The Home: Its Work and Influence

THE HOME: ITS WORK AND INFLUENCE

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

KYPROS PRESS

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Copyright © 2016 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Home: Its Work and Influence

I . INTRODUCTORY

II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME

III. DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

IV. PRESENT CONDITIONS

V. THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

VI. THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

VII. HOME-COOKING

VIII. DOMESTIC ART

IX. DOMESTIC ETHICS

X. DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

XI. THE LADY OF THE HOUSE

XIII. THE GIRL AT HOME

XV. HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS

XVI. LINES OF ADVANCE

XVII. RESULTS

THE HOME: ITS WORK AND INFLUENCE

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I . INTRODUCTORY

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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

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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,