same needs. It involves the further waste of
nearly half the world's labour. It does not fulfil its functions to the
best advantage, thus robbing us again. It maintains a low grade of
womanhood, overworked or lazy; it checks the social development of men
as well as women, and, most of all, of children. The man, in order to
meet this unnecessary expense, must cater to the existing market; and
the existing market is mainly this same home, with its crude tastes and
limitless appetites. Thus the man, to maintain his own woman in
idleness, or low-grade labour, must work three times as hard as is
needful, to meet the demands of similar women; the home-bound woman
clogging the whole world.

Change this order. Set the woman on her own feet, as a free,
intelligent, able human being, quite capable of putting into the world
more than she takes out, of being a producer as well as a consumer. Put
these poor antiquated "domestic industries" into the archives of past
history; and let efficient modern industries take their place, doing
far more work, far better work, far cheaper work in their stead.

With an enlightened system of feeding the world we shall have better
health--and wiser appetites. The more intelligent and broad-minded
woman will assuredly promote a more reasonable, healthful, beautiful,
and economical system of clothing, for her own body and that of the
child. The wiser and more progressive mother will at last recognise
child-culture as an art and science quite beyond the range of instinct,
and provide for the child such surroundings, such training, as shall
allow of a rapid and enormous advance in human character.

The man, relieved of two-thirds of his expenses; provided with double
supplies; properly fed and more comfortable at home than he ever
dreamed of being, and associated with a strong, free, stimulating
companion all through life, will be able to work to far better purpose
in the social service, and with far greater power, pride, and
enjoyment.

The man and woman together, both relieved of most of their personal
cares, will be better able to appreciate large social needs and to meet
them. Each generation of children, better born, better reared, growing
to their full capacity in all lines, will pour into the world a rising
flood of happiness and power. Then we shall see social progress.




XVI

LINES OF ADVANCE


It will be helpful and encouraging for us to examine the development of
the home to this date, and its further tendencies; that we may cease to
regret here, and learn to admire there; that we may use our personal
powers definitely to resist the undertow of habit and prejudice, and
definitely to promote all legitimate progress.

There is a hopelessness in the first realisation of this old-world
obstacle still stationary in our swift to-day; but there need not be.
While apparently as strong as ever, it has in reality been undermined
on every side by the currents of evolution; its whilom prisoners have
been stimulated and strengthened by the unavoidable force of those same
great currents, and little remains to do beyond the final opening of
one's own eyes to the facts--not one's grandmother's eyes, but one's
_own_--and the beautiful work of reconstruction.

Examine the main root of the whole thing--the exclusive confinement of
women to the home, to their feminine functions and a few crude
industries; and see how rapidly that condition is changing. The advance
of women, during the last hundred years or so, is a phenomenon
unparalleled in history. Never before has so large a class made as much
progress in so small a time. From the harem to the forum is a long
step, but she has taken it. From the ignorant housewife to the
president of a college is a long step, but she has taken it. From the
penniless dependent to the wholly self-supporting and often
other-supporting business woman, is a long step, but she has taken it.
She who knew so little is now the teacher; she who could do so little
is now the efficient and varied producer; she who cared only for her
own flesh and blood is now active in all wide good works around the
world. She who was confined to the house now travels freely, the
foolish has become wise, and the timid brave. Even full political
equality is won in more than one country and state; it is a revolution
of incredible extent and importance, and its results are already
splendidly apparent.

This vast number of human beings, formerly as separate as sand grains
and as antagonistic as the nature of their position compelled, are now
organising, from house to club, from local to general, in federations
of city, state, nation, and world. The amount of social energy
accumulated by half of us is no longer possible of confinement to that
half; the woman has inherited her share, and has grown so large and
strong that her previous surroundings can no longer contain or content
her.

The socialising of this hitherto subsocial, wholly domestic class, is a
marked and marvellous event, now taking place with astonishing
rapidity. That most people have not observed it proves nothing. Mankind
has never yet properly perceived historic events until time gave him
the perspective his narrow present horizon denied.

Where most of our minds are home-enclosed, like the visual range of one
sitting in a hogshead, general events make no impression save as they
impinge directly on that personal area. The change in the position of
woman, largely taking place in the home, is lost to general view; and
so far as it takes place in public, is only perceived in fractions by
most of us.

To man it was of course an unnatural and undesired change; he did not
want it, did not see the need or good of it, and has done all he could
to prevent it. To the still inert majority of women, content in their
position, or attributing their growing discontent to other causes, it
is also an unnatural and undesired change. Ideas do not change as fast
as facts, with most of us. Mankind in general, men and women, still
believe in the old established order, in woman's ordination to the
service of bodily needs of all sorts; in the full sufficiency of
maternal instinct as compared with any trivial propositions of
knowledge and experience; in the noble devotion of the man who spends
all his labours to furnish a useless woman with luxuries, and all the
allied throng of ancient myths and falsehoods.

Thus we have not been commonly alive to the full proportions of the
woman's movement, or its value. The facts are there, however. Patient
Griselda has gone out, or is going, faster and faster. The girls of
to-day, in any grade of society, are pushing out to do things instead
of being content to merely eat things, wear things, and dust things.
The honourable instinct of self-support is taking the place of the
puerile acceptance of gifts, and beyond self-support comes the still
nobler impulse to give to others; not corrupting charity, but the one
all-good service of a life's best work. Measuring the position of woman
as it has been for all the years behind us up to a century or so ago
with what it is to-day, the distance covered and the ratio of progress
is incredible. It rolls up continually, accumulatively; and another
fifty years will show more advance than the past five hundred.

This alone is enough to guarantee the development of the home. No
unchanging shell can contain a growing body, something must break; and
the positive force of growth is stronger than the negative force of
mere adhesion of particles. A stronger, wiser, nobler woman must make a
better home.

In the place itself, its customs and traditions, we can also note great
progress. The "domestic industries" have shrunk and dwindled almost out
of sight, so greedily has society sucked at them and forced them out
where they belong.

The increasing difficulties which assail the house-keeper, either in
trying to occupy the primeval position of doing her own work, or in
persuading anyone else to do it for her, are simply forcing us, however
reluctantly, to the adoption of better methods. Even in the most
neglected field of all, the care and education of the little child,
some progress has been made. Education in the hands of men,
broad-minded, humanly loving men, has crept nearer and nearer to the
cradle; and now even women, and not only single women, but _even
mothers_, are beginning to study the nature and needs of the child.
The more they study, the more they learn, the more impossible become
the home conditions. The mother cannot herself alone do all that is
necessary for her children, to say nothing of continuing to be a
companion to her husband, a member of society, and a still growing
individual.

She can sacrifice herself in the attempt,--often does,--but the child
has a righteous indifference to such futile waste of life. He does not
require a nervous, exhausted, ever-present care, and it is by no means
good for him. He wants a strong, serene, lovely mother for a comfort, a
resource, an ideal; but he also wants the care of a trained highly
qualified teacher, and the amateur mama cannot give it to him.
Motherhood is a common possession of every female creature; a joy, a
pride, a nobly useful function. Teacherhood is a profession, a
specialised social function, no more common to mothers than to fathers,
maids, or bachelors. The ceaseless, anxious strain to do what only an
experienced nurse and teacher can do, is an injury to the real uses of
motherhood.

Why do we dread having children, as many of our much-extolled mothers
so keenly do? Partly the physical risk and suffering, which are not
necessary to a normal woman,--and more the ensuing care, labour, and
anxiety,--and oh,--"the responsibility!" The more modern the mother is,
the more fit for a higher plane of execution, the more unfit she is for
the lower plane, the old primitive plane of home-teaching.

If your father is a combination of all college professors you may get
part of a college training at home--but not the best part. If your
mother is a born teacher, a trained teacher, an experienced teacher,
you may get part of your schooling at home--but not the best part.
There would never have been a school or college on earth, if every man
had remained content with teaching his boys at home. There will never
be any proper standard of training for little children while each woman
remains content with caring for her own at home. But the house-wife is
changing. These ways no longer satisfy her. She insists on more modern
methods, even in her ancient labours.

Then follows the equally different attitude of the housemaid; her
rebellion, refusal, retirement from the field; and the immense increase
in mechanical convenience seeping in steadily from outside, and doing
more to "undermine the home" than any wildest exhortations of
reformers. The gas range, the neat and perfect utensils, these have in
themselves an educational reaction; we cannot now maintain the
atmosphere "where greasy Joan doth keel the pot." The pot is a white
enamelled double boiler, and Joan need not be greasy save of _malice
prepense_. Besides the improvement of utensils, we have in our
cities and in most of the smaller towns that insidious new system of
common supply of domestic necessities, which webs together the once so
separate homes by a network of pipes and wires.

Our houses are threaded like beads on a string, tied, knotted, woven
together, and in the cities even built together; one solid house from
block-end to block-end; their boasted individuality maintained by a
thin partition wall. The tenement, flat, and apartment house still
further group and connect us; and our claim of domestic isolation
becomes merely another domestic myth. Water is a household necessity
and was once supplied by household labour, the women going to the wells
to fetch it. Water is now supplied by the municipality, and flows among
our many homes as one. Light is equally in common; we do not have to
make it for ourselves.

Where water and light are thus fully socialised, why are we so shy of
any similar progress in the supply of food? Food is no more a necessity
than water. If we are willing to receive our water from an
extra-domestic pipe--why not our food? The one being a simple element
and the other a very complex combination makes a difference, of course;
but even so we may mark great progress. Some foods, more or less
specific, and of universal use, were early segregated, and the making
of them became a trade, as in breadstuffs, cheese, and confectionery.
Where this has been done we find great progress, and an even standard
of excellence. In America, where the average standard of bread-making
is very low, we regard "baker's bread" as a synonym for inferiority;
but even here, if we consider the saleratus bread of the great middle
west, and all the sour, heavy, uncertain productions of a million
homes, the baker bears comparison with the domestic cook. It is the
maintenance of the latter that keeps the former down; where the baker
is the general dependence he makes better bread.

Our American baker's bread has risen greatly in excellence as we make
less and less at home. All the initial processes of the food supply
have been professionalised. Our housewife does not go out crying,
"Dilly-dilly! Dilly-dilly! You must come and be killed"--and then wring
the poor duck's neck, pick and pluck it with her own hands; nor does
the modern father himself slay the fatted calf--all this is done as a
business. In recent years every article of food which will keep, every
article which is in common demand, is prepared as a business.

The home-blinded toiler has never climbed out of her hogshead to watch
this rising tide, but it is nearly up to the rim, ready to pour in and
float her out. Every delicate confection, every pickle, sauce,
preserve, every species of biscuit and wafer, and all sublimated and
differentiated to a degree we could never have dreamed of; all these
are manufactured in scientific and business methods and delivered at
our doors, or our dumb-waiters. Breakfast foods are the latest step in
this direction; and the encroaching delicatessen shop with its list of
allurements. Even the last and dearest stronghold, the very core and
centre of domestic bliss--hot cooked food--is being served us by this
irreverent professional man.

The sacred domestic rite of eating may be still performed in the
sanctuary, but the once equally sacred, subsidiary art of cooking is
swiftly going out of it. As to eating at home, so dear a habit, so old
a habit, old enough to share with every beast that drags her prey into
her lair, that she and her little ones may gnaw in safety; this remains
strongly in evidence, and will for some time yet. But while it reigns
unshaken in our minds let us follow, open-eyed, the great human
distinction of eating together. To share one's food, to call guest and
friend to the banquet, is not a custom of any animal save those close
allies in social organisation, the ants and their compeers. Not only do
we permit this, but it is our chiefest joy and pride. From the child
playing tea-party to the Lord Mayor's Banquet, the human race shows a
marked tendency to eat together. It is our one great common
medium--more's the pity that we have none better as yet! To share food
is the first impulse of true hospitality, the largest field of
artificial extravagance. Moreover, in actual fact, in the working
world, food is eaten together by almost all men at noon; and by women
and men in what they call "social life" almost daily. In recent years,
in our cities, this habit increases widely, swiftly; men, women, and
families eat together more and more; and the eating-house increases in
excellence commensurately.

Whatever our opinion of these two facts, both _are_ facts--that we
like to eat in "the bosom of the family" and that we equally like to
eat in common. Why, then, do we so fear a change in this field?
"Because of the children!" most people will reply triumphantly. Are the
children, then, perfectly fed at home? Is the list of dietary diseases
among our home-fed little ones a thing to boast of? May it be hinted
that it is because child-feeding has remained absolutely domestic,
while man-feeding has become partially civilised, that the knowledge of
how to feed children is so shamefully lacking? Be all this as it may,
it is plainly to be seen that our domestic conditions as to food supply
are rapidly changing, and that all signs point to a steady rise in
efficiency and decrease in expense in this line of human service. There
remains much to be done. In no field of modern industry and business
opportunity is there a wider demand to be met than in this constantly
waxing demand for better food, more hygienic food, more reliable food,
cheaper food, food which shall give us the maximum of nutrition and
healthy pleasure, with the minimum of effort and expense. At this
writing--May, 1903--there is in flourishing existence a cooked-food
supply company, in New Haven (Conn.), in Pittsburgh (Pa.), and in
Boston (Mass.), with doubtless others not at present known to the
author.

Turning to the other great domestic industry, the care of children, we
may see hopeful signs of growth. The nursemaid is improving. Those who
can afford it are beginning to see that the association of a child's
first years with low-class ignorance cannot be beneficial. There is a
demand for "trained nurses" for children; even in rare cases the
employment of some Kindergarten ability. Among the very poor the
day-nursery and Kindergarten are doing slow, but beautiful work. The
President of Harvard demands that more care and money be spent on the
primary grades in education; and all through our school systems there
is a healthy movement. Child-study is being undertaken at last.
Pedagogy is being taught as a science. In our public parks there is
regular provision made for children; and in the worst parts of the
cities an incipient provision of playgrounds.

There is no more brilliant hope on earth to-day than this new thought
about the child. In what does it consist? In recognising "the child,"
children as a class, children as citizens with rights to be guaranteed
only by the state; instead of our previous attitude toward them of
absolute personal ownership--the unchecked tyranny, or as unchecked
indulgence, of the private home. Children are at last emerging from the
very lowest grade of private ownership into the safe, broad level of
common citizenship. That which no million separate families could give
their millions of separate children, the state can give, and does. Our
progress, so long merely mechanical, is at last becoming personal,
touching the people and lifting them as one.

Now what is all this leading to? What have we to hope--or to dread--in
the undeniable lines of development here shown? What most of us dread
is this: that we shall lose our domestic privacy; that we shall lose
our family dinner table; that woman will lose "her charm;" that we
shall lose our children; and the child lose its mother. We are mortally
afraid of separation.

The unfolding and differentiation of natural growth is not separation
in any organic sense. The five-fingered leaf, closely bound in the bud,
separates as it opens. The branches separate from the trunk as the
trees grow. But this legitimate separation does not mean disconnection.
The tree is as much one tree as if it grew in a strait-jacket. All
growth must widen and diverge. If natural growth is checked, disease
must follow. If allowed, health and beauty and happiness accompany it.

The home, if it grows on in normal lines, will not be of the same size
and relative density as it was in ancient times; but it will be as
truly home to the people of to-day. In trying to maintain by force the
exact limits and characteristics of the primitive home, we succeed only
in making a place modern man is not at home in.

The people of our time need the home of our time, not the homes of
ancient barbarians. The primitive home and the home-bound woman are the
continually acting causes of our increasing domestic unhappiness. By
clinging to unsuitable conditions we bring about exactly the evils we
are most afraid of. A little scientific imagination well based on
existing facts, well in line with existing tendencies, should be used
to point out the practical possibilities of the home as it is to be.

Try to consider it first with the woman out for working hours. This is
an impassable gulf to the average mind. "Home, with the woman
out--there is no such thing!" cries it. The instant assumption is that
she will never be in, in which case I am willing to admit that there
would be no home. Suppose we retrace our steps a little and approach
the average mind more gradually. Can it imagine a home, a real happy
home, with the woman out of it for one hour a day? Can it, encouraged
by this step, picture the home as still enduring while the woman is out
of it two hours a day? Is there any exact time of attendance required
to make a home? What is, in truth, required to make a home? First
mother and child, then father; this is the family, and the place where
they live is the home.

Now the father goes out every day; does the home cease to exist because
of his hours away from it? It is still his home, he still loves it, he
maintains it, he lives in it, only he has a "place of business"
elsewhere. At a certain stage of growth the children are out of it,
between say 8.30 and 3.30. Does it cease to be home because of their
hours away from it? Do they not love it and live in it--_while they
are there_? Now if, while the father was out, and the children were
out, the mother should also be out, would the home disappear into thin
air?

It is home _while the family are in it_. When the family are out
of it it is only a house; and a house will stand up quite solidly for
some eight hours of the family's absence. Incessant occupation is not
essential to a home. If the father has wife and children with him in
the home when he returns to it, need it matter to him that the children
are wisely cared for in schools during his absence; or that his wife is
duly occupied elsewhere while they are so cared for?

Two "practical obstacles" intervene; first, the "housework"; second,
the care of children below school age. The housework is fast
disappearing into professional hands. When that is utterly gone, the
idle woman has but one excuse--the babies. This is a very vital excuse.
The baby is the founder of the home. If the good of the baby requires
the persistent, unremitting care of the mother in the home, then indeed
she must remain there. No other call, no other claim, no other duty,
can be weighed for a moment against this all-important service--the
care of the little child.

But we have already seen that if there is one thing more than another
the home fails in, it is just this. If there is one duty more than
another the woman fails in, it is just this. Our homes are not planned
nor managed in the interests of little children; and the isolated
home-bound mother is in no way adequate to their proper rearing. This
is not disputable on any side. The death rate of little children during
the years they are wholly in the home and mother's care proves it
beyond question. The wailing of little children who live--or before
they die--wailing from bodily discomfort, nervous irritation, mental
distress, punishment--a miserable sound, so common, so expected, that
it affects the price of real estate, tenants not wishing to live near
little children on account of their cries--this sound of world-wide
anguish does not seem to prove much for the happiness of these helpless
inmates of the home.

Such few data as we have of babies and young children in properly
managed day nurseries, give a far higher record of health and
happiness. Not the sick baby in the pauper hospital, not the lonely
baby in the orphan asylum; but the baby who has _not_ lost his
mother, but who adds to mother's love, calm, wise, experienced
professional care.

The best instance of this, as known to me, is that of M. Godin's
_phalanstère_ in Guise, France. An account of it can be found in
the _Harper's Monthly_, November, 1885; or in M. Godin's own book,
"Social Solutions," translated by Marie Howland, now out of print. This
wise and successful undertaking had been going on for over twenty years
when the above article was written. Among its features was a
beautifully planned nursery for babies and little children, and the
results to child and parent, to home and state were wholly good. Better
health, greater peace and contentment, a swift, regular, easy
development these children enjoyed; and when, in later years, they met
the examinations of the public schools, they stood higher than the
children of any other district in France.

A newborn baby leads a far happier, healthier, more peaceful existence
in the hands of the good trained nurse, than it does when those skilled
hands are gone, and it is left on the trembling knees of the young,
untrained mother.

"But the nurse does not love it!" we wildly protest. What if she does
not? Cannot the mother love it _while the nurse takes care of it_?
This is the whole position in a nutshell. Nothing is going to prevent
the mother from loving her children in one deep, ceaseless river of
calm affection, with such maternal transports as may arise from time to
time in addition; but nothing ought to prevent the child's being
properly taken care of while the love is going on. The mother is not
ashamed to depend on the doctor if the child is ill, on the specialist
if the child is defective, on the teacher when the child is in school.
Why should she so passionately refuse to depend on equally skilled
assistance for the first five years of her babies' lives--those years
when iron statistics remorselessly expose her incapacity?

The home that is coming will not try to be a workshop, a nursery, or a
school. The child that is coming will find a more comfortable home than
he ever had before, and something else besides--a place for babies to
be happy in, and grow up in, without shrieks of pain. The mother that
is coming, a much more intelligent person than she has ever been
before, will recognise that this ceaseless procession of little ones
requires some practical provision for its best development, other than
what is possible in the passing invasion of the home. "How a baby does
tyrannise over the household!" we complain, vaguely recognising that
the good of the baby requires something different from the natural home
habits of adults. We shall finally learn to make a home for the babies
too.

This involves great changes in both our idea of home, and our material
provision for it. Why not? Growth is change, and there is need of
growth here. Slowly, gradually, by successive experiments, we shall
find out how to meet new demands; and these experiments are now being
made, in all the living centres of population.




XVII

RESULTS


To us, who have for so many unbroken generations been wholly bound to
the home, who honestly believe that its service and maintenance
constitute the whole duty of men and women, the picture of a world in
which home and its affairs takes but a small part of life's attention
gives rather a blank outlook. What else are we to do! What else to
love--what else to serve eternally! What else to revere, to worship!
How shall we occupy the hands of man if but a tithe of his labour
supports him in comfort; how fill the heart of woman, when her family
are happily and rightly served without sacrificing her in the
operation! It is hard, at first--we being so accustomed to spend all
life in merely keeping ourselves alive--to see what life might be when
we had some to spare. We find it difficult to imagine this "world of
trouble" as rid of its troubles; as rationally and comfortably managed;
peaceful, clean, safe, healthy, giving everyone room and time to grow.
Nor need we labour to forecast events too accurately; especially the
material details which must be decided by long experiment. No rigid
prescription is needed; no dictum as to whether we shall live in small
separate houses, greenly gardened, with closely connected conveniences
for service and for education, for work and play; or in towering
palaces with shaded flower-bright courts and cloisters. All that must
work out as have our great modern wonders in other lines, little by
little, in orderly development. But what we can forecast in safety is
the effect on the human body and the human soul.

A peaceful, healthy, happy babyhood and childhood, with such delicate
adjustment of educational processes as we already see indicated, will
give us a far better individual. The full-grown mother, contributing
racial advance in both body and mind, will add greatly to this gain. We
can be better people everywhere, better born, bred, fed, educated in
all ways. But quite beyond this is the rich growth of our long aborted
social instincts, which will rapidly follow the reduction of these long
artificially maintained primitive and animal instincts.

Where now trying to meet general needs by personal efforts, modern
needs by ancient methods, we must perforce manifest an intense degree
of self-interest to keep up the struggle; as soon as we meet these
needs easily, swiftly, inexpensively, by modern methods and common
efforts, less self-interest will be necessary.

When sidewalks were narrow and streets foul, great was the jostling,
keen the resentment--"You take the wall of me, sir!" Where all is
broad, clean, safe, no such hot feeling exists. We do not truly prefer
to be always sharply looking out for ourselves; it is much more
interesting to look out for each other; but this method of handicapping
each man with his own affairs, in such needless weight, keeps up a
selfishness which true civilisation tends steadily to eliminate. Social
instincts in social conditions are as natural as animal instincts in
animal conditions.

Starving, shipwrecked sailors, robbed of all social advantages, are
reduced sometimes even to cannibalism. Polite people at a banquet show
no hint of such fierce, relentless greed. Relieved of the necessity for
spending our whole time taking care of ourselves, we shall deliciously
launch forward into the much larger pleasure of taking care of one
another. Relieved of the ceaseless, instant pressure of purely physical
needs, we shall be able to put forth the true demands of human life at
last. The mind, no longer penned in its weary treadmill of private
affairs, will spread into its legitimate area--public affairs. We shall
be able to see a greater number of things at once, and care about them.
That larger-mindedness will be an immediate result; for we have already
far more capacity than we use.

We have developed the modern civilised mind, the social mind, through
the world's work; but we bury it, enslave it, stultify it, in the
home's work. A new power--a new sense of range--freedom, growth, as of
a great stream flowing freely; plenty of force to work with, plenty of
room to work in--this is what will follow as we learn to properly
relate the home to the rest of life.

Once the mind rises, free, outside those old enclosing, crushing walls,
it will see life with different eyes. Our common good will appear to us
as naturally as our private good does now. At present the average mind
does not seem able to grasp a great general fact, be it for good or
evil.

To make a man appreciate the proposed advantage, realise the impending
or existing evil, we must "bring it home to him," make him feel it
"where he lives." When his home does not occupy most of his mind, tax
his strength, reduce his range of interest and affection, he can see
the big things more easily. When he "lives" in the whole city--_i.e._,
thinks about it, cares about it, works for it, loves it--then he will
promptly feel anything that affects it in any part. This common love
and care are just as possible to human beings as love and care for
one's own young are possible to the beasts. It is possible; it is
natural; it is a great and increasing joy; but its development is
checked by a system which requires all our love and care for our own,
and even then does not properly provide for them.

The love of human beings for each other is not a dream of religion, it
is a law of nature. It is bred of human contact, of human relation, of
human service; it rests on identical interest and the demands of a
social development which must include all, if it permanently lift any.
Against this perfectly natural development stands this opposing shell;
this earlier form of life, essential in its place, most mischievous out
of it; this early cradle of humanity in which lie smothered the
full-grown people of to-day.

Must we then leave it--lose it--go without it? Never. The more broadly
socialised we become, the more we need our homes to rest in. The large
area is necessary for the human soul; the big, modern, civilised social
nature. But we are still separate animal beings as well as collective
social beings. Always we need to return to the dear old ties, to the
great primal basis, that we may rise refreshed and strengthened, like
Antæus from the earth. Private, secluded, sweet, wholly our own; not
invaded by any trade or work or business, not open to the crowd; the
place of the one initial and undying group of father, mother, and
child, will remain to us. These, and the real friend, are all that
belong to the home.

It should be the recognised base and background of our lives; but those
lives must be lived in their true area, the world. And so lived, by
both of us, all of us; shared in by the child, served in by the woman
as well as the man; that world will grow to have the sense of intimacy,
of permanent close attachment, of comfort and pleasure and rest, which
now attaches only to the home.

So, living, really living in the world and loving it, the presence
there of father, mother, and child will gradually bring out in it all
the beauty and safety, the refreshment and strength we so vainly seek
to ensure in our private home. The sense of duty, of reverence, of
love, honestly transferred to the world we live in, will have its
natural, its inevitable effect, and make that world our home at last.


THE END




BOOKS BY CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN


The Man-made World, or: Our Androcentric Culture.

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Too much of women's influence is dreaded as "feminization"--as likely
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