The Home
THE HOME
“The Woman’s Place”
By The Hon. Mrs. Arthur Lyttleton
(English contemporary. The following is taken from “Women and Their
Work.”)
“The woman’s place is the home.”
Such is a very common reply to those who propound any new schemes for
educating or helping women. No one would deny the statement. It is true
that those who make it sometimes forget that now-a-days a considerable
number of women have no homes, and that therefore the remark by no means
meets the whole case.
The Spirit of the Home
By Lucy Re Bartlett
(English contemporary. Author of “Toward Liberty,” from which the
following is taken.)
By all means let most women choose the home for their sphere, if they
will, and even severely avoid politics for the moment, if they be so
minded. But whether in the home, or outside it, let all women consider
well what be the spirit they are bringing into life—whether it be one
which liberates and uplifts, or one which makes, instead, for bondage.
Lovers of Home
By Dr. Anna Howard Shaw
(In “The Metropolitan Magazine.”)
Every suffragist I have ever met has been a lover of home; and only the
conviction that she is fighting for her home, her children, for other
women, for all of these, has sustained her in her public work.
Woman’s High Achievement
By Selma Lagerlof
(Swedish contemporary. Prominent in literary and progressive circles.
From an address delivered before the Sixth Congress of the International
Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm, entitled “Woman the Savior of the State.”)
Have women done nothing which entitles us to equal rights with man? Our
time on earth has been long—as long as his. Have we created nothing of
incontestable worth to life and civilization? Besides this, that we have
brought human beings into the world, have we contributed nothing of use
to mankind?... I look at paintings and engravings, pictures of old women,
of olden times. Their faces are haggard and stern; their hands rough and
bony. They had their struggles and their interests. What have they done?
I place myself before Rembrandt’s old peasant woman, she of the thousand
wrinkles in her intelligent face, and I ask myself why she lived?
Certainly not to be worshipped by many men, not to rule a state, not to
win a scholar’s degree! And yet the work to which she devoted herself
could not have been of a trivial nature. She did not go through life
stupid and shallow! The glances of men and women rest rather upon her
aged countenance than upon that of the fairest young beauty. Her life
must have had a meaning.
We all know what the old woman will reply to my question. We read the
answer in her calm and kindly smile: “All that I did was to make a good
home.”
And look you! That is what the women would answer if they could rise
from their graves generation after generation, thousands upon thousands,
millions upon millions: “All that we strove for was to make a good home.”
We know that if we were to ask the men, could we line them up, generation
after generation, thousands and millions in succession, it would not
occur to one of them to say that he had lived for the purpose of making a
good home....
We know that it is needless to seek further. We should find nothing. Our
gift to humanity is the home—that, and nothing else....
For the home we have been great; for the home we have been petty. Not
many of us have stood with Christina Gyllenstierna on the walls of
Stockholm and defended a city; still fewer of us have gone forth with
Jeanne D’Arc to battle for the Fatherland. But if the enemy approached
our own gate, we stood there with broom and dish rag, with the sharp
tongue and clawing hand, ready to fight to the last in defense of our
creation, the home. And this little structure which has cost us so much
effort, is it a success or a failure? Is this woman’s contribution to
civilization inconsiderable or valuable? Is it appreciated or despised?
Woman’s Sphere the Home
By Helen Keller
(From “Out of the Dark.”[4])
(See page 209)
Woman’s sphere _is_ the home, and the home, too, is the sphere of man.
The home embraces everything we strive for in this world. To get and
maintain a decent home is the object of all our best endeavors. But what
is the home? What are its boundaries? What does it contain? What must we
do to secure and protect it?
In olden times the home was a private factory.... Home and industrial
life were one.... Once the housewife made her own butter and baked her
own bread; she even sowed, reaped, threshed, and ground the wheat. Now
her churn has been removed to great cheese and butter factories. The
village mill, where she used to take her corn, is today in Minneapolis;
her sickle is in Dakota. Every morning the express company delivers her
loaves to the local grocer from a bakery that employs a thousand hands.
The men who inspect her winter preserves are chemists in Washington. Her
ice box is in Chicago. The men in control of her pantry are bankers in
New York. The leavening of bread is somehow dependent upon the culinary
science of congressmen, and the washing of milk cans is a complicated art
which legislative bodies, composed of lawyers, are trying to teach the
voting population on the farms.
It would take a modern woman a lifetime to walk across her kitchen floor;
and to keep it clean is an Augean labor. No wonder that she sometimes
shrinks from the task and joins the company of timid, lazy women who do
not want to vote. But she _must_ manage her home; for, no matter how
grievously incompetent she may be, there is no one else authorized or
able to manage it for her. She _must_ secure for her children clean food
at honest prices. Through all the changes of industry and government she
remains the baker of bread, the minister of the universal sacrament of
life.
[4] Doubleday Page & Co.
Woman and the Primitive Home
By Mrs. St. Clair Stobart
(See page 144)
(From “War and Woman.”)
In the days when such proverbs as “The woman, the cat and the chimney
should never leave the house”, “_Bonne femme est oiseau de cage_”, “A
wife and a broken leg are best left at home”, were current in every
household, there was some reason why women should remain at home. For
_within the home_ were conducted—by women—all the industries of life.
In those days women not only made jams and pickles, cured the hams and
bacon, concocted wines and medicines, they also designed and embroidered
all the curtains, tapestries and carpets; the making of beautiful
laces, the spinning, the weaving, the sewing and the knitting of all
the garments was committed to the charge of women. In those days when
the control of all that made life worth living was with woman, she did
not need, nor did she seek, outside occupations, which indeed consisted
chiefly of the less intellectual pursuits of hunting and fishing. There
was plenty of scope _within_ doors for the intellectual, industrial,
and artistic faculties of every active-minded woman. If it is true that
woman was more honored at that time when she remained indoors than she is
now, this was _not because_ she remained at home, but because all the
arts and crafts of life were in her hands—_within the home_. But now all
this is changed, through no fault of the woman herself, and, except for
the young wife and mother who has plenty of occupation in the rearing of
her family, there is not enough work _within the home_ for additional
active-minded and able-bodied women, the numerous daughters, sisters,
cousins, aunts, who need occupation, but who have no family of their own
because there are not enough men to go round.
The Poor and Good Housing
By Elizabeth Cook
(From Speech on “Housing and Morals in Richmond.” Quoted from “Woman’s
Work in Municipalities.”)
Can children raised in Jail Bottom, whose only outlook is a mountain-like
dump of rotting and rusty tin cans on the one side, and on the other a
stream which is an open sewer, smelling to heaven from the filth which
it carries along, or leaves here and there in slime upon its banks,
have any but debasing ideas? Can parents inculcate high moral standards
when across the street or down the block are houses of the “red light”
district? Is the world so small that there is no room left for the
amenities of life? Are ground space and floor space of more value than
cleanliness and health and morality?... It is certainly a fallacy that
the poor do not want good housing.
Where She Lived
By Mrs. John Van Vorst
(American contemporary writer on Child Labor Problems. The following is
taken from her book, “The Cry of the Children.”)
The cotton-mill “folks” wear unwittingly a badge which distinguishes
them far and wide. As I came along down over the hillside I met a child
holding in her arms another smaller child; both were covered, their hair,
their clothes, their very eyelids, with fine flakes of lint, wisps of
cotton, fibres of the great web in which the factories imprison their
victims.
“Hello,” I said, “do you work in the mill?”
“Yes, meaum.” The voice was gentle and the manner friendly. And giving
a sidewise hitch to the baby, who had a tendency to slip from her tiny
mother’s arms, this little worker showed me one of her fingers done up in
a loose, dirty bandage.
“I cut my finger right smart,” she drawled, “so I’m takin’ a day off.”
“How old are you?”
“Tweaulve.”
“Got any brothers or sisters?”
“I’ve got him.... And I’ve got one brother in the mill.”
“How old is he?”
“Tweaulve.”
“Twins?” I asked.
She smiled and shook her head. “He’s tweaulve in the mill, and he’s
teayun outside.”
This little bit of humanity, taking a day off as mother of a still tinier
being, seemed a promising sponsor, and I suggested that we walk along
together. She could not go to the mill with me, she explained, without
first consulting her mother, so we proceeded to the settlement in which
she lodged, along with eighty or a hundred families, who man the mill in
which she was a hand.
“That’s where we live.”
Her fleet little bare feet picked a way deftly over the stony path, and
she kept a hand free—when it was not laid on the baby’s back—to point
out the turns in the road that led to “where she lived.” Her home was
one of a group of frame one-story houses, perched on a slant of ground.
Each house was encircled by a wooden veranda, and the order of the
housekeeping described itself before the eyes, as a whisk of the broom
which carried all the dirt from the kitchen onto the porch, and another
whisk which landed it on the slant of ground, bedecked, in consequence,
with old tin cans, decayed vegetables, pieces of dirty paper, rags and
chicken feathers.
It was to the more intimate quarters, however, that I penetrated with my
guide. The inside court, or square upon which these “homes” opened their
back doors, was a large mud puddle overhung with the collective wash
of the neighborhood. In and out of the mud puddle wallowed the younger
members of the mill families, receiving from time to time admonition and
reprimand from a gently irate parent, who swished her long cotton wrapper
over the court, drawling to her offspring: “I sure will whip you if
you-all don’t quit.”
“That-a-ways where we live,” said my little companion, stepping onto
the porch and depositing her load, as she opened the door to announce
a visitor to her mother. The woman turned listlessly from her sewing
machine over which she was bent.
“Won’t you come in?” she called to me, dragging out a chair by the fire,
without getting up. “Lookin’ for work?” she asked.
I took a seat, glancing at the interior which my little friend called
“home.” The outer room was a kitchen—though it might, except for the
stove, have been mistaken for a hen coop. The chickens pecked their way
about the dirty floor, venturing as far, even, as the table upon which
stood the meagre remains of a noonday meal. The second and the inner room
had each a bed;—an unmade bed, I was going to say, but how, indeed, could
a bed be made without either sheets or pillows? Two grimy counterpanes
were flung in disorder across the mattresses; a few chairs, a bureau and
the sewing machine completed the house furnishings.
As the listless woman talked with me in a kindly manner about work,
the baby, who had crawled in from the porch, and arrived as far as his
mother’s skirts, now tugged at these, to be taken up. His tiny hands had
served as propellers across the filthy floor. The piece of lemon candy
had added to the general stickiness of the dirt, with which both hands
and face were smeared. As a soldier shoulders a gun—the burden to which
he is most accustomed—this mother swung her baby into her arms, and,
while she talked on, giving items about the cost of living, and factory
wages, she loosened her cotton jacket—evidently the only garment she had
on—and folding the baby to her breast, she lulled its whimperings.
“Yes,” she said, “we pay $1.50 a week for three rooms. That’s a little
over six a month. I call it high. We don’t get no runnin’ water. Every
drop we use’s got to be drawed in the yard; an’ we don’t get no light,
either, nuthin’ but lamps.”
The baby, comfortable and contented, let his hand stray over the mother’s
throat, with little spasmodic caresses which left in their trail smears
of dirt, flecked with tiny scarlet streaks where the sharp nails had
caught in the pale, withered flesh.
“I reckon you-all might be cold,” she said, directing the older child
to put more wood on the open grate fire, thinking apparently nothing of
herself. “We don’t like it here first-rate. Maybe we’ll move on. I sure
do crave traveling. Well, honey,” this was addressed to the baby, who had
sat up with a jerk and began to whine. The candy picked up from the floor
where it had fallen and restored to its owner’s mouth, did not seem the
desired thing. The mother looked at me with a knowing smile.
“I reckon I can guess what ails him. He wants his babies.” And at this,
always without getting out of her chair before the machine, she reached
behind her and drew from a shelf over her head two white rats. These were
apparently what the baby wanted. In the game that ensued between him and
his pets, his chief delight seemed to be in seeing the rats disappear
through the open throated gown of his mother, and making the tour of
her bodice, wriggling, burrowing, crawling, to emerge finally from
her collar at the nape of her neck. Sometimes they diversified their
gyrations, proceeding upward into her hair and down again by way of her
ears onto easier climbing ground. Impassable, unmoved, she talked on in
her gentle voice, giving no sign whatever that she noticed the animals.
It was only when the baby plunged his short nails into the white rat’s
side that she ejaculated mercifully:
“Quit that! You-all ’ll hurt them babies.”
I was somewhat dazed as I proceeded presently with my little girl guide
from this interior to the mill. The squalor and disorder of what I had
seen, the ignorance and the insensibility, contrasted strangely with the
courtesy that had been shown me, the friendly concern about any intention
I might have to get work, the desire to help me on my way, the strange
lethargic tenderness which took the form of pity for even rats.
“Like animals,” my friend had told me. That we must wait to see.
The War and the Home
By Jane Addams
(See page 28)
This war is destroying the home unit in the most highly civilized
countries in the world to an extent which is not less than appalling....
At the present moment women in Europe are being told: bring children
into the world for the benefit of the nation; for the strengthening of
future battle lines; forgetting everything that you are taught to hold
dear; forgetting your struggles to establish the responsibilities of
fatherhood; forgetting all but the appetite of war for human flesh. It
must be satisfied and you must be the ones to feed it, cost what it may;
this is war’s message to the world of women.
The Home
By Mrs. Laura P. Young
It is the home, and specifically the mother, who, with taste and tact,
experience and wisdom, and above all, with love and faith, must guide
and steady and inspire these lives. If we want our boys and girls to be
free from discontent, free from hard commercialism, free from vulgarity
and false ideals, we must enter their lives and quietly guide them into a
youthful brotherhood and sisterhood of service.
Honest Partnership in the Home
By Mrs. Fred Dick
(From speech before Congress on Welfare of the Child.)
The homemaking of the future ... must be founded in this day and
generation on financial independence. The girl of the past used to go
from financial dependence in the girlhood home, to financial dependence
as wife. She now goes from the independence of a wage earner to financial
dependence as a wife, which relationship creates friction, and leads
to incompatibility and divorce. There should be an adjustment of the
responsibilities of home life before marriage on the basis of honest
partnership. The children coming into the home should be taken into
partnership financially and occupationally. They should be paid for
their work on the basis that “If you don’t work you can’t eat,” and held
responsible for their share in the home-making.
The Home Influence
By Ida Tarbell
(From “The Business of Being a Woman.”[5])
(See page 266)
Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center. It does its
work in spite of every effort to shirk or supplement it. No teacher can
entirely undo what it does, be that good or bad. The natural, joyous
opening of a child’s mind depends on its first intimate relations.
These are, as a rule, with the mother. It is the mother who “takes an
interest,” who oftenest decides whether the new mind shall open frankly
and fearlessly. How she does her work depends less upon her ability to
answer questions, than her effort not to discourage them; less upon her
ability to lead authoritatively into great fields than her efforts to
push the child into those which attract him. To be responsive to his
interests is the woman’s greatest contribution to the child’s development.
[5] McMillan Publishers.
Then—Back to the Home!
By Caro Lloyd
(American contemporary writer. Sister of Henry Demarest Lloyd, and
author of his Biography. The following was taken from an article in “The
Progressive Woman.”)
Search any woman’s heart, no matter how “emancipated”, how “modern”,
she may be, and you will find there the love of home, of a lover, of a
child, either realized or hoped for. How far this love is being denied to
women today needs no showing. Women are being forced from the home into
industry at a faster rate than the birth rate. Those still in the home
are beginning to realize the interdependence of the modern social order
and to see that only by extending their home-making out into the larger
life of the community are their own circles safe.
As they go out into this wider service and struggle, women will take the
spirit of the home with them. There are already signs that the faith,
honesty, cleanliness, kindness of the home are to become the qualities
of future society. We are to forsake our present régime with its cruel
hostilities, and to build an order which shall meet the needs of all
its children with the tenderness of father and mother, which shall
institutionalize sisterhood and brotherhood. In this reconstruction
women, the home-makers, will do a valiant share.
Then, having battled for their emancipation and won, and having used
their new powers to join in the crusade for a higher civilization and
won, women will go back into the home. Back to the home! But it will be
as free women to a free home, under whose roof justice, equality and
security will be sheltered. At last there will be an era of peace, and
the morning rays of the golden age will tint the hilltops.
Women’s Lodging Houses
By Mary Higgs
(English contemporary. Author of “The Master,” “How to Deal With the
Unemployed,” “Glimpses Into the Abyss,” etc. The following extract is
taken from the last named book.)
We sat watching until we were weary, between 11 and 12, and then went to
our bedroom. The same beds were reserved, and one woman who was said to
work for her living, and had a very bad cough, was already in bed. We
were speedily in bed also, and for awhile were quiet. The room was very
stuffy, in spite of two ventilators; the sheets were not very clean,
but still fairly so. The beds were filled by degrees all but one, that
previously occupied by the Scotch woman. One girl who came in late said
she was not on the streets; that she had begged money for her lodging,
as she was out too late to return to her place. It was holiday time,
being Whit week. One girl came in late and had had drink, which made her
talkative, said she was a servant, and had just left a place where she
had been ten months.... She meant to “enjoy herself” over the holiday and
go to service again.
One girl who had been in before grumbled that her bed had been slept in
and was dirty; but her own underlinen was far from clean. No one seemed
to possess a nightgown; all slept in their underlinen.
We had the door a little ajar, and far into the night the doorbell kept
ringing, and girls were admitted, and laughter and conversation drifted
up the stairs. Our room settled down sometime past midnight, but the
girl who was drunk several times tried to begin a conversation. At last
we all slept. Two, however, had bad coughs. I woke at intervals through
the night, and finally at 6.30. I was longing for fresh air, so put on
a skirt and went down to enquire the time, and decided to go out for a
quiet stroll. The bath room was empty, the bath had old papers in it, and
did not look as if it was often used. There was a table with a looking
glass, and a good deal of rouge about. The wash basin was very small,
and no soap was provided. There was a roller towel for everybody. We had
learned by experience to take our own soap and towel, and we lent the
soap several times....
I slipped out to the brightness of a May morning, and walked in the
direction of the park. The park was not open, as it was not yet seven,
but just outside I found a resting place. What a contrast to the fresh
budding life of the trees was that perversion and decay of budding
womanhood I had left behind me! A tree cut down in its prime to make way
for building furnished me with a parallel. What _artificial_ conditions
of man’s making, are pressing on those young lives, sapping them off from
true use to rottenness and decay?...
Is there even at the back an _organized_ system, seeking victims and
preying on them? This much is certain: that there is room for an
allowance of greed and wickedness against defenseless womanhood. For if a
woman cannot get work, where is she to go? What is she to do? Can all our
homes and shelters together prevent many from drifting “on the streets”?
Do we not need a national provision for migration, and temporary
destitution among women?
The Inefficient Home
By Mrs. Laura P. Young
(From a paper read at the Third International Congress on “Welfare of the
Child.”)
At present the chief reason I see for the fostering of a recreative
social relationship among high school students is the inefficiency of the
average home....
For instance, there is the home where the father may assume the attitude
that after working all day at his own necessary pursuits, he cannot be
annoyed by a riotous lot of youngsters all over the place in the evening.
This is the short-sighted home....
There is the home in which the mother values her housekeeping above her
home-making, the mother who cannot have her cherished lares and penates
marred or displaced by visiting young people or indeed even by her own.
This is the home of things, not of children....
And an especially pitiful type of inefficient home is that materially
prosperous one in which the parents are too absorbed in their own
affairs, social and business, to encourage home social life in their
children. This type flourishes in many so-called exclusive suburban
districts.
From whatever type of home a child goes to school, it is in that home
that his standards of conduct and ideals of life are formed, and it is
these that he carries to his association with his fellow-pupils.
Immorality and the Home
By Clara E. Laughlin
(Contemporary—Author of “The Evolution of a Girl’s Ideal,” “Everybody’s
Lonesome,” “The Work-a-Day Girl.” The following extract is from “The
Work-a-Day Girl.”)
What is the relation between domestic service and criminality and
immorality? Between erring girls and their own homes as nurseries of
weakness and wilfulness? It is this: housework as a sad majority of women
perform it, is the most unsystematized, unstandardized, undisciplinary,
unsocial and uninteresting work in the world. And family relations, as a
sad majority of our citizens comprehend them, are the most unregulated
relations in the world; there are a few standards below which the social
conscience of the community will not allow a parent to fall in the
treatment of a child, or a mistress to fall in the treatment of a maid;
but they are standards so low that almost any other human relationship
is better regulated by law and by public sentiment. The home is the most
haphazard institution of our day.... Of the twelve or fifteen million
homes in the country, probably not one million would pass an efficiency
test based on the way they are run and the quality of their output.
Perpetuate the Ideal
By Mrs. C. E. Porter
If every man and woman held in their hearts a definite home ideal,—a
lofty conception of their united lives, the highest function of
parenthood would then, too, be perfect. There is little credit in simply
perpetuating either a condition or a race.
Market Value of Home Labor
By Helen G. Putnam, M. D., LL. D.
If the labors which the great majority of women are putting in homes were
estimated at market rates like those of men—and domestic arts are coming
to have high values—husband’s incomes in a great majority of cases could
not secure either the quality or the quantity. This, the largest single
field of industries, is not enumerated by the census. Accurate valuation
would put an end to the shibboleth, “The husband supports the wife”;
would give self-respect to millions of women, and so inspire them; would
remove the unsound impression of women’s comparative irresponsibility and
men’s comparative dependability, whose psychologic effect is disastrous.
Domestic Strife
By Mrs. Belle Case La Follette
(See page 22)
(In “The Woman’s Journal.”)
Where do we find strife amid civilization? In the homes where husband and
wife have not had mutual interests, where they have grown apart, and one
has outstripped the other in development.
The Child at Home
By Elizabeth McCracken
(See page 90)
In one of the letters of Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, to her mother,
Queen Victoria, she writes: “I try to give my children in their home what
I had in my childhood’s home. As well as I am able, I copy what you did.”
There is something essentially British in this point of view. The English
mother, whatever her rank, tried to give her children in their home what
she had in her childhood’s home; as well as she is able, she copies what
her mother did. The conditions in her life may be entirely different from
those of her mother, her children may be unlike herself in disposition;
yet she holds to tradition in regard to their upbringing; she tries to
make their home a reproduction of her mother’s home.
The American mother, whatever her station, does the exact opposite—she
attempts to bestow upon her children what she did not possess; and she
makes an effort to imitate as little as possible what her mother did....
Her ambition is to train her children, not after the mother’s way, but in
accordance with “the most approved method”. This is apt, on analysis, to
turn out to be merely the reverse of her mother’s procedure.
Cannot Replace the Home
By Lillian D. Wald
(Of Henry Street Settlement, New York.)
We acknowledge the inability and the inefficiency of the parents and the
home to control the fortunes of the child when we substitute for them the
parental function of government; nevertheless, the strongest of education
remains in the home, and the school and the settlement and other agencies
that hover over it cannot replace that home.
Man, Woman, and the Home
By Edna Kenton
(American contemporary writer. The following quotation is from “The
Militant Women—and Women,” in “The Century Magazine.”)
There is a rising revolt among women against the unspeakable dullness
of unvaried home life. It has been a long, deadly routine, a life of
servitude imposed on her for ages in a man-made world. No honest woman
will deny—man’s opinion is valueless here—that there is nothing in the
home alone to satisfy woman’s human longing for variety, adventure,
romance. But any man will tell you strongly that home is not enough to
fill a human being’s life—_if that human being is to be himself_.
Mother and Child-Character
By Mrs. Winifred Sackville Stoner
(Of the University of Pittsburgh, and noted specialist in Child Culture.)
As you know, the ancients believed that a mother had a great deal to do
with the character of her children, and this is true, for no mother has
the right to bring children into this world and not give them the best of
care and attention. I believe that every child born into this world has
the trinity of mental, physical and moral elements, and it is up to the
mother to develop this trinity....
I believe more good can be accomplished by proper training right from the
cradle than all the corporal punishment in the world. I have ten rules,
and they are:
1. Never say “don’t.” The very atmosphere of some homes is fairly reeking
with “don’t”.
2. Never scold. A scolding mother is worse than a spanking mother.
3. Never give corporal punishment.
4. Never say “must”.
5. Never allow a child to lose its self-respect or respect for its
parents.
6. Never frighten a child.
7. Never refuse to answer questions.
8. Never ridicule a child or tease him.
9. Don’t banish the fairies.
10. Don’t let a child ever think there is any more attractive place than
its own home.
The Home of the Workingman
By Alice Henry
(See page 203)
I look forward to a time I believe to be rapidly approaching, when the
home of the workingman, like everyone else’s home, will be truly a home,
the happy resting-place, the sheltering nest of father, mother and
children, and when, through the rearrangement of labor, the workingman’s
wife will be relieved from her monotonous existence of unrelieved
domestic drudgery and overwork, disguised under the name of wifely
and maternal duties, when the cooking and the washing, for instance,
will be no more part of the home life in the humblest home than in the
wealthiest. The workingman’s wife will then share in the general freedom
to occupy part of her time in whatever occupation she is best fitted
for, and, along with every other member of the community, she will share
in the benefits arising from the better organization of domestic work.
The Hotel “Home”
By Edith Wharton
(Contemporary American Novelist. From “The House of Mirth.”)
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its
inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New
York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with
mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements,
while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a
desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as
richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits
or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity
from restaurant to concert hall, from palm-garden to music-room,
from “art-exhibit” to dressmaker’s opening. High-stepping horses or
elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague
metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the
weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of
the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them in the background of their
lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities;
they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent
energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet
they had no more real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs.
Hatch was its most substantial figure.... The details of her existence
were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits were
marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her
companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside
the bonds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed
obligations existed: night and day floated into one another in a blur
of confused and retarded engagement so that one had the impression of
lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy
after-theater supper which prolonged Mrs. Hatch’s vigil until daylight.
Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng
of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hairdressers, teachers of
bridge, of French, of “physical development”.... Mrs. Hatch swam in a
haze of interminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage,
the newspapers, the fashion-journals, and a gaudy world of sport still
more completely beyond her companion’s ken.
The Domestic Home Destroyed
By Lida Parce
(From “Economic Determinism.”[6])
(See page 174)
We have seen how the ties of mutual interest and common experience are
disrupted by the transference of industry from the home to the factory.
We have seen members of the family forsake the roof-tree in pursuit
of work. We have seen the wife and child receiving their pay from the
corporation, in definite, fixed wages.... The home shifts from time
to time. Light, food, air, space, all are inadequate or polluted. The
parents are irritable from the constant friction and anxiety of the
predicament in which they live. Naturally, none of them can love “the
home” very deeply. The children feel little reverence for the parents
whose helplessness exposes the family to such a life. There are few
common activities and interests between the members of the family,
hence, there are few strong ties. The companions of the alleyways and
streets form the social circle of the young, and the cheap theatres
which offer their attractions at short intervals along the city streets
fill up that vacuum in their experience which the nature of man abhors.
Children living in these conditions do not have a reasonable chance to
grow up with strong minds in sound bodies. Nor can this kind of youthful
life develop those ideas of fair and right conduct, that honorable and
dignified attitude of mind which are essential to good citizenship. Born
into such a world, growing up in such an environment, why should they
respect anything or any body? They do not. And the family disintegrates
as soon as the children are old enough to declare their independence.
Society has deprived the family of the means of securing normal living
conditions for its future citizens. It is now confronted by the immediate
and urgent problem of providing those conditions outside the family. The
domestic home having been destroyed, a social one must be provided.
[6] Kerr Publishing Company.