their hold on the popular mind than even religious beliefs. Of all
current superstitions none are deeper rooted, none so sensitive to the
touch, so acutely painful in removal. We have lived to see nations
outgrow some early beliefs, but others are still left us to study, in
their long slow processes of decay. Belief in "the divine right of
kings," for instance, is practically outgrown in America; and yet,
given a king,--or even a king's brother,--and we show how much of the
feeling remains in our minds, disclaim as we may the idea. Habits of
thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may
reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the
same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.
Wherever the pouring stream of social progress has had little
influence,--in remote rural regions, hidden valleys, and neglected
coasts,--we find still in active force some of the earliest myths. They
may change their names as new religions take the place of old, Santa
Claus and St. Valentine holding sway in place of forgotten deities of
dim antiquity, but the festival or custom embodied is the same that was
enjoyed by those most primitive ancestors. Of all hidden valleys none
has so successfully avoided discovery as the Home. Church and State
might change as they would--as they must; science changed, art changed,
business changed, all human functions changed and grew save those of
the home. Every man's home was his castle, and there he maintained as
far as possible the facts and fancies of the place, unaltered from
century to century.
The facts have been too many for him. The domestic hearth, with its
undying flame, has given way to the gilded pipes of the steam heater
and the flickering evanescence of the gas range. But the sentiment
about the domestic hearth is still in play. The original necessity for
the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire--and it
was an altar fire in very truth at one period--has passed with the
means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from
that incessant service, but the _feeling_ that women should stay
at home is with us yet.
The time when all men were enemies, when out-of-doors was one
promiscuous battlefield, when home, well fortified, was the only place
on earth where a man could rest in peace, is past, long past. But the
_feeling_ that home is more secure and protective than anywhere else is
not outgrown.
So we have quite a list of traditional sentiments connected with home
life well worth our study; not only for their interest as
archaeological relics, but because of their positive injury to the life
of to-day, and in the hope that a fuller knowledge will lead to sturdy
action. So far we have but received and transmitted this group of
myths, handed down from the dim past; we continue to hand them down in
the original package, never looking to see if they are so; if we, with
our twentieth-century brains really believe them.
A resentful shiver runs through the reader at the suggestion of such an
examination. "What! Scrutinise the home, that sacred institution, and
even question it? Sacrilegious!" This very feeling proves the frail and
threadbare condition of this group of ideas. Good healthy young ideas
can meet daylight and be handled, but very old and feeble ones, that
have not been touched for centuries, naturally dread inspection, and no
wonder--they seldom survive it.
Let us begin with one especially dominant domestic myth, that fondly
cherished popular idea--"the privacy of the home." In the home who has
any privacy? Privacy means the decent seclusion of the individual, the
right to do what one likes unwatched, uncriticised, unhindered. Neither
father, mother, nor child has this right at home. The young man setting
up in "chambers," the young woman in college room or studio, at last
they realise what privacy is, at last they have the right to be alone.
The home does provide some privacy for the family as a lump--but it
remains a lump--there is no privacy for the individual. When homes and
families began this was enough, people were simple, unspecialised,
their tastes and wishes were similar; it is not enough to-day.
The progressive socialisation of humanity develops individuals; and
this ever-increasing individuality suffers cruelly in the crude
familiarity of home life. There sits the family, all ages, both sexes,
as many characters as persons; and every budding expression, thought,
feeling, or action has to run the gauntlet of the crowd. Suppose any
member is sufficiently strong to insist on a place apart, on doing
things alone and without giving information thereof to the others--is
this easy in the home? Is this relished by the family?
The father, being the economic base of the whole structure, has most
power in this direction; but in ninety-nine cases in a hundred he has
taken his place and his work outside. In the one hundredth case, where
some artist, author, or clergyman has to do his work at home--what is
his opinion then of the privacy of that sacred place?
The artist flees to a studio apart, if possible; the author builds him
a "den" in his garden, if he can afford it; the clergyman strives
mightily to keep "the study" to himself, but even so the family, used
to herding, finds it hard to respect anybody's privacy, and resents it.
The mother--poor invaded soul--finds even the bathroom door no bar to
hammering little hands. From parlour to kitchen, from cellar to garret,
she is at the mercy of children, servants, tradesmen, and callers. So
chased and trodden is she that the very idea of privacy is lost to her
mind; she never had any, she doesn't know what it is, and she cannot
understand why her husband should wish to have any "reserves," any
place or time, any thought or feeling, with which she may not make
free.
The children, if possible, have less even than the mother. Under the
close, hot focus of loving eyes, every act magnified out of all natural
proportion by the close range, the child soul begins to grow. Noticed,
studied, commented on, and incessantly interfered with; forced into
miserable self-consciousness by this unremitting glare; our little ones
grow up permanently injured in character by this lack of one of
humanity's most precious rights--privacy.
The usual result, and perhaps the healthiest, is that bickering which
is so distinctive a feature of family life. The effect varies. Sore
from too much rubbing, there is a state of chronic irritability in the
more sensitive; callous from too much rubbing there is a state of
chronic indifference in the more hardy; and indignities are possible,
yes, common, in family life which would shock and break the bonds of
friendship or of love, and which would be simply inconceivable among
polite acquaintances.
Another result, pleasanter to look at, but deeply injurious to the
soul, is the affectionate dominance of the strongest member of the
family; the more or less complete subservience of the others. Here is
peace at least; but here lives are warped and stunted forever by the
too constant pressure, close and heavy, surrounding them from infancy.
The home, as we know it, does not furnish privacy to the individual,
rich or poor. With the poor there is such crowding as renders it
impossible; and with the rich there is another factor so absolutely
prohibitive of privacy that the phrase becomes a laughing-stock.
Private?--a place private where we admit to the most intimate personal
association an absolute stranger; or more than one? Strangers by birth,
by class, by race, by education--as utterly alien as it is possible to
conceive--these we introduce in our homes--in our very bedchambers; in
knowledge of all the daily habits of our lives--and then we talk of
privacy! Moreover, these persons can talk. As they are not encouraged
to talk to us, they talk the more among themselves; talk fluently,
freely, in reaction from the enforced repression of "their place," and,
with perhaps a tinge of natural bitterness, revenging small slights by
large comment. With servants living in our homes by day and night,
confronted with our strange customs and new ideas, having our family
affairs always before them, and having nothing else in their occupation
to offset this interest, we find in this arrangement of life a
condition as far removed from privacy as could be imagined.
Consider it further: The average servant is an ignorant young woman.
Ignorant young women are proverbially curious, or old ones. This is not
because of their being women, but because of their being ignorant. A
well-cultivated mind has matter of its own to contemplate, and mental
processes of absorbing interest. An uncultivated mind is comparatively
empty and prone to unguarded gossip; its processes are crude and weak,
the main faculty being an absorbing appetite for events--the raw
material for the thoughts it cannot think. Hence the fondness of the
servant class for "penny dreadfuls"--its preferred food is highly
seasoned incident of a wholly personal nature. This is the kind of mind
to which we offer the close and constant inspection of our family life.
This is the kind of tongue which pours forth description and comment in
a subdomiciliary stream. This is the always-open avenue of information
for lover and enemy, spy and priest, as all history and literature
exhibit; and to-day for the reporter--worse than all four.
In simple communities the women of the household, but little above the
grade of servant in mind, freely gossip with their maids. In those more
sophisticated we see less of this free current of exchange, but it is
there none the less, between maid and maid, illimitable. Does not this
prove that our ideas of privacy are somewhat crude--and that they are
kept crude--must remain crude so long as the home is thus vulgarly
invaded by low-class strangers? May we not hope for some development of
home life by which we may outgrow forever these coarse old customs, and
learn a true refinement which keeps inviolate the privacy of both soul
and body in the home?
One other, yes, two other avenues of publicity are open upon this
supposed seclusion. We have seen that the privacy of the mother is at
the mercy of four sets of invaders: children, servants, tradesmen, and
callers. The tradesmen, in a city flat, are kept at a pleasing distance
by the dumb-waiter and speaking tube; and, among rich households
everywhere, the telephone is a defence. But, even at such long range,
the stillness and peace of the home, the chance to do quiet continued
work of any sort, are at the mercy of jarring electric bell or piercing
whistle. One of the joys of the country vacation is the escape from
just these things; the constant calls on time and attention, the
interruption of whatever one seeks to do, by these mercantile demands
against which the home offers no protection.
In less favoured situations, in the great majority of comfortable
homes, the invader gets far closer. "The lady of the house" is
demanded, and must come forth. The front door opens, the back door
yawns, the maid pursues her with the calls of tradesmen, regular and
irregular; from the daily butcher to the unescapable agent with a
visiting card. Of course we resist this as best we may with a bulwark
of trained servants. That is one of the main uses of servants--to offer
some protection to the inmates of this so private place, the home!
Then comes the fourth class--callers. A whole series of revelations as
to privacy comes here; a list so long and deep as to tempt a whole new
chapter on that one theme. Here it can be but touched on, just a
mention of the most salient points.
First there is the bulwark aforesaid, the servant, trained to protect a
place called private from the entrance of a class of persons privileged
to come in. To hold up the hands of the servant comes the lie; the
common social lie, so palpable that it has no moral value to most of
us--"Not at home!"
The home is private. Therefore, to be in private, you must claim to be
out of it!
Back of this comes a whole series of intrenchments--the reception room,
to delay the attack while the occupant hastily assumes defensive
armour; the parlour or drawing room, wherein we may hold the enemy in
play, cover the retreat of non-combatants, and keep some inner chambers
still reserved; the armour above mentioned--costume and manner, not for
the home and its inmates, but meant to keep the observer from forming
an opinion as to the real home life; and then all the weapons crudely
described in rural regions as "company manners," our whole system of
defence and attack; by which we strive, and strive ever in vain, to
maintain our filmy fiction of the privacy of the home.
The sanctity of the home is another dominant domestic myth. That we
should revere the processes of nature as being the laws of God is good;
a healthy attitude of mind. But why revere some more than others, and
the lower more than the higher?
The home, as our oldest institution, is necessarily our lowest, it came
first, before we were equal to any higher manifestation. The home
processes are those which maintain the individual in health and
comfort, or are intended to; and those which reproduce the individual.
These are vital processes, healthy, natural, indispensable, but why
sacred? To eat, to sleep, to breathe, to dress, to rest and amuse one's
self--these are good and useful deeds; but are they more hallowed than
others?
Then the shocked home-worshipper protests that it is not these physical
and personal functions which he holds in reverence, but "the sacred
duties of maternity," and "all those precious emotions which centre in
the home."
Let us examine this view; but, first let us examine the sense of
sanctity itself--see what part it holds in our psychology. In the first
dawn of these emotions of reverence and sanctity, while man was yet a
savage, the priest-craft of the day forced upon the growing racial mind
a sense of darkness and mystery, a system of "tabu"--of "that which is
forbidden." In China still, as term of high respect, the imperial seat
of government is called "the Forbidden City." To the dim thick early
mind, reverence was confounded with mystery and restriction.
Today, in ever-growing light, with microscope and telescope and Röntgen
ray, we are learning the true reverence that follows knowledge, and
outgrowing that which rests on ignorance.
The savage reveres a thing because he cannot understand it--we revere
because we can understand.
The ancient sacred must be covered up; to honour king or god you must
shut your eyes, hide your face, fall prostrate.
The modern sacred must be shown and known of all, and honoured by
understanding and observance.
Let not our sense of sanctity shrink so sensitively from the searcher;
if the home is really sacred, it can bear the light. So now for these
"sacred processes of reproduction." (Protest. "We did not say
'reproduction,' we said 'maternity!'") And what is maternity but one of
nature's processes of reproduction? Maternity and paternity and the
sweet conscious duties and pleasures of human child-rearing are only
more sacred than reproduction by fission, by parthenogenesis, by any
other primitive device, because they are later in the course of
evolution, so higher in the true measure of growth; and for that very
reason education, the social function of child-rearing, is higher than
maternity; later, more developed, more valuable, and so more sacred.
Maternity is common to all animals--but we do not hold it sacred, in
them. We have stultified motherhood most brutally in two of our main
food products--milk and eggs--exploiting this function remorselessly to
our own appetites.
In humanity, in some places and classes we do hold it sacred, however.
Why? "Because it is the highest, sweetest, best thing we know!" will be
eagerly answered. Is it--really? Is it better than Liberty, better than
Justice, better than Art, Government, Science, Industry, Religion? How
can that function which is common to savage, barbarian, peasant, to all
kinds and classes, low and high, be nobler, sweeter, better, than those
late-come, hard-won, slowly developed processes which make men greater,
wiser, kinder, stronger from age to age?
The "sacred duties of maternity" reproduce the race, but they do
nothing to improve it.
Is it not more sacred to teach right conduct for instance, as a true
preacher does, than to feed one's own child as does the squaw? Grant
that both are sacred--that all right processes are sacred--is not the
relative sanctity up and out along the line of man's improvement?
Do we hold a wigwam more sacred than a beast's lair and less sacred
than a modern home? If so, why? Do we hold an intelligent, capable
mother more sacred than an ignorant, feeble one? Where are the limits
and tendencies of these emotions?
The main basis of this home-sanctity idea is simply the historic record
of our ancient religion of ancestor-worship. The home was once used as
a church, as it yet is in China; and the odour of sanctity hangs round
it still. The other basis is the equally old custom of sex-seclusion--the
harem idea. This gives the feeling of mystery and "tabu," of "the
forbidden"--a place shut and darkened--wholly private. A good, clean,
healthy, modern home, with free people living and loving in it, is no
more sacred than a schoolhouse. The schoolhouse represents a larger
love, a higher function, a farther development for humanity. Let us
revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the
lowest; the future, not the past!
Closely allied to our sense of home-sanctity and sprung from the same
root, is our veneration for the old; either people or things; the "home
of our ancestors" being if anything more sacred than our own, and the
pot or plate or fiddle-back chair acquiring imputed sanctity by the
simple flux of time. What time has to do with sanctity is not at first
clear. Perhaps it is our natural respect for endurance. This thing has
_lasted_, therefore it must be good; the longer it lasts the better it
must be, let us revere it!
If this is a legitimate principle, let us hold pilgrimages to the
primordial rocks, they have lasted longer than anything else, except
sea water. Let us frankly worship the sun--or the still remoter
dog-star. Let us revere the gar-fish above the shad--the hedgehog more
than the cow--the tapir beyond the horse--they are all earlier types
and yet endure!
Still more practically let us turn our veneration to the tools,
vehicles, and implements which preceded ours--the arrow-head above the
bullet, the bone-needle above the sewing machine, the hour-glass above
the clock!
There is no genuine reason for this attitude. It is merely a race
habit, handed down to us from very remote times and founded on the
misconceptions of the ignorant early mind. The scientific attitude of
mind is veneration of all the laws of nature, or works of God, as you
choose to call them. If we must choose and distinguish, respecting this
more than that, let us at least distinguish on right lines. The claim
of any material object upon our respect is the degree of its use and
beauty. A weak, clumsy, crooked tool acquires no sanctity from the
handling of a dozen grandfathers; a good, strong, accurate one is as
worthy of respect if made to-day. It is quite possible to the mind of
man to worship idols, but it is not good for him.
A great English artist is said to have scorned visiting the United
States of America as "a country where there were no castles." We might
have showed him the work of the mound-builders, or the bones of the
Triceratops, they are older yet. It will be a great thing for the human
soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards. We are pushed forward
by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our
shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along;
still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping "the
God of our fathers." Why not the God of our children? Does eternity
only stretch one way?
Another devoutly believed domestic myth is that of the "economy" of the
home.
The man is to earn, and the woman to save, to expend judiciously, to
administer the products of labour to the best advantage. We honestly
suppose that our method of providing for human wants by our system of
domestic economy is the cheapest possible; that it would cost more to
live in any other way. The economic dependence of women upon men, with
all its deadly consequences, is defended because of our conviction that
her labour in the home is as productive as his out of it; that the
marriage is a partnership in which, if she does not contribute in cash,
she does in labour, care, and saving.
It is with a real sense of pain that one remorselessly punctures this
beautiful bubble. When plain financial facts appear, when economic laws
are explained, then it is shown that our "domestic economy" is the most
wasteful department of life. The subject is taken up in detail in the
chapter on home industries; here the mere statement is made, that the
domestic system of feeding, clothing, and cleaning humanity costs more
time, more strength, and more money than it could cost in any other way
except absolute individual isolation. The most effort and the least
result are found where each individual does all things for himself. The
least effort and the most result are found in the largest
specialisation and exchange.
The little industrial group of the home--from two to five or ten--is
very near the bottom of the line of economic progress. It costs men
more money, women more work, both more time and strength than need be
by more than half. A method of living that wastes half the time and
strength of the world is not economical.
Somewhat along this line of popular belief comes that pretty fiction
about "the traces of a woman's hand." It is a minor myth, but very dear
to us. We imagine that a woman--any woman--just because she is a woman,
has an artistic touch, an æsthetic sense, by means of which she can
cure ugliness as kings were supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on
of hands. We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some
lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers a flower pot,
a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly proclaims--"A woman has been
here." He thinks it is beautiful because it is feminine--a
sexuo-æsthetic confusion common to all animals.
The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions, is a strange
field of study. The varied forms of crests, combs, wattles, callosities
of blue and crimson, and the like, with which one sex attracts the
other, are interesting to follow; but they do not appeal to the
cultivated sense of beauty. Beauty--beauty of sky and sea, of flower
and shell, of all true works of art--has nothing to do with sex.
When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those who _have_
beautified the world for us; on the immortal marbles and mosaics,
vessels of gold and glass, on building and carving and modelling and
painting; the enduring beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich
embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great record of
world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a woman's hand.
Then study real beauty in the home--any home--all homes. There are
women in our farm-houses--women who painfully strive to produce beauty
in many forms; crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck
together, made of wax; made--of all awful things--of the hair of the
dead! Here are traces of a woman's hand beyond dispute, but is it
beauty? Through the hands of women, with their delighted approval,
pours the stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture,
fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration, fashion in clothing.
What miracle does "a woman's hand" work on this varying flood of
change?
The woman is as pleased with black horsehair as with magenta reps; she
is equally contented with "anti-macassars" as with sofa-cushions, if
these things are fashionable. Her "old Canton" is relegated to the
garret when "French China" of unbroken white comes in; and then brought
down again in triumph when the modern goes out and the antique comes in
again.