Good workers are trained in the home, the school, the shop, the wider
world. Every home is an industrial establishment. In it go on the
industrial processes of cooking, cleaning, sewing, washing; the care of
silver, glass, linen, and household stores; the activities of buying
food and clothing; the moral responsibilities of teaching and training
servants and children. If any healthy member of the home is excused from
at least some form of active work, he will inevitably be a shirker when
he grows up. Cannot almost all the problems of human training be run
down to this: How to teach a child to work? If he can work, he can be
happy; but if he does not want to work, he shall never be happy. No
work, no joy, is the universal dictum.
This is the great hardship of the children of great wealth: they are not
taught to work. To avoid this difficulty, in two very wealthy families
that I know, the boys were even obliged to darn their own stockings and
mend their own clothes. One young hopeful once tore his clothes
a-fishing, and mended his trousers with a scarlet flannel patch! Some
mothers do not allow their little girls to go to school until their beds
are made up and their rooms in order. Other equally wise parents have
tools in the house, and allow the boys to do all the repair work, the
daughters all the family mending, or to care for the linen; the boys to
put in electric fixtures and bells, and keep the batteries in order.
Queen Margherita of Italy, Queen Elizabeth of Roumania, Queen Alexandra
of England, and the Empress Augusta of Germany are all women who have
been from their childhood acquainted with simple and practical household
tasks. This principle is a right one and underlies much after-success.
Each child should, first of all, have a mastery of home-tasks. Then,
whether on the prairie or in the palace, he is free and independent.
What makes the differences in the social privileges given to one class
of workers above another? In reality, we are all workers. No one ought
to live, if in health, who does not work. But for some forms of work,
men and women receive an income, and nothing more. For other work, men
and women may or may not receive a large personal income, but their work
is recognized, they are a part of the best social circles, and when they
die, a city or a nation grieves.
The essential difference is this: that one is honor-work, and one is
not. Wherever in the world work is done in a spirit of love and
fidelity, it brings its own reward in recognition and in personal
affection. Sooner or later, honor-work receives honor.
Another reason for exaltation of one form of work above another, is
that some kinds of work are so very hard to do. They involve the intense
and complicated action of many and of complex powers. It may be hard
physical work to break stones for a road-way, but the task itself is a
simple one--the lifting of the arm and dropping it again with sufficient
force to split a rock apart. But the writing of a prose masterpiece,
such as the _Areopagitica_, involves the highest human faculties in
harmonious action. If we add to the requirements of prose, the rhythm,
the exalted imagery, and perhaps the assonance and rhyme of verse, we
still further increase the difficulty of the task, and the honor of its
successful achievement. The king-work of a powerful monarch, the
president-work of a republican leader, is serious work to do. Our honor
is not all given to the king or president income, salary, or office; it
is a tribute to hard and royal-minded work.
Household service is personal service. It cannot be made a thing of set
hours, and of measurably set tasks, as office-work maybe. We may talk of
"eight-hour shifts," but they are scarcely practicable. Not every baby
would go to successive "shifts"! House-demands vary, not only with every
household, but with every day.
When love-making is wholly scientific, then domestic service will be.
There is in it the same delicate personal adjustment, the changing
requirements of weather, health, temper, and season, of emergency and
stress, that are to be found in the most purely personal relation. When
there is a period of unusual sickness through the community, not only
the doctors have extra tasks, but all household servants as well.
What social recognition can be given to servants who lie, steal, who
shirk every duty that can be shirked, and who are both incompetent and
unfaithful? The here-and-there one faithful helper receives her meed of
appreciation and affection. The whole aspect of household work will
change when honor-work is given: when home-helpers come up to us, from
the truthful and honor-loving class.
The school-room is the place in which the principles of work are
implanted: thoroughness, grasp, speed, decision, and definite purpose.
The shop is the apprentice-place of work, before one takes up individual
responsibilities. The man who wishes to rise in the railroad service
goes into the shops and roundhouse. The man who wishes to take charge of
an important department in a department store is put to tying packages.
Teachers' work will not be rightly done until certain advantages are
given to teachers that are now largely withheld. Teachers need more
society, more hours of play, freer opportunity of marriage. Instead of
being tied up to exercise-books and roll-books, in their home-hours,
they should have a chance to spend their time on the golf-links, at
afternoon teas, in visiting and in entertaining friends. Take away
society from any man or woman, and you take away the possibility of a
growing, happy, and helpful life. We need friends just as we need air.
Teachers need admiration and affection, just as much as the society
girl does.
Universities should have, in their faculties, men and women who
represent the best social as well as the best intellectual life of the
world--who are not only, in the highest sense of the word, society men
and women, but who are social leaders, inspiring truth, inculcating
larger social ideals of the best sort.
The problem between capitalist and laborer, however, only affects a
portion of the world; that of domestic service a still smaller
proportion; that of teachers affects only a class. There is another
problem, which affects nearly all married women, and therefore a large
section of the human race. It is the problem of mother-work. Here is
where the economist should next turn his attention. First, What is
Mother-work? Second, What are the best economic conditions under which
this work can be done? When we have solved this question, we shall have
solved a great human problem.
Mother-work includes the bearing and the rearing of children, the
conduct of a home, and the placing of that home in the right social
atmosphere and relations. It includes manual, intellectual, and
spiritual labors. The one who lives and works, as God meant her to live
and work, will never feel over-fatigue. Why do mothers often look so
tired? It is because they too often do not have what every mother ought
to have: education, rest, change, a Sabbath-day, individual income,
intellectual interests, society.
Whether in the simplest home or in the stateliest, there are certain
manual things to be done in regard to the care and bringing-up of
children, and the conduct of a home. To make the conditions of a woman's
life easier, the very first thing is this: 1. _Women should be educated
primarily for home-life._ By this I do not mean that a woman should be
taught cooking, and not political economy; that she should be instructed
in dressmaking and nursery-work, but not in chemistry and logic. I mean
that the very fullest education that schools, colleges, universities,
and foreign travel can give, should be given to the woman who is
fortunate enough to have them at command, and that every woman,
according to the degree of her possibilities of education and
opportunity, should have the best. But always this education should be
thought of as a part of her preparation for a woman's life. When boys
are in a business college, the principal of that college does not forget
that among the boys there may be more than one who will never have a
business life, but who will go out into other interests and pursuits.
Yet he turns the thoughts of _all_ boys in his school specially toward
business problems. In schools and colleges for women, not all the girls
will marry, not all will be mothers, but most of them will be. Is not,
then, the normal education of a woman that which, while it does not
cramp her life in one direction, nor mould her in a set way, yet keeps
always in mind the fact that the normal woman is being educated for a
normal woman's life?
This would not necessarily change the curriculum of our colleges in any
way; it would change the spirit and atmosphere of some of them at once.
Instead of the spirit being: "My mind is just as good as a man's. What a
man can study, I can learn! What a man can do, I can do!"--the spirit
would be this: "I am going out into a woman's life, and it is my
business now to take to myself all the wisdom, counsel, experience, and
inspiration of past ages, that I may be the very grandest woman that
history has yet seen! I will be a land-mark in time: I will be a pivot
in history around which the earth shall turn. Because of my life, women
to the end of time shall be able to live a truer, freer, better life!"
With this thought in mind, all the academic subjects would still pass
into her mind and life, but they would be much more naturally set and
their value would be greatly enhanced. Then we would not have the
too-ambitious woman stepping out of college, or the restless and
discontented one. We would have the large-minded, earnest, noble,
public-spirited one, who would go out into the world as a fine type of
woman, to live a woman's life and do a woman's work. Married or
unmarried, she would still have a woman's interests, a woman's
influence, a woman's charm.
This higher education may or may not include practical studies in
domestic science, nursing, and household emergencies, but she should
learn somewhere the elements of these studies, so that when she goes
into a home of her own her duties and responsibilities will not be met
in a half-hearted and untrained way.
2. Mothers should have rest-hours and rest-days. Is it not something
extraordinary, from a purely economic point of view, that while it is
widely recognized that every one should have one day in seven for rest,
that while business men are expected to close up their offices on the
Sabbath, and all working men and women are given this day in the stores,
the factories, and mines--the cook and maids have their Sundays out, and
their week-day afternoons--that nowhere on earth, so far as I know, has
there ever been a systematic arrangement by which mothers, as a class,
have any specially arranged hours or days for rest! A baby's care does
not stop on the Sabbath, and the average mother is practically on duty,
at least over-seeing, day and night, twenty-four hours out of the
twenty-four, from one end of the year to the other, no matter how many
maids and nurses she may have in her employ!
3. Personal income and its use. What we buy marks our own individuality,
as well as what we do. The woman whose father or husband adjusts her
expenses and expenditures cannot by any possibility be the kind of woman
that the one is who chooses her own things, and spends her money
absolutely to suit herself. When a man buys cigars or fishing-tackle,
his wife may prefer to buy oratorios and golf-clubs.
4. Mothers should have some interest outside of home-tasks, to keep them
in touch with world-interests and world-tasks. Not all mother's duty is
inside the four walls of her home. The race has demands upon her, as
well as her own child. She ought to be guarded from that short-sighted
and selfish devotion which makes her look upon her child as the centre
of the universe, and which leads her to sacrifice every hour, every
thought, every talent, to him alone.
5. Building up the place of a home in a community means much more than a
rivalry with one's neighbors, as to which one shall have the cleanest
house, the prettiest or most expensive curtains and furniture, who shall
entertain the most, and whose children shall present the best appearance
in the world! Making a social place for a family involves a very wide
acquaintance with really great social ideals; with the best instincts
and customs; with world refinement and manners, as well as those of
one's own town or village--with the social possibilities of life in
general, as well as the etiquette of Quinton's Corners! To give the
right stamp upon her home, a mother must have a social life, as well as
domestic one. She must have time to enter somewhat into the activities
of her own neighborhood, and must have society after marriage, as well
as before.
It is a different sort of society that she then needs. It is not a
boy-and-girl society, with its crude ways, and its adolescent ideas of
life. It is the society of earnest, cultured, and public-spirited men
and women, each of whom is adding something to the general store of
interest and ideals; each of whom is doing some phase of social work,
according to his own talent and opportunity.
When a mother steps out into life in this large way, makes education and
training tributary to her mother-life, and does not stop growing
intellectually or spiritually,--her charm as a woman increases, instead
of diminishes, every year of her married life. Her looks mark her
everywhere as a supremely happy woman, and she goes out into the world
marked with that strange, deep, grand impress of motherhood and
womanhood, which has always made the true woman not only a
working-mother, but a love-crowned queen!
These and many other thoughts flit over one's mind in looking at any
phase of work, or any piece of work. In the right choice of work lies
the fullest use of one's capacities; in the right conditions of work
lies the freest play of one's energies; in the right spirit of work lies
the way of one's lasting happiness, and the foretaste of eternal joys.
Thus the world is seen to consist of great cycles of workers, rising in
tiers one above another. Those who do not work are quickly cut out from
all participation in race-progress and in race-delights; those who work
earnestly, but blindly, have their small reward. But those who work with
spiritual energy and enthusiasm are weaving their handiwork into the
very fibre of the universal frame. It is for these spiritual workers
that the great eagerness of life is undying; for them there is no shadow
of fatigue; for them there is the joy of mastery and accomplishment; for
them the peace of soul that comes from the triumphant achievement of
one's mission to mankind!