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The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman · English · Gutenberg #44481 · 468,662 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The home: its work and influence

Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman


        
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Language: English

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THE HOME

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




THE HOME

ITS WORK AND INFLUENCE


BY

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN


NEW YORK
CHARLTON COMPANY
1910

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

Printed by The Co-Operative Press, New York City




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




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                                       PAGE

   I. INTRODUCTORY,                                              3

  II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME,                                14

 III. DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY,                                       36

  IV. PRESENT CONDITIONS,                                       62

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

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

 VII. HOME-COOKING,                                            124

VIII. DOMESTIC ART,                                            143

  IX. DOMESTIC ETHICS,                                         160

   X. DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT,                                  184

  XI. THE LADY OF THE HOUSE,                                   206

 XII. THE CHILD AT HOME,                                       230

XIII. THE GIRL AT HOME,                                        252

 XIV. HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN,                                   272

  XV. HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS,                                300

 XVI. LINES OF ADVANCE,                                        323

XVII. RESULTS,                                                 342




    TWO CALLINGS


    I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


    II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE HOME




I

INTRODUCTORY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




II

THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




III

DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




IV

PRESENT CONDITIONS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




V

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP


_I. The Housewife_

All industry began at home.

All industry was begun by women.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where is Children's Day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VI

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP


_II. The Housemaid_

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          [4] See Veblen again.

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

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

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

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

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

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




VII

HOME-COOKING


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




VIII

DOMESTIC ART


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A typical extreme of 

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