INAGURAL ADDRESS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE OPENING OF ONE OF THE
"CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
It may be that the life lived by the very poor is a thing which some of
you here to-day have never actually looked upon in all its degradation.
You may have only felt the misery of deep human poverty through the
medium of some great book, or some gifted actor may have made your soul
vibrato with its horror.
Let us suppose that in some such moment a voice should cry to you, "Go
look upon these homes of misery and blackest poverty. For there have
sprung up amid the terror and the suffering, cases of happiness, of
cleanliness, of peace. The poor are to have an ideal house which shall
be their own. In Quarters where poverty and vice ruled, a work of moral
redemption is going on. The soul of the people is being set free from
the torpor of vice, from the shadows of ignorance. The little children
too have a 'House' of their own. The new generation goes forward to meet
the new era, the time when misery shall no longer be deplored but
destroyed. They go to meet the time when the dark dens of vice and
wretchedness shall have become things of the past, and when no trace of
them shall be found among the living." What a change of emotions we
should experience! and how we should hasten here, as the wise men
guided by a dream and a star hastened to Bethlehem!
I have spoken thus in order that you may understand the great
significance, the real beauty, of this humble room, which seems like a
bit of the house itself set apart by a mother's hand for the use and
happiness of the children of the Quarter. This is the second "Children's
House"[5] which has been established within the ill-favoured Quarter of
San Lorenzo.
[5] Dr. Montessori no longer directs the work in the Casa dei
Bambini in the Quarter of San Lorenzo.
The Quarter of San Lorenzo is celebrated, for every newspaper in the
city is filled with almost daily accounts of its wretched happenings.
Yet there are many who are not familiar with the origin of this portion
of our city.
It was never intended to build up here a tenement district for the
people. And indeed San Lorenzo is not the _People's_ Quarter, it is the
Quarter of the _poor_. It is the Quarter where lives the underpaid,
often unemployed workingman, a common type in a city which has no
factory industries. It is the home of him who undergoes the period of
surveillance to which he is condemned after his prison sentence is
ended. They are all here, mingled, huddled together.
The district of San Lorenzo sprang into being between 1884 and 1888 at
the time of the great building fever. No standards either social or
hygienic guided these new constructions. The aim in building was simply
to cover with walls square foot after square foot of ground. The more
space covered, the greater the gain of the interested Banks and
Companies. All this with a complete disregard of the disastrous future
which they were preparing. It was natural that no one should concern
himself with the stability of the building he was creating, since in no
case would the property remain in the possession of him who built it.
When the storm burst, in the shape of the inevitable building panic of
1888 to 1890, these unfortunate houses remained for a long time
untenanted. Then, little by little, the need of dwelling-places began to
make itself felt, and these great houses began to fill. Now, those
speculators who had been so unfortunate as to remain possessors of these
buildings could not, and did not wish to, add fresh capital to that
already lost, so the houses constructed in the first place in utter
disregard of all laws of hygiene, and rendered still worse by having
been used as temporary habitations, came to be occupied by the poorest
class in the city.
The apartments not being prepared for the working class, were too large,
consisting of five, six, or seven rooms. These were rented at a price
which, while exceedingly low in relation to the size, was yet too high
for any one family of very poor people. This led to the evil of
subletting. The tenant who has taken a six room apartment at eight
dollars a month sublets rooms at one dollar and a half or two dollars a
month to those who can pay so much, and a corner of a room, or a
corridor, to a poorer tenant, thus making an income of fifteen dollars
or more, over and above the cost of his own rent.
This means that the problem of existence is in great part solved for
him, and that in every case he adds to his income through usury. The one
who holds the lease traffics in the misery of his fellow tenants,
lending small sums at a rate which generally corresponds to twenty cents
a week for the loan of two dollars, equivalent to an annual rate of 500
per cent.
Thus we have in the evil of subletting the most cruel form of usury:
that which only the poor know how to practise upon the poor.
To this we must add the evils of crowded living, promiscuousness,
immorality, crime. Every little while the newspapers uncover for us one
of these _interieurs_: a large family, growing boys and girls, sleep in
one room; while one corner of the room is occupied by an outsider, a
woman who receives the nightly visits of men. This is seen by the girls
and the boys; evil passions are kindled that lead to the crime and
bloodshed which unveil for a brief instant before our eyes, in some
lurid paragraph, this little detail of the mass of misery.
Whoever enters, for the first time, one of these apartments is
astonished and horrified. For this spectacle of genuine misery is not at
all like the garish scene he has imagined. We enter here a world of
shadows, and that which strikes us first is the darkness which, even
though it be midday, makes it impossible to distinguish any of the
details of the room.
When the eye has grown accustomed to the gloom, we perceive, within, the
outlines of a bed upon which lies huddled a figure--someone ill and
suffering. If we have come to bring money from some society for mutual
aid, a candle must be lighted before the sum can be counted and the
receipt signed. Oh, when we talk of social problems, how often we speak
vaguely, drawing upon our fancy for details instead of preparing
ourselves to judge intelligently through a personal investigation of
facts and conditions.
We discuss earnestly the question of home study for school children,
when for many of them home means a straw pallet thrown down in the
corner of some dark hovel. We wish to establish circulating libraries
that the poor may read at home. We plan to send among these people books
which shall form their domestic literature--books through whose
influence they shall come to higher standards of living. We hope through
the printed page to educate these poor people in matters of hygiene, of
morality, of culture, and in this we show ourselves profoundly ignorant
of their most crying needs. For many of them have no light by which to
read!
There lies before the social crusader of the present day a problem more
profound than that of the intellectual elevation of the poor; the
problem, indeed, of _life_.
In speaking of the children born in these places, even the conventional
expressions must be changed, for they do not "first see the light of
day"; they come into a world of gloom. They grow among the poisonous
shadows which envelope over-crowded humanity. These children cannot be
other than filthy in body, since the water supply in an apartment
originally intended to be occupied by three or four persons, when
distributed among twenty or thirty is scarcely enough for drinking
purposes!
We Italians have elevated our word "casa" to the almost sacred
significance of the English word "home," the enclosed temple of domestic
affection, accessible only to dear ones.
Far removed from this conception is the condition of the many who have
no "casa," but only ghastly walls within which the most intimate acts of
life are exposed upon the pillory. Here, there can be no privacy, no
modesty, no gentleness; here, there is often not even light, nor air,
nor water! It seems a cruel mockery to introduce here our idea of the
home as essential to the education of the masses, and as furnishing,
along with the family, the only solid basis for the social structure. In
doing this we would be not practical reformers but visionary poets.
Conditions such as I have described make it more decorous, more
hygienic, for these people to take refuge in the street and to let their
children live there. But how often these streets are the scene of
bloodshed, of quarrel, of sights so vile as to be almost inconceivable.
The papers tell us of women pursued and killed by drunken husbands! Of
young girls with the fear of worse than death, stoned by low men. Again,
we see untellable things--a wretched woman thrown, by the drunken men
who have preyed upon her, forth into the gutter. There, when day has
come, the children of the neighbourhood crowd about her like scavengers
about their dead prey, shouting and laughing at the sight of this wreck
of womanhood, kicking her bruised and filthy body as it lies in the mud
of the gutter!
Such spectacles of extreme brutality are possible here at the very gate
of a cosmopolitan city, the mother of civilisation and queen of the fine
arts, because of a new fact which was unknown to past centuries, namely,
_the isolation of the masses of the poor_.
In the Middle Ages, leprosy was isolated: the Catholics isolated the
Hebrews in the Ghetto; but poverty was never considered a peril and an
infamy so great that it must be isolated. The homes of the poor were
scattered among those of the rich and the contrast between these was a
commonplace in literature up to our own times. Indeed, when I was a
child in school, teachers, for the purpose of moral education,
frequently resorted to the illustration of the kind princess who sends
help to the poor cottage next door, or of the good children from the
great house who carry food to the sick woman in the neighbouring attic.
To-day all this would be as unreal and artificial as a fairy tale. The
poor may no longer learn from their more fortunate neighbours lessons in
courtesy and good breeding, they no longer have the hope of help from
them in cases of extreme need. We have herded them together far from us,
without the walls, leaving them to learn of each other, in the abandon
of desperation, the cruel lessons of brutality and vice. Anyone in whom
the social conscience is awake must see that we have thus created
infected regions that threaten with deadly peril the city which, wishing
to make all beautiful and shining according to an aesthetic and
aristocratic ideal, has thrust without its walls whatever is ugly or
diseased.
When I passed for the first time through these streets, it was as if I
found myself in a city upon which some great disaster had fallen. It
seemed to me that the shadow of some recent struggle still oppressed the
unhappy people who, with something very like terror in their pale faces,
passed me in these silent streets. The very silence seemed to signify
the life of a community interrupted, broken. Not a carriage, not even
the cheerful voice of the ever-present street vender, nor the sound of
the hand-organ playing in the hope of a few pennies, not even these
things, so characteristic of poor quarters, enter here to lighten this
sad and heavy silence.
Observing these streets with their deep holes, the doorsteps broken and
tumbling, we might almost suppose that this disaster had been in the
nature of a great inundation which had carried the very earth away; but
looking about us at the houses stripped of all decorations, the walls
broken and scarred, we are inclined to think that it was perhaps an
earthquake which has afflicted this quarter. Then, looking still more
closely, we see that in all this thickly settled neighbourhood there is
not a shop to be found. So poor is the community that it has not been
possible to establish even one of those popular bazars where necessary
articles are sold at so low a price as to put them within the reach of
anyone. The only shops of any sort are the low wine shops which open
their evil-smelling doors to the passer-by. As we look upon all this, it
is borne upon us that the disaster which has placed its weight of
suffering upon these people is not a convulsion of nature, but
poverty--poverty with its inseparable companion, vice.
This unhappy and dangerous state of things, to which our attention is
called at intervals by newspaper accounts of violent and immoral crime,
stirs the hearts and consciences of many who come to undertake among
these people some work of generous benevolence. One might almost say
that every form of misery inspires a special remedy and that all have
been tried here, from the attempt to introduce hygienic principles into
each house, to the establishment of creches, "Children's Houses," and
dispensaries.
But what indeed is benevolence? Little more than an expression of
sorrow; it is pity translated into action. The benefits of such a form
of charity cannot be great, and through the absence of any continued
income and the lack of organisation it is restricted to a small number
of persons. The great and widespread peril of evil demands, on the other
hand, a broad and comprehensive work directed toward the redemption of
the entire community. Only such an organisation, as, working for the
good of others, shall itself grow and prosper through the general
prosperity which it has made possible, can make a place for itself in
this quarter and accomplish a permanent good work.
It is to meet this dire necessity that the great and kindly work of the
Roman Association of Good Building has been undertaken. The advanced and
highly modern way in which this work is being carried on is due to
Edoardo Talamo, Director General of the Association. His plans, so
original, so comprehensive, yet so practical, are without counterpart in
Italy or elsewhere.
This Association was incorporated three years ago in Rome, its plan
being to acquire city tenements, remodel them, put them into a
productive condition, and administer them as a good father of a family
would.
The first property acquired comprised a large portion of the Quarter of
San Lorenzo, where to-day the Association possesses fifty-eight houses,
occupying a ground space of about 30,000 square metres, and containing,
independent of the ground floor, 1,600 small apartments. Thousands of
people will in this way receive the beneficent influence of the
protective reforms of the Good Building Association. Following its
beneficent programme, the Association set about transforming these old
houses, according to the most modern standards, paying as much attention
to questions related to hygiene and morals as to those relating to
buildings. The constructional changes would make the property of real
and lasting value, while the hygienic and moral transformation, would,
through the improved condition of the inmates, make the rent from these
apartments a more definite asset.
The Association of Good Building therefore decided upon a programme
which would permit of a gradual attainment of their ideal. It is
necessary to proceed slowly because it is not easy to empty a tenement
house at a time when houses are scarce, and the humanitarian principles
which govern the entire movement make it impossible to proceed more
rapidly in this work of regeneration. So it is, that the Association has
up to the present time transformed only three houses in the Quarter of
San Lorenzo. The plan followed in this transformation is as follows:
A: To demolish in every building all portions of the structure not
originally constructed with the idea of making homes, but, from a purely
commercial standpoint, of making the rental roll larger. In other words,
the new management tore down those parts of the building which
encumbered the central court, thus doing away with dark, ill-ventilated
apartments, and giving air and light to the remaining portion of the
tenement. Broad airy courts take the place of the inadequate air and
light shafts, rendering the remaining apartments more valuable and
infinitely more desirable.
B: To increase the number of stairways, and to divide the room space in
a more practical way. The large six or seven room suites are reduced to
small apartments of one, two, or three rooms, and a kitchen.
The importance of such changes may be recognised from the economic point
of view of the proprietor as well as from the standpoint of the moral
and material welfare of the tenant. Increasing the number of stairways
diminishes that abuse of walls and stairs inevitable where so many
persons must pass up and down. The tenants more readily learn to respect
the building and acquire habits of cleanliness and order. Not only this,
but in reducing the chances of contact among the inhabitants of the
house, especially late at night, a great advance has been made in the
matter of moral hygiene.
The division of the house into small apartments has done much toward
this moral regeneration. Each family is thus set apart, _homes_ are made
possible, while the menacing evil of subletting together with all its
disastrous consequences of overcrowding and immorality is checked in the
most radical way.
On one side this arrangement lessens the burden of the individual lease
holders, and on the other increases the income of the proprietor, who
now receives those earnings which were the unlawful gain of the system
of subletting. When the proprietor who originally rented an apartment of
six rooms for a monthly rental of eight dollars, makes such an apartment
over into three small, sunny, and airy suites consisting of one room and
a kitchen, it is evident that he increases his income.
The moral importance of this reform as it stands to-day is tremendous,
for it has done away with those evil influences and low opportunities
which arise from crowding and from promiscuous contact, and has brought
to life among these people, for the first time, the gentle sentiment of
feeling themselves free within their own homes, in the intimacy of the
family.
But the project of the Association goes beyond even this. The house
which it offers to its tenants is not only sunny and airy, but in
perfect order and repair, almost shining, and as if perfumed with purity
and freshness. These good things, however, carry with them a
responsibility which the tenant must assume if he wishes to enjoy them.
He must pay an actual tax of _care_ and _good will_. The tenant who
receives a clean house must keep it so, must respect the walls from the
big general entrance to the interior of his own little apartment. He who
keeps his house in good condition receives the recognition and
consideration due such a tenant. Thus all the tenants unite in an
ennobling warfare for practical hygiene, an end made possible by the
simple task of _conserving_ the already perfect conditions.
Here indeed is something new! So far only our great national buildings
have had a continued _maintenance fund_. Here, in these houses offered
to the people, the maintenance is confided to a hundred or so
workingmen, that is, to all the occupants of the building. This care is
almost perfect. The people keep the house in perfect condition, without
a single spot. The building in which we find ourselves to-day has been
for two years under the sole protection of the tenants, and the work of
maintenance has been left entirely to them. Yet few of our houses can
compare in cleanliness and freshness with this home of the poor.
The experiment has been tried and the result is remarkable. The people
acquire together with the lore of home-making, that of cleanliness. They
come, moreover, to wish to beautify their homes. The Association helps
this by placing growing plants and trees in the courts and about the
halls.
Out of this honest rivalry in matters so productive of good, grows a
species of pride new to this quarter; this is the pride which the entire
body of tenants takes in having the best-cared-for building and in
having risen to a higher and more civilised plane of living. They not
only live in a house, but they _know how to live_, they _know how to
respect_ the house in which they live.
This first impulse has led to other reforms. From the clean home will
come personal cleanliness. Dirty furniture cannot be tolerated in a
clean house, and those persons living in a permanently clean house will
come to desire personal cleanliness.
One of the most important hygienic reforms of the Association is that
of _the baths_. Each remodeled tenement has a place set apart for
bathrooms, furnished with tubs or shower, and having hot and cold water.
All the tenants in regular turn may use these baths, as, for example, in
various tenements the occupants go according to turn, to wash their
clothes in the fountain in the court. This is a great convenience which
invites the people to be clean. These hot and cold baths _within the
house_ are a great improvement upon the general public baths. In this
way we make possible to these people, at one and the same time, health
and refinement, opening not only to the sun, but to progress, those dark
habitations once the _vile caves_ of misery.
But in striving to realise its ideal of a semi-gratuitous maintenance of
its buildings, the Association met with a difficulty in regard to those
children under school age, who must often be left alone during the
entire day while their parents went out to work. These little ones, not
being able to understand the educative motives which taught their
parents to respect the house, became ignorant little vandals, defacing
the walls and stairs. And here we have another reform the expense of
which may be considered as indirectly assumed by the tenants as was the
care of the building. This reform may be considered as the most
brilliant transformation of a tax which progress and civilisation have
as yet devised. The "Children's House" is earned by the parents through
the care of the building. Its expenses are met by the sum that the
Association would have otherwise been forced to spend upon repairs. A
wonderful climax, this, of moral benefits received! Within the
"Children's House," which belongs exclusively to those children under
school age, working mothers may safely leave their little ones, and may
proceed with a feeling of great relief and freedom to their own work.
But this benefit, like that of the care of the house, is not conferred
without a tax of care and of good will. [6]The Regulations posted on the
walls announce it thus:
[6] See page 70.
"The mothers are obliged to send their children to the 'Children's
House' clean, and to co-operate with the Directress in the educational
work."
Two obligations: namely, the physical and moral care of their own
children. If the child shows through its conversation that the
educational work of the school is being undermined by the attitude taken
in his home, he will be sent back to his parents, to teach them thus how
to take advantage of their good opportunities. Those who give themselves
over to low-living, to fighting, and to brutality, shall feel upon them
the weight of those little lives, so needing care. They shall feel that
they themselves have once more cast into the darkness of neglect those
little creatures who are the dearest part of the family. In other words,
the parents must learn to _deserve_ the benefit of having within the
house the great advantage of a school for their little ones.
"Good will," a willingness to meet the demands of the Association is
enough, for the directress is ready and willing to teach them how. The
regulations say that the mother must go at least once a week, to confer
with the directress, giving an account of her child, and accepting any
helpful advice which the directress may be able to give. The advice thus
given will undoubtedly prove most illuminating in regard to the child's
health and education, since to each of the "Children's Houses" is
assigned a physician as well as a directress.
The directress is always at the disposition of the mothers, and her
life, as a cultured and educated person, is a constant example to the
inhabitants of the house, for she is obliged to live in the tenement and
to be therefore a co-habitant with the families of all her little
pupils. This is a fact of immense importance. Among these almost savage
people, into these houses where at night no one dared go about unarmed,
there has come not only to teach, _but to live the very life they live_,
a gentlewoman of culture, an educator by profession, who dedicates her
time and her life to helping those about her! A true missionary, a moral
queen among the people, she may, if she be possessed of sufficient tact
and heart, reap an unheard-of harvest of good from her social work.
This house is verily _new_; it would seem a dream impossible of
realisation, but it has been tried. It is true that there have been
before this attempts made by generous persons to go and live among the
poor to civilise them. But such work is not practical, unless the house
of the poor is hygienic, making it possible for people of better
standards to live there. Nor can such work succeed in its purpose unless
some common advantage or interest unites all of the tenants in an effort
toward better things.
This tenement is new also because of the pedagogical organisation of the
"Children's House." This is not simply a place where the children are
kept, not just an _asylum_, but a true school for their education, and
its methods are inspired by the rational principles of scientific
pedagogy.
The physical development of the children is followed, each child being
studied from the anthropological standpoint. Linguistic exercises, a
systematic sense-training, and exercises which directly fit the child
for the duties of practical life, form the basis of the work done. The
teaching is decidedly objective, and presents an unusual richness of
didactic material.
It is not possible to speak of all this in detail. I must, however,
mention that there already exists in connection with the school a
bathroom, where the children may be given hot or cold baths and where
they may learn to take a partial bath, hands, face, neck, ears. Wherever
possible the Association has provided a piece of ground in which the
children may learn to cultivate the vegetables in common use.
It is important that I speak here of the pedagogical progress attained
by the "Children's House" as an institution. Those who are conversant
with the chief problems of the school know that to-day much attention is
given to a great principle, one that is ideal and almost beyond
realisation,--the union of the family and the school in the matter of
educational aims. But the family is always something far away from the
school, and is almost always regarded as rebelling against its ideals.
It is a species of phantom upon which the school can never lay its
hands. The home is closed not only to pedagogical progress, but often to
social progress. We see here for the first time the possibility of
realising the long-talked-of pedagogical ideal. We have put _the school
within the house_; and this is not all. We have placed it within the
house as the _property of the collectivity_, leaving under the eyes of
the parents the whole life of the teacher in the accomplishment of her
high mission.
This idea of the collective ownership of the school is new and very
beautiful and profoundly educational.
The parents know that the "Children's House" is their property, and is
maintained by a portion of the rent they pay. The mothers may go at any
hour of the day to watch, to admire, or to meditate upon the life
there. It is in every way a continual stimulus to reflection, and a
fount of evident blessing and help to their own children. We may say
that the mothers _adore_ the "Children's House," and the directress. How
many delicate and thoughtful attentions these good mothers show the
teacher of their little ones! They often leave sweets or flowers upon
the sill of the schoolroom window, as a silent token, reverently, almost
religiously, given.
And when after three years of such a novitiate, the mothers send their
children to the common schools, they will be excellently prepared to
co-operate in the work of education, and will have acquired a sentiment,
rarely found even among the best classes; namely, the idea that they
must _merit_ through their own conduct and with their own virtue, the
possession of an educated son.
Another advance made by the "Children's Houses" as an institution is
related to scientific pedagogy. This branch of pedagogy, heretofore,
being based upon the anthropological study of the pupil whom it is to
educate, has touched only a few of the positive questions which tend to
transform education. For a man is not only a biological but a social
product, and the social environment of individuals in the process of
education, is the home. Scientific pedagogy will seek in vain to better
the new generation if it does not succeed in influencing also the
environment within which this new generation grows! I believe,
therefore, that in opening the house to the light of new truths, and to
the progress of civilisation we have solved the problem of being able to
modify directly, the _environment_ of the new generation, and have thus
made it possible to apply, in a practical way, the fundamental
principles of scientific pedagogy.
The "Children's House" marks still another triumph; it is the first step
toward the _socialisation of the house_. The inmates find under their
own roof the convenience of being able to leave their little ones in a
place, not only safe, but where they have every advantage.
And let it be remembered that _all_ the mothers in the tenement may
enjoy this privilege, going away to their work with easy minds. Until
the present time only one class in society might have this advantage.
Rich women were able to go about their various occupations and
amusements, leaving their children in the hands of a nurse or a
governess. To-day the women of the people who live in these remodeled
houses, may say, like the great lady, "I have left my son with the
governess and the nurse." More than this, they may add, like the
princess of the blood, "And the house physician watches over them and
directs their sane and sturdy growth." These women, like the most
advanced class of English and American mothers, possess a "Biographical
Chart," which, filled for the mother by the directress and the doctor,
gives her the most practical knowledge of her child's growth and
condition.
We are all familiar with the ordinary advantages of the communistic
transformation of the general environment. For example, the collective
use of railway carriages, of street lights, of the telephone, all these
are great advantages. The enormous production of useful articles,
brought about by industrial progress, makes possible to all, clean
clothes, carpets, curtains, table-delicacies, better tableware, etc. The
making of such benefits generally tends to level social caste. All this
we have seen in its reality. But the communising of _persons_ is new.
That the collectivity shall benefit from the services of the servant,
the nurse, the teacher--this is a modern ideal.
We have in the "Children's Houses" a demonstration of this ideal which
is unique in Italy or elsewhere. Its significance is most profound, for
it corresponds to a need of the times. We can no longer say that the
convenience of leaving their children takes away from the mother a
natural social duty of first importance; namely, that of caring for and
educating her tender offspring. No, for to-day the social and economic
evolution calls the working-woman to take her place among wage-earners,
and takes away from her by force those duties which would be most dear
to her! The mother must, in any event, leave her child, and often with
the pain of knowing him to be abandoned. The advantages furnished by
such institutions are not limited to the labouring classes, but extend
also to the general middle-class, many of whom work with the brain.
Teachers, professors, often obliged to give private lessons after school
hours, frequently leave their children to the care, of some rough and
ignorant maid-of-all-work. Indeed, the first announcement of the
"Children's House" was followed by a deluge of letters from persons of
the better class demanding that these helpful reforms be extended to
their dwellings.
We are, then, communising a "maternal function," a feminine duty, within
the house. We may see here in this practical act the solving of many of
woman's problems which have seemed to many impossible of solution. What
then will become of the home, one asks, if the woman goes away from it?
The home will be transformed and will assume the functions of the woman.
I believe that in the future of society other forms of communistic life
will come.
Take, for example, the infirmary; woman is the natural nurse for the
dear ones of her household. But who does not know how often in these
days she is obliged to tear herself unwillingly from the bedside of her
sick to go to her work? Competition is great, and her absence from her
post threatens the tenure of the position from which she draws the means
of support. To be able to leave the sick one in a "house-infirmary," to
which she may have access any free moments she may have, and where she
is at liberty to watch during the night, would be an evident advantage
to such a woman.
And how great would be the progress made in the matter of family
hygiene, in all that relates to isolation and disinfection! Who does not
know the difficulties of a poor family when one child is ill of some
contagions disease, and should be isolated from the others? Often such a
family may have no kindred or friends in the city to whom the other
children may be sent.
Much more distant, but not impossible, is the communal kitchen, where
the dinner ordered in the morning is sent at the proper time, by means
of a dumb-waiter, to the family dining-room. Indeed, this has been
successfully tried in America. Such a reform would be of the greatest
advantage to those families of the middle-class who must confide their
health and the pleasures of the table to the hands of an ignorant
servant who ruins the food. At present, the only alternative in such
cases is to go outside the home to some cafe where a cheap table d'hote
may be had.
Indeed, the transformation of the house must compensate for the loss in
the family of the presence of the woman who has become a social
wage-earner.
In this way the house will become a centre, drawing into itself all
those good things which have hitherto been lacking: schools, public
baths, hospitals, etc.
Thus the tendency will be to change the tenement houses, which have been
places of vice and peril, into centres of education, of refinement, of
comfort. This will be helped if, besides the schools for the children,
there may grow up also _clubs_ and reading-rooms for the inhabitants,
especially for the men, who will find there a way to pass the evening
pleasantly and decently. The tenement-club, as possible and as useful in
all social classes as is the "Children's House," will do much toward
closing the gambling-houses and saloons to the great moral advantage of
the people. And I believe that the Association of Good Building will
before long establish such clubs in its reformed tenements here in the
Quarter of San Lorenzo; clubs where the tenants may find newspapers and
books, and where they may hear simple and helpful lectures.
We are, then, very far from the dreaded dissolution of the home and of
the family, through the fact that woman has been forced by changed
social and economic conditions to give her time and strength to
remunerative work. The home itself assumes the gentle feminine
attributes of the domestic housewife. The day may come when the tenant,
having given to the proprietor of the house a certain sum, shall receive
in exchange whatever is necessary to the _comfort_ of life; in other
words, the administration shall become the _steward_ of the family.
The house, thus considered, tends to assume in its evolution a
significance more exalted than even the English word "home" expresses.
It does not consist of walls alone, though these walls be the pure and
shining guardians of that intimacy which is the sacred symbol of the
family. The home shall become more than this. It lives! It has a soul.
It may be said to embrace its inmates with the tender, consoling arms
of woman. It is the giver of moral life, of blessings; it cares for, it
educates and feeds the little ones. Within it, the tired workman shall
find rest and newness of life. He shall find there the intimate life of
the family, and its happiness.
The new woman, like the butterfly come forth from the chrysalis, shall
be liberated from all those attributes which once made her desirable to
man only as the source of the material blessings of existence. She shall
be, like man, an individual, a free human being, a social worker; and,
like man, she shall seek blessing and repose within the house, the house
which has been reformed and communised.
She shall wish to be loved for herself and not as a giver of comfort and
repose. She shall wish a love free from every form of servile labour.
The goal of human love is not the egotistical end of assuring its own
satisfaction--it is the sublime goal of multiplying the forces of the
free spirit, making it almost Divine, and, within such beauty and light,
perpetuating the species.
This ideal love is made incarnate by Frederick Nietzsche, in the woman
of Zarathustra, who conscientiously wished her son to be better than
she. "Why do you desire me?" she asks the man. "Perhaps because of the
perils of a solitary life?
"In that case go far from me. I wish the man who has conquered himself,
who has made his soul great. I wish the man who has conserved a clean
and robust body. I wish the man who desires to unite with me, body and
soul, to create a son! A son better, more perfect, stronger, than any
created heretofore!"
To better the species consciously, cultivating his own health, his own
virtue, this should be the goal of man's married life. It is a sublime
concept of which, as yet, few think. And the socialised home of the
future, living, provident, kindly; educator and comforter; is the true
and worthy home of those human mates who wish to better the species, and
to send the race forward triumphant into the eternity of life!
RULES AND REGULATIONS OF THE "CHILDREN'S HOUSES"
The Roman Association of Good Building hereby establishes within its
tenement house number, a "Children's House," in which may be gathered
together all children under common school age, belonging to the families
of the tenants.
The chief aim of the "Children's House" is to offer, free of charge, to
the children of those parents who are obliged to absent themselves for
their work, the personal care which the parents are not able to give.
In the "Children's House" attention is given to the education, the
health, the physical and moral development of the children. This work is
carried on in a way suited to the age of the children.
There shall be connected with the "Children's House" a Directress, a
Physician, and a Caretaker.
The programme and hours of the "Children's House" shall be fixed by the
Directress.
There may be admitted to the "Children's House" all the children in the
tenement between the ages of three and seven.
The parents who wish to avail themselves of the advantages of the
"Children's House" pay nothing. They must, however, assume these binding
obligations:
(a) To send their children to the "Children's House" at the
appointed time, clean in body and clothing, and provided with
a suitable apron.
(b) To show the greatest respect and deference toward the
Directress and toward all persons connected with the
"Children's House," and to co-operate with the Directress
herself in the education of the children. Once a week, at
least, the mothers may talk with the Directress, giving her
information concerning the home life of the child, and
receiving helpful advice from her.
There shall be expelled from the "Children's House":
(a) Those children who present themselves unwashed, or in
soiled clothing.
(b) Those who show themselves to be incorrigible.
(c) Those whose parents fail in respect to the persons
connected with the "Children's House," or who destroy through
bad conduct the educational work of the institution.