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THE HOME
_Shall the home be our world ... or the world our home?_
THE HOME
ITS WORK AND INFLUENCE
BY
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN
NEW YORK
CHARLTON COMPANY
1910
Copyrighted 1903
Republished, November, 1910
by
THE CHARLTON CO.
Printed by The Co-Operative Press, New York City
To every Man who maintains a Home--
To every Woman who "keeps house"--
To every House-Servant, owned, hired, or married--
To every Boy and Girl who lives at Home--
To every Baby who is born and reared at Home--
In the hope of better homes for all this book
is dedicated.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY, 3
II. THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME, 14
III. DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY, 36
IV. PRESENT CONDITIONS, 62
V. THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP. I. THE HOUSEWIFE, 82
VI. THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP. II. THE HOUSEMAID, 104
VII. HOME-COOKING, 124
VIII. DOMESTIC ART, 143
IX. DOMESTIC ETHICS, 160
X. DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT, 184
XI. THE LADY OF THE HOUSE, 206
XII. THE CHILD AT HOME, 230
XIII. THE GIRL AT HOME, 252
XIV. HOME INFLUENCE ON MEN, 272
XV. HOME AND SOCIAL PROGRESS, 300
XVI. LINES OF ADVANCE, 323
XVII. RESULTS, 342
TWO CALLINGS
I
_I hear a deep voice through uneasy dreaming,
A deep, soft, tender, soul-beguiling voice;
A lulling voice that bids the dreams remain,
That calms my restlessness and dulls my pain,
That thrills and fills and holds me till in seeming
There is no other sound on earth--no choice._
_"Home!" says the deep voice, "Home!" and softly singing
Brings me a sense of safety unsurpassed;
So old! so old! The piles above the wave--
The shelter of the stone-blocked, shadowy cave--
Security of sun-kissed treetops swinging--
Safety and Home at last!_
_"Home" says the sweet voice, and warm Comfort rises,
Holding my soul with velvet-fingered hands;
Comfort of leafy lair and lapping fur,
Soft couches, cushions, curtains, and the stir
Of easy pleasures that the body prizes,
Of soft, swift feet to serve the least commands._
_I shrink--half rise--and then it murmurs "Duty!"
Again the past rolls out--a scroll unfurled;
Allegiance and long labor due my lord--
Allegiance in an idleness abhorred--
I am the squaw--the slave--the harem beauty--
I serve and serve, the handmaid of the world._
_My soul rebels--but hark! a new note thrilling,
Deep, deep, past finding--I protest no more;
The voice says "Love!" and all those ages dim
Stand glorified and justified in him;
I bow--I kneel--the woman soul is willing--
"Love is the law. Be still! Obey! Adore!"_
_And then--ah, then! The deep voice murmurs "Mother!"
And all life answers from the primal sea;
A mingling of all lullabies; a peace
That asks no understanding; the release
Of nature's holiest power--who seeks another?
Home? Home is Mother--Mother, Home--to me._
_"Home!" says the deep voice; "Home and Easy Pleasure!
Safety and Comfort, Laws of Life well kept!
Love!" and my heart rose thrilling at the word;
"Mother!" it nestled down and never stirred;
"Duty and Peace and Love beyond all measure!
Home! Safety! Comfort! Mother!"--and I slept._
II
_A bugle call! A clear, keen, ringing cry,
Relentless--eloquent--that found the ear
Through fold on fold of slumber, sweet, profound--
A widening wave of universal sound,
Piercing the heart--filling the utmost sky--
I wake--I must wake! Hear--for I must hear!_
_"The World! The World is crying! Hear its needs!
Home is a part of life--I am the whole!
Home is the cradle--shall a whole life stay
Cradled in comfort through the working day?
I too am Home--the Home of all high deeds--
The only Home to hold the human soul!_
_"Courage!--the front of conscious life!" it cried;
"Courage that dares to die and dares to live!
Why should you prate of safety? Is life meant
In ignominious safety to be spent?
Is Home best valued as a place to hide?
Come out, and give what you are here to give!_
_"Strength and Endurance! of high action born!"
And all that dream of Comfort shrank away,
Turning its fond, beguiling face aside:
So Selfishness and Luxury and Pride
Stood forth revealed, till I grew fierce with scorn,
And burned to meet the dangers of the day._
_"Duty? Aye, Duty! Duty! Mark the word!"
I turned to my old standard. It was rent
From hem to hem, and through the gaping place
I saw my undone duties to the race
Of man--neglected--spurned--how had I heard
That word and never dreamed of what it meant!_
_"Duty! Unlimited--eternal--new!"
And I? My idol on a petty shrine
Fell as I turned, and Cowardice and Sloth
Fell too, unmasked, false Duty covering both--
While the true Duty, all-embracing, high,
Showed the clear line of noble deeds to do._
_And then the great voice rang out to the turn,
And all my terror left me, all my shame,
While every dream of joy from earliest youth
Came back and lived!--that joy unhoped was truth,
All joy, all hope, all truth, all peace grew one,
Life opened clear, and Love? Love was its name!_
_So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more,
I saw at last its meaning and its place;
Not the blind passion of the brooding past,
But Mother--the World's Mother--come at last,
To love as she had never loved before--
To feed and guard and teach the human race._
_The world was full of music clear and high!
The world was full of light! The world was free!
And I? Awake at last, in joy untold,
Saw Love and Duty broad as life unrolled--
Wide as the earth--unbounded as the sky--
Home was the World--the World was Home to me!_
THE HOME
I
INTRODUCTORY
In offering this study to a public accustomed only to the unquestioning
acceptance of the home as something perfect, holy, quite above
discussion, a word of explanation is needed.
First, let it be clearly and definitely stated, the purpose of this
book is to maintain and improve the home. Criticism there is, deep and
thorough; but not with the intention of robbing us of one essential
element of home life--rather of saving us from conditions not only
unessential, but gravely detrimental to home life. Every human being
should have a home; the single person his or her home; and the family
their home.
The home should offer to the individual rest, peace, quiet, comfort,
health, and that degree of personal expression requisite; and these
conditions should be maintained by the best methods of the time. The
home should be to the child a place of happiness and true development;
to the adult a place of happiness and that beautiful reinforcement of
the spirit needed by the world's workers.
We are here to perform our best service to society, and to find our
best individual growth and expression; a right home is essential to
both these uses.
The place of childhood's glowing memories, of youth's ideals, of the
calm satisfaction of mature life, of peaceful shelter for the aged;
this is not attacked, this we shall not lose, but gain more
universally. What is here asserted is that our real home life is
clogged and injured by a number of conditions which are not necessary,
which are directly inimical to the home; and that we shall do well to
lay these aside.
As to the element of sanctity--that which is really sacred can bear
examination, no darkened room is needed for real miracles; mystery and
shadow belong to jugglers, not to the truth.
The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to
improvement. This specially dear and ancient one, however, we have
successfully kept shut, and so it has not improved as have some others.
The home is too important a factor in human life to be thus left behind
in the march of events; its influence is too wide, too deep, too
general, for us to ignore.
Whatever else a human being has to meet and bear, he has always the
home as a governing factor in the formation of character and the
direction of life.
This power of home-influence we cannot fail to see, but we have bowed
to it in blind idolatry as one of unmixed beneficence, instead of
studying with jealous care that so large a force be wisely guided and
restrained.
We have watched the rise and fall of many social institutions, we have
seen them change, grow, decay, and die; we have seen them work mightily
for evil--or as mightily for good; and have learned to judge and choose
accordingly, to build up and to tear down for the best interests of the
human race.
In very early times, when the child-mind of inexperienced man was
timid, soft, and yet conservative as only the mind of children and
savages can be, we regarded all institutions with devout reverence and
fear.
Primitive man bowed down and fell upon his face before almost
everything, whether forces of nature or of art. To worship, to
enshrine, to follow blindly, was instinctive with the savage.
The civilised man has a larger outlook, a clearer, better-ordered
brain. He bases reverence on knowledge, he loses fear in the light of
understanding; freedom and self-government have developed him. It does
not come so readily to him to fall upon his face--rather he lifts his
face bravely to see and know and do. In place of the dark and cruel
superstitions of old time, with the crushing weight of a strong cult of
priests, we have a free and growing church, branching steadily wider as
more minds differ, and coming nearer always to that final merging of
religion in life which shall leave them indistinguishable. In place of
the iron despotisms of old time we have a similar growth and change in
governments, approaching always nearer to a fully self-governing
condition. Our growth has been great, but it has been irregular and
broken by strange checks and reversions; also accompanied, even in its
heights, by parallel disorders difficult to account for.
In all this long period of progress the moving world has carried with
it the unmoving home; the man free, the woman confined; the man
specialising in a thousand industries, the woman still limited to her
domestic functions. We have constantly believed that this was the true
way to live, the natural way, the only way. Whatever else might
change--and all things did--the home must not. So sure were we, and are
we yet, of this, that we have utterly refused to admit that the home
has changed, has grown, has improved, in spite of our unshaken
convictions and unbending opposition.
The softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the
brain--the hardest and most iron-bound as well. Given a sufficiently
deep conviction, and facts are but as dreams before its huge reality.
Our convictions about the home go down to the uttermost depths, and
have changed less under the tooth of time than any others, yet the
facts involved have altered most radically. The structure of the home
has changed from cave to tent, from tent to hut, from hut to house,
from house to block or towering pile of "flats"; the functions of the
home have changed from every incipient industry known to past times, to
our remaining few; the inmates of the home have changed, from the
polygamous group and its crowd of slaves, to the one basic family
relation of father, mother, and child; but our feelings have remained
the same.
The progress of society we have seen to be hindered by many evils in
the world about us and in our own characters; we have sought to oppose
them as best we might, and even in some degree to study them for wiser
opposition.
Certain diseases we have traced to their cause, removed the cause, and
so avoided the disease; others we are just beginning to trace, as in
our present warfare with "the white plague," tuberculosis.
Certain forms of vice we are beginning to examine similarly, and
certain defects of character; we are learning that society is part of
the living world and comes under the action of natural law as much as
any other form of life.
But in all this study of social factors affecting disease and vice and
character, we have still held that the home--our most universal
environment--was perfect and quite above suspicion.
We were right at bottom. The home _in its essential nature_ is pure
good, and in its due development is progressively good; but it must
change with society's advance; and the kind of home that was wholly
beneficial in one century may be largely evil in another. We must
forcibly bear in mind, in any honest study of a long-accustomed
environment, that our own comfort, or even happiness, in a given
condition does not prove it to be good.
Comfort and happiness are very largely a matter of prolonged
adjustment. We like what we are used to. When we get used to something
else we like that too--and if the something else is really better, we
profit by the change. To the tired farmer it is comfort to take off his
coat, put up his yarn-stockinged feet on a chair, and have his wife
serve him the supper she has cooked. The tired banker prefers a
dressing gown or lounging jacket, slippers, a well-dressed,
white-handed wife, and a neat maid or stately butler to wait on the
table. The domestic Roman preferred a luxurious bath at the hands of
his slaves. All these types find comfort in certain surroundings--yet
the surroundings differ.
The New England farmer would not think a home comfortable that was full
of slaves--even a butler he would find oppressive; the New York banker
would not enjoy seeing his wife do dirty work. Ideals change--even home
ideals; and whatever kind of home we have, so that we grow up in it and
know no other, we learn to love. Even among homes as they now are,
equally enjoyed by their inmates, there is a wide scale of difference.
Why, then, is it impossible to imagine something still further varying
from what we now know; yet to the children born therein as dear and
deeply loved?
Again let us remember that happiness, mere physical comfort and the
interchange of family affection, is not all that life is for. We may
have had "a happy childhood," as far as we can recall; we may have been
idolised and indulged by our parents, and have had no wish ungratified;
yet even so all this is no guarantee that the beloved home has given us
the best training, the best growth. Nourmahal, the Light of the Harem,
no doubt enjoyed herself--but perhaps other surroundings might have
done more for her mind and soul. The questions raised here touch not
only upon our comfort and happiness in such homes as are happy ones,
but on the formative influence of these homes; asking if our present
home ideals and home conditions are really doing all for humanity that
we have a right to demand. There is a difference in homes not only in
races, classes, and individuals, but in periods.
The sum of the criticism in the following study is this: the home has
not developed in proportion to our other institutions, and by its
rudimentary condition it arrests development in other lines. Further,
that the two main errors in the right adjustment of the home to our
present life are these: the maintenance of primitive industries in a
modern industrial community, and the confinement of women to those
industries and their limited area of expression. No word is said
against the real home, the true family life; but it is claimed that
much we consider essential to that home and family life is not only
unnecessary, but positively injurious.
The home is a beautiful ideal, but have we no others? "My Country"
touches a deeper chord than even "Home, Sweet Home." A homeless man is
to be pitied, but "The Man without a Country" is one of the horrors of
history. The love of mother and child is beautiful; but there is a
higher law than that--the love of one another.
In our great religion we are taught to love and serve all mankind.
Every word and act of Christ goes to show the law of universal service.
Christian love goes out to all the world; it may begin, but does not
stay, at home.
The trend of all democracy is toward a wider, keener civic
consciousness; a purer public service. All the great problems of our
times call for the broad view, the large concept, the general action.
Such gain as we have made in human life is in this larger love; in some
approach to peace, safety, and world-wide inter-service; yet this so
patent common good is strangely contradicted and off-set by
cross-currents of primitive selfishness. Our own personal lives, rich
as they are to-day, broad with the consciousness of all acquainted
races, deep with the consciousness of the uncovered past, strong with
our universal knowledge and power; yet even so are not happy. We are
confused--bewildered. Life is complicated, duties conflict, we fly and
fall like tethered birds, and our new powers beat against old
restrictions like ships in dock, fast moored, yet with all sail set and
steam up.
It is here suggested that one cause for this irregular development of
character, this contradictory social action, and this wearing unrest in
life lies unsuspected in our homes; not in their undying essential
factors, but in those phases of home life we should have long since
peacefully outgrown. Let no one tremble in fear of losing precious
things. That which is precious remains and will remain always. We do
small honour to nature's laws when we imagine their fulfilment rests on
this or that petty local custom of our own.
We may all have homes to love and grow in without the requirement that
half of us shall never have anything else. We shall have homes of rest
and peace for all, with no need for half of us to find them places of
ceaseless work and care. Home and its beauty, home and its comfort,
home and its refreshment to tired nerves, its inspiration to worn
hearts, this is in no danger of loss or change; but the home which is
so far from beautiful, so wearing to the nerves and dulling to the
heart, the home life that means care and labour and disappointment, the
quiet, unnoticed whirlpool that sucks down youth and beauty and
enthusiasm, man's long labour and woman's longer love--this we may
gladly change and safely lose. To the child who longs to grow up and be
free; to the restless, rebelling boy; to the girl who marries all too
hastily as a means of escape; to the man who puts his neck in the
collar and pulls while life lasts to meet the unceasing demands of his
little sanctuary; and to the woman--the thousands upon thousands of
women, who work while life lasts to serve that sanctuary by night and
day--to all these it may not be unwelcome to suggest that the home need
be neither a prison, a workhouse, nor a consuming fire.
Home--with all that the sweet word means; home for each of us, in its
best sense; yet shorn of its inordinate expenses, freed of its grinding
labours, open to the blessed currents of progress that lead and lift us
all--this we may have and keep for all time.
It is, therefore, with no iconoclastic frenzy of destruction, but as
one bravely pruning a most precious tree, that this book is put
forward; inquiring as to what is and what is not vital to the subject;
and claiming broadly that with such and such clinging masses cut away,
the real home life will be better established and more richly fruitful
for good than we have ever known before.
II
THE EVOLUTION OF THE HOME
We have been slow, slow and reluctant, to apply the laws of evolution
to the familiar facts of human life. Whatever else might move, we
surely were stationary; we were the superior onlookers--not part of the
procession. Ideas which have possessed the racial mind from the oldest
times are not to be dispossessed in a day; and this idea that man is
something extra in the scheme of creation is one of our very oldest. We
have always assumed that we were made by a special order, and that our
manners and customs were peculiarly and distinctively our own,
separated by an immeasurable gap from those of "the lower animals."
Now it appears, in large succeeding waves of proof, that there are no
gaps in the long story of earth's continual creation; some pages may be
lost to us, but they were once continuous. There is no break between us
and the first stir of life upon our planet. Life is an unbroken line, a
ceaseless stream that pours steadily on; or rather, it grows like an
undying tree, some of whose branches wither and drop off, some reach
their limit part way up, but the main trunk rises ever higher. We stand
at the top and continue to grow, but we still carry with us many of the
characteristics of the lower branches.
At what point in this long march of life was introduced that useful,
blessed thing--the home? Is it something new, something distinctively
human, like the church, the school, or the post office? No. It is
traceable far back of humanity, back of the mammals, back of the
vertebrates; we find it in most elaborate form even among insects.
What is a home? The idea of home is usually connected with that of
family, as a place wherein young are born and reared, a common shelter
for the reproductive group. The word may be also applied to the common
shelter for any other permanent group, and to the place where any
individual habitually stays. Continuous living in any place by
individual or group makes that place a home; even old prisoners, at
last released, have been known to come back to the familiar cell
because it seemed like "home" to them. But "the home," in the sense in
which we here discuss it, is the shelter of the family, of the group
organised for purposes of reproduction. In this sense a beehive is as
much a home as any human dwelling place--even more, perhaps. The snow
hut of the Eskimo, the tent of hides that covers the American savage,
the rock-bound fastness of the cave-dweller--these are homes as truly
as the costliest modern mansion. The burrow of the prairie dog is a
home, a fox's earth is a home, a bird's nest is a home, and the shelter
of the little "seahorse" is a home. Wherever the mother feeds and
guards her little ones,--more especially if the father helps
her,--there is, for the time being, home.
This accounts at once for the bottomless depths of our attachment to
the idea. For millions and millions of years it has been reborn in each
generation and maintained by the same ceaseless pressure. The furry
babies of the forest grow to consciousness in nests of leaves, in a
warm stillness where they are safe and comfortable, where mother
is--and mother is heaven and earth to the baby. Our lightly spoken
phrase "What is home without a mother?" covers the deepest truth; there
would never have been any home without her. It is from these
antecedents that we may trace the formation of this deep-bedded
concept, home.
The blended feelings covered by the word are a group of life's first
necessities and most constant joys: shelter, quiet, safety, warmth,
ease, comfort, peace, and love. Add to these food, and you have the sum
of the animal's gratification. Home is indeed heaven to him. The world
outside is, to the animal with a home, a field of excitement, exertion,
and danger. He goes out to eat, in more or less danger of being eaten;
but if he can secure his prey and drag it home he is then perfectly
happy. Often he must feed where it falls, but then home is the place
for the after-dinner nap.
With the graminivora there is no thought of home. The peaceful
grass-eater drops foal or fawn, kid, calf, or lamb, where chance may
find her in the open, and feeds at random under the sky. Vegetable food
of a weak quality like grass has to be constantly followed up; there is
no time to gather armfuls to take home, even if there were homes--or
arms. But the beasts of prey have homes and love them, and the little
timid things that live in instant danger--they, too, have homes to hide
in at a moment's notice. These deep roots of animal satisfaction
underlie the later growths of sentiment that so enshrine the home idea
with us. The retreat, the shelter both from weather and enemies, this
is a primal root.
It is interesting to note that there is a strong connection still
between a disagreeable climate and the love of home. Where it is
comfortable and pleasant out of doors, then you find the life of the
street, the market place, the café, the plaza. Where it is damp and
dark and chill, where rain and wind, snow and ice make it unpleasant
without, there you find people gathering about the fireside, and
boasting of it as a virtue--merely another instance of the law that
makes virtue of necessity.
Man began with the beasts' need of home and the beasts' love of home.
To this he rapidly applied new needs and new sentiments. The ingenious
ferocity of man, and his unique habit of preying on his own kind, at
once introduced a new necessity, that of fortification. Many animals
live in terror of attack from other kinds of animals, and adapt their
homes defensively as best they may, but few are exposed to danger of
attack from their own kind. Ants, indeed, sometimes make war; bees are
sometimes thieves; but man stands clear in his pre-eminence as a
destroyer of his own race. From this habit of preying on each other
came the need of fortified homes, and so the feeling of safety attached
to the place grew and deepened.
The sense of comfort increased as we learned to multiply conveniences,
and, with this increase in conveniences, came decreased power to do
without them. The home where all sat on the floor had not so much
advantage in comfort over "out-of-doors" as had the home where all sat
on chairs, and became unable to sit on the ground with ease. So safety
and comfort grew in the home concept. Shelter, too, became more complex
as door and window and curtain guarded us better, and made us more
susceptible to chill. Peace became more dear at home as war increased
outside; quiet, as life waxed louder in the world; love, as we learned
to hate each other more. The more dangerous and offensive life outside,
the more we cling to the primal virtues of the home; and conversely, in
our imagination of heaven, we do not picture the angels as bound up in
their homes--if, indeed, they have any--but as gladly mingling in the
larger love which includes them all. When we say "Heaven is my home,"
we mean the whole of it.
The care and shelter of the young is a far larger problem with us than
with our hairy ancestors. Our longer period of immaturity gives us
monogamous marriage and the permanent home. The animal may change his
mate and home between litters; ours lap. This over-lapping,
long-continuing babyhood has given us more good than we yet recognise.
Thus we see that all the animal cared for in the home we have in
greater degree, and care for more; while we have, further, many home
ideals they knew not. One of the earliest steps in human development
was ancestor-worship. With lower animals the parents do their duty
cheerfully, steadily, devotedly, but there is no thought of return. The
law of reproduction acts to improve the race by relentlessly
sacrificing the individual, and that individual, the parent, never sets
up a claim to any special veneration or gratitude.
But with us it is different. Our little ones lasting longer and
requiring more care, we become more conscious of our relation to them.
So the primitive parent very soon set up a claim upon the child, and as
the child was absolutely helpless and in the power of the parent, it
did not take long to force into the racial mind this great back-acting
theory. The extreme height is found where it is made a religion,
ancestor-worship, once very common, and still dominant in some of our
oldest, _i.e._, most primitive civilisations, as the Chinese. This
ancestor-worship is what gave the element of sanctity to the home. As
late as the Roman civilisation its power was so strong that the home
was still a temple to a dwindling group of household gods--mere fossil
grandpas--and we ourselves are not yet free from the influence of Roman
civilisation. We still talk in poetic archaisms of "the altar of the
home."
The extension of the family from a temporary reproductive group to a
permanent social group is another human addition to the home idea. To
have lived in one hole all his infancy makes that hole familiar and
dear to the little fox. To have lived in one nest all his life makes
that nest more familiar and more dear to the rook. But to have lived in
one house for generations, to have "the home of my ancestors" loom upon
one's growing consciousness--this is to enlarge enormously our sense of
the dignity and value of the term.
This development of the home feeling of course hinges upon the theory
of private property rights; and on another of our peculiar specialties,
the exaltation of blood-relationships. Our whole social structure,
together with social progress and social action, rests in reality on
social relationship--that is, on the interchange of special services
between individuals. But we, starting the custom at a time when we knew
no better, and perpetuating it blindly, chose to assume that it was
more important to be connected physically as are the animals, than
psychically as human beings; so we extended the original family group
of father, mother, and child into endless collateral lines and tried to
attach our duties, our ambitions, our virtues and achievements to that
group exclusively. The effect of this on any permanent home was
necessarily to still further enlarge and deepen the sentiment attached
to it.
There is another feature of human life, however, which has contributed
enormously to our home sentiment,--the position of women. Having its
rise, no doubt, in the over-lapping babyhood before mentioned, the
habit grew of associating women more continuously with the home, but
this tendency was as nothing compared to the impetus given by the
custom of ownership in women. Women became, practically, property. They
were sold, exchanged, given and bequeathed like horses, hides, or
weapons. They belonged to the man, as did the house; it was one
property group. With the steadily widening gulf between the sexes which
followed upon this arbitrary imprisonment of the woman in the home, we
have come to regard "the world" as exclusively man's province, and "the
home" as exclusively woman's.
The man, who constitutes the progressive wing of the human race, went
on outside as best he might, organising society, and always enshrining
in his heart the woman and the home as one and indivisible. This gives
the subtle charm of sex to a man's home ideals, and, equally, the scorn
of sex to a man's home practices. Home to the man first means mother,
as it does to all creatures, but later, and with renewed intensity, it
means his own private harem--be it never so monogamous--the secret
place where he keeps his most precious possession.
Thus the word "home," in the human mind, touches the spring of a large
complex group of ideas and sentiments, some older than humanity, some
recent enough for us to trace their birth, some as true and inalienable
as any other laws of life, some as false and unnecessary as any others
of mankind's mistakes. It does not follow that all the earliest ones
are right for us to-day, because they were right for our remote
predecessors, or that those later introduced are therefore wrong.
What is called for is a clear knowledge of the course of evolution of
this earliest institution and an understanding of the reasons for its
changes, that we may discriminate to-day between that which is vital
and permanent in home life and that which is unessential and injurious.
We may follow without difficulty the evolution of each and all the
essential constituents of home, mark the introduction of
non-essentials, show the evils resultant from forced retention of
earlier forms; in a word, we may study the evolution of the home
precisely as we study that of any other form of life.
Take that primal requisite of safety and shelter which seems to
underlie all others, a place where the occupant may be protected from
the weather and its enemies. This motive of home-making governs the
nest-builder, the burrow-digger, the selector of caves; it dominates
the insect, the animal, the savage, and the modern architect. Dangers
change, and the home must change to suit the danger. So after the caves
were found insufficient, the lake-dwellers built above the water, safe
when the bridge was in. The drawbridge as an element of safety lingered
long, even when an artificial moat must needs be made for lack of lake.
When the principal danger is cold, as in Arctic regions, the home is
built thick and small; when it is heat, we build thick and large; when
it is dampness, we choose high ground, elevate the home, lay drains;
when it is wind, we seek a sheltered slope, or if there is no slope,
plant trees as a wind-break to protect the home, or, in the worst
cases, make a "cyclone cellar."
The gradual development of our careful plastering and glazing, our
methods of heating, of carpeting and curtaining, comes along this line
of security and shelter, modified always by humanity's great enemy,
conservatism. In these mechanical details, as in deeper issues, free
adaptation to changed conditions is hindered by our invariable effort
to maintain older habits. Older habits are most dear to the aged, and
as the aged have always most controlled the home, that institution is
peculiarly slow to respond to the kindling influence of changed
condition. The Chaldeans built of brick for years unnumbered, because
clay was their only building material. When they spread into Assyria,
where stone was plenty, they continued calmly putting up great palaces
of sunbaked brick,--mere _adobe_,--and each new king left the cracking
terraces of his predecessor's pride and built another equally
ephemeral. The influence of our ancestors has dominated the home more
than it has any other human institution, and the influence of our
ancestors is necessarily retroactive.
In the gathering currents of our present-day social evolution, and
especially in this country where progress is not feared, this heavy
undertow is being somewhat overcome. Things move so rapidly now that
one life counts the changes, there is at last a sense of motion in
human affairs, and so these healthful processes of change can have free
way. The dangers to be met to-day by the home-builder are far different
from those of ancient times, and, like most of our troubles, are
largely of our own making. Earthquake and tidal wave still govern our
choice of place and material somewhat, and climate of course always,
but fire is the chief element of danger in our cities, and next to fire
the greatest danger in the home is its own dirt.
The savage was dirty in his habits, from our point of view, but he
lived in a clean world large enough to hold his little contribution of
bones and ashes, and he did not defile his own tent with detritus of
any sort. We, in our far larger homes, with our far more elaborate
processes of living, and with our ancient system of confining women to
the home entirely, have evolved a continuous accumulation of waste
matter in the home. The effort temporarily to remove this waste is one
of the main lines of domestic industry; the effort to produce it is the
other.
Just as we may watch the course of evolution from a tiny transparent
cell, absorbing some contiguous particle of food and eliminating its
microscopic residuum of waste, up to the elaborate group of alimentary
processes which make up so large a proportion of our complex
physiology; so we may watch the evolution of these home processes from
the simple gnawing of bones and tossing them in a heap of the
cave-dweller, to the ten-course luncheon with its painted menu. In
different nations the result varies, each nation assumes its methods to
be right, and, so assuming, labours on to meet its supposed needs, to
fulfil its local ambitions and duties as it apprehends them. And in no
nation does it occur to the inhabitants to measure their habits and
customs by the effect on life, health, happiness, and character.
The line of comfort may be followed in its growth like the line of
safety. At first anything to keep the wind and rain off was
comfortable--any snug hole to help retain the heat of the little
animal. Then that old ABC of all later luxury, the bed,
appeared--something soft between you and the rock--something dry
between you and the ground. So on and on, as ease grew exquisite and
skill increased, till we robbed the eider duck and stripped the goose
to make down-heaps for our tender flesh to lie on, and so to the costly
modern mattress. The ground, the stamped clay floor, the floor of
brick, of stone, of wood; the rushes and the sand; the rug--a mere hide
once and now the woven miracle of years of labour in the East, or gaudy
carpet of the West--so runs that line of growth. Always the simple
beginning, and its natural development under the laws of progress to
more and more refinement and profusion. Always the essential changes
that follow changed conditions, and always the downward pull of
inviolate home-tradition, to hold back evolution when it could.
See it in furnishing: A stone or block of wood to sit on, a hide to lie
on, a shelf to put the food on. See that block of wood change under
your eyes and crawl up history on its forthcoming legs--a stool, a
chair, a sofa, a settee, and now the endless ranks of sittable
furniture wherewith we fill the home to keep ourselves from the floor
withal. And these be-stuffed, be-springed, and upholstered till it
would seem as if all humanity were newly whipped. It is much more
tiresome to stand than to walk. If you are confined at home you cannot
walk much--therefore you must sit--especially if your task be a
stationary one. So, to the home-bound woman came much sitting, and much
sitting called for ever softer seats, and to the wholly home-bound
harem women even sitting is too strenuous; there you find cushions and
more cushions and eternal lying down. A long way this from the strong
bones, hard muscles, and free movement of the sturdy squaw, and yet a
sure product of evolution with certain modifications of religious and
social thought.
Our homes, thanks to other ideas and habits, are not thus
ultra-cushioned; our women can still sit up, most of the time,
preferring a stuffed chair. And among the more normal working classes,
still largely and blessedly predominant, neither the sitting nor the
stuffing is so evident. A woman who does the work in an ordinary home
seldom sits down, and when she does any chair feels good.
In decoration this long and varied evolution is clearly and prominently
visible, both in normal growth, in natural excess, and in utterly
abnormal variations. So large a field of study is this that it will be
given separate consideration in the chapter on Domestic Art.
What is here sought is simply to give a general impression of the
continual flux and growth of the home as an institution, as one under
the same laws as those which govern other institutions, and also of the
check to that growth resultant from our human characteristic of
remembering, recording, and venerating the past. The home, more than
any other human phenomenon, is under that heavy check. The home is an
incarnate past to us. It is our very oldest thing, and holds the heart
more deeply than all others. The conscious thought of the world is
always far behind the march of events, it is most so in those
departments where we have made definite efforts to keep it at an
earlier level, and nowhere, not even in religion, has there been a more
distinct, persistent, and universal attempt to maintain the most remote
possible status.
"The tendency to vary," that inadequate name for the great centrifugal
force which keeps the universe swinging, is manifested most in the
male. He is the natural variant, where the female is the natural
conservative. By forcibly combining the woman with the home in his
mind, and forcibly compelling her to stay there in body, then,
conversely, by taking himself out and away as completely as possible,
we have turned the expanding lines of social progress away from the
home and left the ultra-feminised woman to ultra-conservatism therein.
Where this condition is most extreme, as in the Orient, there is least
progress; where it is least extreme, as with us, there is the most
progress; but even with us, the least evolved of all our institutions
is the home. Move it must, somewhat, as part of human life, but the
movement has come from without, through the progressive man, and has
been sadly retarded in its slow effect on the stationary woman.
This difference in rate of progress may be observed in the physical
structure of the home, in its industrial processes, and in the group of
concepts most closely associated with it. We have run over, cursorily
enough, the physical evolution of the home-structure, yet wide as have
been its changes they do not compare with the changes along similar
lines in the ultra-domestic world. Moreover, such changes as there are
have been introduced by the free man from his place in the more rapidly
progressive world outside.
The distinctively home-made product changes far less. We see most
progress in the physical characteristics of the home, its plan,
building, materials, furnishings, and decoration, because all these are
part of the world growth outside. We see less progress in such of the
home industries as remain to us. It should be always held in mind that
the phrase "domestic industry" does not apply to a special kind of
work, but to a certain grade of work, a stage of development through
which all kinds pass. All industries were once "domestic," that is,
were performed at home and in the interests of the family. All
industries have since that remote period risen to higher stages, except
one or two which are still classed as "domestic," and rightly so, since
they are the only industries on earth which have never left their
primal stage. This a very large and important phase of the study of the
home, and will be given due space later.
Least of all do we see progress in the home ideas. The home has changed
much in physical structure, in spite of itself. It has changed somewhat
in its functions, also in spite of itself. But it has changed very
little--painfully little--dangerously little, in its governing
concepts. Naturally ideas change with facts, but if ideas are held to
be sacred and immovable, the facts slide out from under and go on
growing because they must, while the ideas lag further and further
behind. We once held that the earth was flat. This was our concept and
governed our actions. In time, owing to a widening field of action on
the one hand, and a growth of the human brain on the other, we
ascertained the fact that the earth was round. See the larger thought
of Columbus driving him westward, while the governing concepts of the
sailors, proving too strong for him, dragged him back. Then, gradually,
with some difficulty, the idea followed the fact, and has since
penetrated to all minds in civilised countries. But the flatness of the
earth was not an essential religious concept, though it was clung to
strongly by the inert religion of the time; nor was it a domestic
concept, something still more inert. If it had been, it would have
taken far longer to make the change.
What progress has been made in our domestic concepts? The oldest,--the
pre-human,--shelter, safety, comfort, quiet, and mother love, are still
with us, still crude and limited. Then follow gradually later
sentiments of sanctity, privacy, and sex-seclusion; and still later,
some elements of personal convenience and personal expression. How do
these stand as compared with the facts? Our safety is really insured by
social law and order, not by any system of home defence. Against the
real dangers of modern life the home is no safeguard. It is as open to
criminal attack as any public building, yes, more. A public building is
more easily and effectively watched and guarded than our private homes.
Sewer gas invades the home; microbes, destructive insects, all diseases
invade it also; so far as civilised life is open to danger, the home is
defenceless. So far as the home is protected it is through social
progress--through public sanitation enforced by law and the public
guardians of the peace. If we would but shake off the primitive
limitations of these old concepts, cease to imagine the home to be a
safe place, and apply our ideas of shelter, safety, comfort, and quiet
to the City and State, we should then be able to ensure their
fulfilment in our private homes far more fully.
The mother-love concept suffers even more from its limitations. As a
matter of fact our children are far more fully guarded, provided for,
and educated, by social efforts than by domestic; compare the children
of a nation with a system of public education with children having only
domestic education; or children safeguarded by public law and order
with children having only domestic protection. The home-love and care
of the Armenians for their children is no doubt as genuine and strong
as ours, but the public care is not strong and well organised, hence
the little Armenians are open to massacre as little Americans are not.
Our children are largely benefited by the public, and would be much
more so if the domestic concept did not act too strongly in limiting
mother love to so narrow a field of action.
The later sentiments of sanctity and the others have moved a little,
but not much. _Why_ it is more sacred to make a coat at home than
to buy it of a tailor, to kill a cow at home than to buy it of a
butcher, to cook a pie at home than to buy it of a baker, or to teach a
child at home than to have it taught by a teacher, is not made clear to
us, but the lingering weight of those ages of ancestor-worship, of real
sacrifice and libation at a real altar, is still heavy in our minds. We
still by race-habit regard the home as sacred, and cheerfully profane
our halls of justice and marts of trade, as if social service were not
at least as high a thing as domestic service. This sense of sanctity is
a good thing, but it should grow, it should evolve along natural lines
till it includes all human functions, not be forever confined to its
cradle, the home.
The concept of sex-seclusion is, with us, rapidly passing away. Our
millions of wage-earning women are leading us, by the irresistible
force of accomplished fact, to recognise the feminine as part of the
world around us, not as a purely domestic element. The foot-binding
process in China is but an extreme expression of this old domestic
concept, the veiling process another. We are steadily leaving them all
behind, and an American man feels no jar to his sexuo-domestic
sentiments in meeting a woman walking freely in the street or working
in the shops.
The latest of our home-ideas, personal convenience and expression, are
themselves resultant from larger development of personality, and lead
out necessarily. The accumulating power of individuality developed in
large social processes by the male, is inherited by the female; she,
still confined to the home, begins to fill and overfill it with the
effort at individual expression, and must sooner or later come out to
find the only normal field for highly specialised human power--the
world.
Thus we may be encouraged in our study of domestic evolution. The
forces and sentiments originating in the home have long since worked
out to large social processes. We have gone far on our way toward
making the world our home. What most impedes our further progress is
the persistent retention of certain lines of industry within domestic
limits, and the still more persistent retention of certain lines of
home feelings and ideas. Even here, in the deepest, oldest, darkest,
slowest place in all man's mind, the light of science, the stir of
progress, is penetrating. The world does move--and so does the home.
III
DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY