Gilman Charlotte Perkins
The home: its work and influence
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!
