perception facts which have been always familiar. The association of
child and servant is so old that it makes no impression on our
consciousness. It will, perhaps, bring out the relation more vividly
to change the sex of the servant. Suppose a man is left with boys to
educate. Suppose he engages a tutor for his boys. He is willing to pay
well for a man with the proper ability, character, and training to
come and benefit his children by instruction and association. Would
such a man be willing to engage a tutor who was also a janitor? Would
he be willing to spare the time required to fill the janitor's
position from the time required to fill the tutor's position? Or would
he be willing to engage a man who had so little fitness for the
profession of tutor as to be content to act as janitor also?
Again, in sending his boys to school to be educated, would a man be
willing to have that school also run as a restaurant, a laundry, and a
tailor shop? Would he think these industries and the society of the
persons engaged in them good educational influences? It is clear that
a man would not be willing to do these things. Yet all men cheerfully
intrust their children, during their most impressionable years, to the
society and care of domestic servants and the constant association
with domestic industries. In most cases the servant is also the
mother. In other cases the servant is not the mother. In either case
the child grows up in association with domestic servants and service.
Let us not too readily conclude that this is an evil, but examine it
carefully, in its physical and psychical effects. Physically, the
child is born into a certain kind of shop or factory. The conditions
of any labour in the home are particularly open to criticism; our
sweat-shop investigations show that in glaring instance. Intimate
associations with a trade, and especially a dirty or dangerous one,
does not seem advantageous to a child's health and progress. In nine
homes out of ten the child is directly associated with the trades of
his mother, who is a cook, a laundress, a cleaner in general; and the
baby is early accustomed to the fumes and heat of the kitchen, to
grease and ashes and dust, to all the kitchen-work, laundry-work,
chamber-work, and endless miscellaneous industries of his mother. In
the other tenth of our homes the child grows up a little removed, but
not far, from these same industries. They go on under his eyes none
the less, but with a certain ban upon them, as servant's work.
Any mother and housewife knows the complications continually arising
between children and servants. Early associations are deep and
lasting. Domestic servants are not, as a rule, either at all trained
in the right treatment of children or in such personal development of
character and manners as would make them desirable companions for the
young. Yet companions they are,--incessant, intimate, unavoidable.
The formative influence of a nurse-maid or of a maid-of-all-work is of
varying weight in different cases, but always a factor in the child's
development. The education of a child consists in every impression
received by the growing brain, not merely those received when we are
instructing it. We might give an hour a day to careful instruction in
good manners: we might ourselves be models of propriety; but, if the
child is also in the society of conspicuously ill-mannered persons
every day, an effect will surely be produced by them.
It may be suggested that an end is to be attained through exhibiting
the deficiencies of servants, and exhorting the child to despise them,
as the Spartans used the Helots for an awful example; but, even if
this were gained, there would follow with it a spirit of scorn and
contempt for fellow-creatures most injurious to true social
development.
A little child should be surrounded with the best influences of all
sorts, and with behaviour not to avoid, but to imitate. The long
period of immaturity, which is one of our human distinctions, has its
value in the accumulated improvements which may be built into the race
in that time. It is a period of enrichment, of clear growth. To expose
the young to disadvantageous conditions, especially the very young, is
a method of education finding no precedent in nature and no
justification in reason. The adult, with developed powers, may find in
some degree of difficulty a stimulus to further effort; and, if
confronted with injurious conditions, may strive the harder to escape
or change them. But the new person, the child, has no background. He
can make no comparisons. He accepts his first environment
unquestioningly as "the world"; it is all the world he knows. For the
very reason that we were all born and reared in the domestic factory,
we find it hard to imagine any other conceivable surroundings for a
young human being to meet life in. We have accepted it without dream
of criticism.
Yet in physical conditions alone the household industries furnish a
large and constant element of danger to the child. A most casual
retrospect of the accidents common to childhood, which so shock us in
the daily press, show this with startling clearness. Children suffer
from accidents by fire, by boiling water, by sharp instruments, by
injurious substances taken into the stomach. The industry of cooking
alone involves the free use of fire, a constant succession of hot
products, many sharp instruments for cutting and stabbing, and various
food elements healthful in combination,--but often injurious when
taken separately by one ignorant of their nature. The kitchen and the
laundry are responsible for many horrible and sudden deaths among
young children, and many more painful accidents.
Given the essential ignorance and as essential experiments of
childhood, and we may well wonder how it has so long seemed good to us
to bring up our babies among such large chances of danger. If we
reared them in stables, we should expect them to be kicked
occasionally; if we placed them in saw-mills, we should look for some
deficit in fingers; and a child in a cook-shop has his steady average
risk of injury by fire, steel, or poison; in the laundry, the added
chance of drowning. Apart from these main sources of danger, he finds
in sweeping, dusting, and all the uncounted activities of household
toil much that is detrimental to health and safety.
To avoid these dangers, our first effort has been to train the child
to a prompt and instant obedience, such as conditions of imminent
danger and military rule alone can justify, and also to check his
natural and most valuable tendency to investigate and experiment. The
labours of the household must go on: economic laws are peremptory; and
the servant, who is educating the baby so unconsciously, cannot stop
work to explain or illustrate.
On the contrary, the very presence of the child is inimical to the
proper performance of these imperative industries; and the flushed and
hurried servant cries: "Run away now. Mamma's busy!" Where is the
child to run to? This is home. When is mamma not busy? To properly
perform the household labour of an average family, which is of five
persons in an average house,--say of six rooms,--takes ten hours a
day of swift, intelligent, skilled labour. During what part of this
time can the household labourer give due attention to the child? Or is
it sufficient education to watch a servant at work, and to help a
little when one is old enough?
If the industries involved were properly divided, specialized, and
developed, much that is valuable might be gathered from their
observation, and from guarded experiment, by children who are old
enough. A child can receive valuable instruction in a woollen-mill or
a blacksmith shop, but it does not follow that these places are
suitable as nurseries. The lack of any true educational value in the
position is sufficiently shown by the ceaseless centuries of ignorance
in these very trades. All women, for all time, reared in this intimate
association with domestic service and domestic servants, have failed
to work out any better grade of performance than that which still
furnishes the staple of conversation among them.
It is quite evident, from the results so painfully visible around us,
that the education of our children by house-servants developes neither
general intelligence nor special proficiency. The intellectual
progress of humanity has shown close connection with the extension of
industry in larger lines, with a growing specialisation, a wider
distribution, and, of course, with the beautiful growth in special
methods of education. But this kitchen education, though we have
enjoyed its advantages for so long, does not seem to show good
results.
The educational value of the mother seems not to be in proportion to
her occupation as a house-servant, but the reverse. It would seem that
our children grow in intelligence and good behaviour rather in spite
of the domestic industries than because of them. Any mother who is
awake to the limitless possibilities of child-culture, and who begins
to work out some well-considered plan for its pursuance, knows the
ceaseless interruptions of her efforts, and the peremptory
monopolisation of her time, by the demands of household labour. So
far, with true womanly patience,--a patience which ceased to be a
virtue some years ago,--she has accepted the condition as inevitable,
and plodded on, consoling herself with a "day unto day" philosophy,
and with "doing the best she could"; and many moralists consoled her,
saying, "Blessed be drudgery!" Drudgery has a certain value, no doubt.
It developes certain characteristics; namely, those of a competent and
contented drudge. The question raised here is merely whether this kind
of work and the characteristics developed by it are suitable
educational associations for young children.
What are the qualities developed by house-service? Let us suppose that
we are all, fathers as well as mothers, occupied solely in household
labour. The effect may be studied from one point of view in those
countries where there are more men-servants than with us, and where
the profession is sometimes followed for generations. The typical
character of a butler or footman, a parlour-maid, cook, or general
servant, may be traced through all personal variation. Given any sort
of person, and put him or her through a lifetime of domestic service,
and certain characteristics appear, modified to a large degree by
personality, but typical none the less.
This palpable result of house-service is familiar to us all, and not
desired in ourselves or our children. Admitting all personal good
qualities in the individual servant, that in his bearing which
distinguishes it from the bearing we call "soldierly" or "gentlemanly"
or even "business-like" is the natural result of his form of
labour,--of personal domestic service. Where the purpose of action is
to serve one individual or a very few individuals,--and this not so
much in ministering to general needs as in catering to personal
tastes,--those who thus labour are checked in development by the
measure of the tastes they serve. That is the restrictive tendency,
resisted according to personal power and ability, but always producing
some result. A race of men who were one and all contented to be
butlers and footmen would not give as noble a fatherhood as the world
needs; and a race of women who are contented to be cooks and
housemaids do not give as noble a motherhood as the world needs.
Sharp exception will, no doubt, be taken to the use of the word
"servant" to designate the nine out of ten women who "do their own
work." There is a difference, we freely admit. They do the same work
in the same way, but they have different motives. They do it from a
sense of duty, oft-times, instead of a desire for wages; for they get
no wages. They do it simply because they have to, sometimes, feeling
it to be merely a disagreeable necessity. They do it from a more
direct self-interest than the servant, as well as from a greater
self-sacrifice. Few, very few women love it, and continue to do it a
day beyond the time when their husbands can afford to hire another
woman.
Whatever the "moral quality" of intention and the value of one's
"frame of mind," the reactive effect of one's daily labour is
inexorable. No matter how high and holy the purpose of the toiling
housewife, no matter whether she glories in her task or hates it, her
brain is daily modified by its kind of exercise as surely as her
fingers are greased by the dish-water, cracked by the soap-suds, and
calloused by the broom. The amount of labour and care required to run
a household comfortably is not small. It takes no mean intelligence to
administer a home. So does it require intelligence, labour, and care
to run a retail dry-goods shop or a railroad train. The point to study
is whether this particular species of labour and care is conducive to
the best child-culture. Can the average woman successfully manage the
mingled industries of her household and the education of her children?
It may be replied at once, with some triumph, "Yes, she does!" To
which we merely rejoin, "Does she?" We know that the household
industries are carried on in some fashion; and that children grow up
amid them (such of them as do not die), and are--when grown--the kind
of people we see about us.
People did live and rear children in caves, in tents, in huts, in
feudal castles. It is a question not of the bare possibility of
maintaining the race, but of the relative advantages of methods of
culture. Our rate of infant mortality is shamefully large, and due
mainly to what physicians term "preventable diseases." It is quite
open to discussion whether those diseases are not often traceable to
the insanitary conditions of household labour, and their continued
prevalence to the limitations of the kitchen-bred intellects of
nine-tenths of our mothers.
No human being, be she never so much a mother, can be in two places at
once or do full justice to several varied functions with one
distracted brain. That the mother comes so near it in many cases is a
splendid tribute to the power of love; that she fails in such degree
is no reproach to her, so long as she is unable to alter the
industrial conditions under which her motherhood is restricted.
Now that economic progress makes it possible to introduce new and wide
improvements, the mother does become responsible, if she fails to see
and take advantage of the change. Our complex and ill-developed
household labours tend to produce certain special mental capacities in
those who perform them. The housewife must hold in mind the entire
contents of the home,--all its furnishing, decorations, utensils, and
supplies. She must keep a running account of stock, and make good the
incessant and irregular deficiencies of linen-closet, wardrobe,
cupboard, and pantry, as well as the wear and tear on the machinery
and furnishings. This developes one order of brain,--the
administrative. The house-servant must exhibit skill in several
distinct trades, and a swift facility for disconnecting the mind and
readjusting it as promptly. This developes another order of
brain,--the executive,--the development seriously hindered in special
perfection by the attendant facility for disconnection. Neither of
these mental powers is that of the educator, especially the educator
of babies.
The capacity for subtle, long-continued, nicely balanced observation
in lines of psychic development; the ever-present, delicate sympathy
which knows the moment to suggest and the hour to refrain,--these
mental attributes belong neither to the administrative nor to the
executive ability. We find in the maternal dealings with children,
when conspicuously efficient, precisely what should be expected of
the expert manager and skilful servant. The children are well managed
and well served, but they are not well educated.
When the mother--the housewife-mother, the servant-mother--begins to
look into educational processes, she is appalled. It is easy to show
her, if she has a clear and at all educated mind, what conditions
would be best for babies, what kind of observation and treatment; but
she knows full well that she cannot furnish these conditions. She has
neither place, time, strength, skill, nor training for this delicate
and careful method. Her work--her daily, hourly inexorable work--fills
the place, consumes the time, exhausts the strength, does not develope
the skill, and prevents the training of the educator. Many mothers do
not even recognise the possibility of better methods, and strenuously
resent the suggestion that they are not doing all that could be done.
They resent even the kindergarten, many of them. The relatively slow
progress of the kindergarten method is as good a proof as could be
offered of the lack of educational perception among mothers. They are
willing to "serve" their children endlessly,--wait on them, wash,
sweep, and cook for them. They are willing to "manage" their children
carefully and conscientiously, and do not recognise the need of better
educational treatment for babies. This attitude is a perfectly natural
result of the reaction of the absorbing household industries on the
mind of the mother. Her interest is eager and alert in all that
concerns the material management of the family, from wall-paper and
carpets to some new variety of hose-supporter,--down to the least
detail of decoration on an embroidered muslin cap for the baby.
In any matter of greater beauty or economy, or in some cases of
sanitary improvement, the housewife-mother's mind is open. In
indefatigable zeal in direct service--no task too difficult, too long,
too tedious--the servant-mother's hand is ever-ready. But the same
devoted, loving, conscientious mother will fail appallingly to keep in
touch with the mind-growth of the baby; will often neglect and even
seriously injure its development in what is, after all, the main
field of human life. The young human being needs far more than to be
fed and clothed and waited on, however lovingly; or even than to be
taught in schools in a few set lines of study.
We have made splendid progress in external things, in material forms
and methods of production and distribution. We have travelled far and
deep in scientific study, climbed high in art, and grown through grand
religions. Our one great need--a need that grows daily greater in the
vivid light of these swift-moving years--is for a better kind of
people. The progress in human character does not keep pace with our
external improvement. We are not trained in the right management of
our own faculties; and come out of "the home" into "the world" well
fed enough, well dressed enough, but with such unkempt, unbuttoned,
dangling strings of neglected character as bespeaks the orphan soul.
Ask any mother to describe her children's complexion, costume, and
tastes in eating. She will do it glibly, profusely, and with feeling.
Johnny would never touch meat till he was ten; Maud would eat nothing
else; Jessie could never bear potatoes. Maud was very near-sighted.
She had early taken her to an oculist. She would probably have to wear
glasses always. Jessie was so hard on shoes. She used two pairs to
Maud's one,--even worse than Johnny. Now ask her to describe the
distinctive mental characteristics of each, at what age they
developed, and what measures she has taken from year to year to check
Jessie's personal vanity, to increase Maud's courage, to develope
patience in Johnny. Ask her what she has tried for croup, and she will
discourse freely. Ask her what she has tried for the gradual reduction
of self-consciousness, and she looks puzzled.
The human race is capable of beautiful development in character, as we
see in occasional instances. That such beautiful development is
largely assisted by right education, especially in the very first
years, is proven by a thousand experiments. That most of us grow up
without any intelligent psychic training, without wise attention and
skilful care in soul-growth, is but too evident. Better education for
the young of the human race, that education which the child never
knows of, but which surrounds him with helpful influences from his
first consciousness, is an imperative need.
Some attempt at this work is made by all conscientious mothers, and
wonderful success is sometimes attained by a mother of special genius
for child-culture (and who, by the way, is seldom distinguished as a
housekeeper); but our general average in humaniculture is low. Nothing
in the range of human effort is more important than the right
education of children, which means the improvement of the race. The
first years are of special value, the first influences and
associations of pre-eminent importance.
If the household industries are incompatible with the best
child-culture, they should be withdrawn from the household,
specialised and professionalised like all the other industries once
considered essentially domestic. When a broader intelligence is
brought to bear on our infancy, when we do not grow up under the
unavoidable assumption that the principal business of life is to "keep
house," there will be a better chance for the growth of those civic
virtues so pitifully lacking in us now. So many marks of progress in
these lines are now evident that any intelligent woman can see the way
open before her. The public laundry is sapping the foundations of our
domestic industry; the "Domestic Service Bureau" is beginning to
furnish skilled labour by the hour; the "Prepared Food Association" is
solving another problem. The way out of these household difficulties
is opening fast. It needs only a fuller recognition among women of the
value of this change to bring it in with greater rapidity and success.
For the sake of our children let us free the home from its archaic
industries.
XIV.
MOTHERS, NATURAL AND UNNATURAL.
We use the word "natural" in many senses,--sometimes with warm
approval, as indicating that which is best; sometimes with
disapproval, as low and discreditable.
"Natural affection" is one familiar phrase, and "unnatural monster"
another, which show a firm belief in the rightness of the working laws
of the universe.
On the other hand, the whole story of human development lies in
changing those conditions and habits which were once natural to the
slow, laborious, hard-won advantages of civilisation. "The natural
man" or man "in a state of nature" is a remote ancestor; and we do not
allow unchecked freedom to animal passions and appetites among us on
the ground that they are "natural."
It is natural to take revenge for injuries; it is natural to eat too
much; it is natural to be too careless in youth and too cautious in
old age. "Natural" means according to the laws of nature; and the laws
of nature have a wide and long range.
In applying the word to any one creature, we have to limit it by time
and circumstance. It is natural for an absolutely wild creature, which
has never seen man, not to be afraid of him. It is natural for the
same creature, when hunted, to fear man, and shun him. If long tamed,
like the cat and dog, it is natural to come trustfully to the
well-known friend.
Nature is essentially changeful. Its laws remain the same, but the
interaction of those laws produces ever-varying results. "The nature"
of any given creature varies with its circumstances,--give it
time,--as in the above case of the dog and cat; but the whole scale of
behaviour is "natural" in its place and time. "A state of nature" is
not a period with an exact date, nor any one grade of conduct. That
conduct which is most advantageous to a creature under given
circumstances is natural. The only conduct which is "unnatural" would
be that which was exhibited in contradiction to the laws of nature, if
such were possible.
In this sense an ascetic life is unnatural, as meaning destruction to
the individual and race; but, in the sense that the ascetic fondly
believes he is acting for his ultimate benefit, his conduct is
"natural," after all.
A wild rose is "natural," a garden rose or hot-house rose is
"cultivated," a velvet rose on a bonnet is "artificial." Yet it is as
natural for man to cultivate and imitate for his own good pleasure as
for a bee to store honey. When we were in what we usually call "a
state of nature," we did not keep clean, wear clothes, go to school or
to church. Yet cleanliness and clothing, education and religion, are
natural products of "human nature."