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Title: The home: its work and influence

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Release date: December 21, 2013 [eBook #44481]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOME: ITS
WORK AND INFLUENCE ***

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—

bow ee t e wo a sou s w g
"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?

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]

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

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
hismenie 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.

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?

[3]

See Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class."

[4]
See Veblen again.

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 manœuvres.
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.
By

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN

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Too much of women's influence is dreaded as "feminization"—as likely to
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We have heard much of the "eternal womanly;" this book treats of the
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"Cherchez la femme!" is the old hue and cry; this book raises a new one:
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"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER"

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