distortion, discord, and contradiction that can be sewed together. The
æsthetic sense of woman has never interfered with her acceptance of
ugliness, if ugliness were the fashion. The very hair of her head goes
up and down, in and out, backwards and forwards under the sway of
fashion, with no hint of harmony with the face it frames or the head it
was meant to honour. In her house or on her person "the traces of a
woman's hand" may speak loud of sex, and so please her opposite; but
there is no assurance of beauty in the result. This sweet tradition is
but another of our domestic myths.
Among them all, most prominent of all, is one so general and so
devoutly accepted as to call for most thorough exposure. This is our
beloved dogma of "the maternal instinct." The mother, by virtue of
being a mother, is supposed to know just what is right for her
children. We honestly believe, men and women both, that in motherhood
inheres the power rightly to care for childhood.
This is a nature-myth, far older than humanity. We base the theory on
observation of the lower animals. We watch the birds and beasts and
insects, and see that the mother does all for the young; and as she has
no instruction and no assistance, yet achieves her ends, we attribute
her success to the maternal instinct.
What is an instinct? It is an inherited habit. It is an automatic
action of the nervous system, developed in surviving species of many
generations of repetition; and performing most intricate feats.
There is an insect which prepares for its young to eat a carefully
paralysed caterpillar. This ingenious mother lays her eggs in a neatly
arranged hole, then stings a caterpillar, so accurately as to deprive
him of motion but not of life, and seals up the hole over eggs and
fresh meat in full swing of the maternal instinct. A cruelly inquiring
observer took out the helpless caterpillar as soon as he was put in;
but the instinct-guided mother sealed up the hole just as happily. She
had done the trick, as her instinct prompted, and there was no
allowance for scientific observers in that prompting. She had no
intelligence, only instinct. You may observe mother instinct at its
height in a fond hen sitting on china eggs--instinct, but no brains.
We, being animals, do retain some rudiments of the animal instincts;
but only rudiments. The whole course of civilisation has tended to
develop in us a conscious intelligence, the value of which to the human
race is far greater than instinct. Instinct can only be efficient in
directing actions which are unvaryingly repeated by each individual for
each occasion. It is that repetition which creates the instinct. When
the environment of an animal changes he has to use something more than
instinct, or he becomes ex-tinct!
The human environment is in continual flux, and changes more and more
quickly as social evolution progresses. No personal conditions are so
general and unvarying with us as to have time to develop an instinct;
the only true ones for our race are the social instincts--and maternity
is not a social process.
Education is a social process, the very highest. To collect the
essentials of human progress and supply them to the young, so that each
generation may improve more rapidly, that is education. The animals
have no parallel to this. The education of the animal young by the
animal mother tends only to maintain life, not to improve it. The
education of a child, and by education is meant every influence which
reaches it, from birth to maturity, is a far more subtle and elaborate
process.
The health and growth of the body, the right processes of mental
development, the ethical influences which shape character--these are
large and serious cares, for which our surviving driblets of instinct
make no provision. If there were an instinct inherent in human mothers
sufficient to care rightly for their children, then all human mothers
would care rightly for their children.
Do they?
What percentage of our human young live to grow up? About fifty per
cent. What percentage are healthy? We do not even expect them to be
healthy. So used are we to "infantile diseases" that our idea of a
mother's duty is to nurse sick children, not to raise well ones! What
percentage of our children grow up properly proportioned, athletic and
vigorous? Ask the army surgeon who turns down the majority of
applicants for military service. What percentage of our children grow
up with strong, harmonious characters, wise and good? Ask the great
army of teachers and preachers who are trying for ever and ever to
somewhat improve the adult humanity which is turned out upon the world
from the care of its innumerable mothers and their instincts.
Our eyes grow moist with emotion as we speak of our mothers--our own
mothers--and what they have done for us. Our voices thrill and tremble
with pathos and veneration as we speak of "the mothers of great men--"
mother of Abraham Lincoln! Mother of George Washington! and so on. Had
Wilkes Booth no mother? Was Benedict Arnold an orphan?
_Who_, in the name of all common sense, raises our huge and growing
crop of idiots, imbeciles, cripples, defectives, and degenerates, the
vicious and the criminal; as well as all the vast mass of slow-minded,
prejudiced, ordinary people who clog the wheels of progress? Are the
mothers to be credited with all that is good and the fathers with all
that is bad?
That we are what we are is due to these two factors, mothers and
fathers.
Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our social
environment is what modifies heredity and develops human character. The
kind of country we live in, the system of government, of religion, of
education, of business, of ordinary social customs and convention, this
is what develops mankind, this is given by our fathers.
What does maternal instinct contribute to this sum of influences? Has
maternal instinct even evolved any method of feeding, dressing,
teaching, disciplining, educating children which commands attention,
not to say respect? It has not.
The mothers of each nation, governed only by this rudimentary instinct,
repeat from generation to generation the mistakes of their more
ignorant ancestors; like a dog turning around three times before he
lies down on the carpet, because his thousand-remove progenitors turned
round in the grass!
That the care and education of children have developed at all is due to
the intelligent efforts of doctors, nurses, teachers, and such few
parents as chose to exercise their human brains instead of their brute
instincts.
That the care and education of children are still at the disgraceful
level generally existent is due to our leaving these noble functions to
the unquestioned dominance of a force which, even among animals, is not
infallible, and which, in our stage of socialisation, is practically
worthless.
Of all the myths which befog the popular mind, of all false worship
which prevents us from recognising the truth, this matriolatry is one
most dangerous. Blindly we bow to the word "mother"--worshipping the
recreative processes of nature as did forgotten nations of old time in
their great phallic religions.
The processes of nature are to be studied, not worshipped; the laws of
nature find best reverence in our intelligent understanding and
observance, not in obsequious adoration. When the human mother shows
that she understands her splendid function by developing a free,
strong, healthy body; by selecting a vigorous and noble mate; by
studying the needs of childhood, and meeting them with proficient
services, her own or that of others better fitted; by presenting to the
world a race of children who do not die in infancy, who are not preyed
upon by "preventable diseases," who grow up straight, strong,
intelligent, free-minded, and right-intentioned; then we shall have
some reason to honour motherhood, and it will be brain-work and
soul-work that we honour. Intelligence, study, experience, science,
love that has more than a physical basis--human motherhood--not the
uncertain rudiments of a brute instinct!
IV
PRESENT CONDITIONS
The difference between our current idea of the home to-day, and its
real conditions, is easily seen. That is, it is easily seen if we are
able temporarily to resist the pressure of inherited traditions, and
use our individual brain power for a little while. We must remember, in
attempting to look fairly, to see clearly, that a concept is a much
stronger stimulus to the brain than a fact.
A fact, reaching the brain through any sensory nerve, is but an
impression; and if a previous impression to the contrary exists,
especially if that contrary impression has existed, untouched, for many
generations, the fact has but a poor chance of acceptance. "What!"
cries the astonished beholder of some new phenomenon. "Can I believe my
eyes!" and he does not believe his eyes, preferring to believe the
stock in trade of his previous ideas. It takes proof, much proof,
glaring, positive, persistent, to convince us that what we have long
thought to be so is not so. "A preconceived idea" is what we call this
immoveable lump in the brain, and if the preconceived idea is deeply
imbedded, knit, and rooted as an "underlying conviction," and has so
existed for a very long time, then a bombardment of most undeniable
facts bounds off it without effect.
Our ideas of the home are, as we have seen, among the very deepest in
the brain; and to reach down into those old foundation feelings, to
disentangle the false from the true, to show that the true home does
not involve this group of outgrown rudiments is difficult indeed. Yet,
if we will but use that wonderful power of thought which even the most
prejudiced can exercise for a while, it is easy to see what are the
real conditions of the average home to-day. By "average" is not meant
an average of numbers. The world still has its millions of savage
inhabitants who do not represent to-day, but anthropologic yesterdays,
long past.
Even in our own nation, our ill-distributed social advance leaves us a
vast majority of population who do not represent to-day, but a historic
yesterday. The home that is really of to-day is the home of the people
of to-day, those people who are abreast of the thought, the work, the
movement of our times. The real conditions of the present-day home are
to be studied here; not in the tepee of the Sioux, the clay-built walls
of the Pueblo, the cabin of the "Georgia cracker," or mountaineer of
Tennessee; or even in the thousand farm-houses which still repeat so
nearly the status of an earlier time.
The growth and change of the home may be traced through all these
forms, in every stage of mechanical, industrial, economic, artistic,
and psychic development; but the stage we need to study is that we are
now in, those homes which are pushed farthest in the forefront of the
stream of progress. An average home of to-day, in this sense, is one of
good social position, wherein the husband has sufficient means and the
wife sufficient education to keep step with the march of events; one
which we should proudly point out to a foreign visitor as "a typical
American home."
Now, how does this home really stand under dispassionate observation?
The ideal which instantly obtrudes itself is this: A beautiful,
comfortable house meeting all physical needs; a happy family,
profoundly enjoying each other's society; a father, devotedly spending
his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain this little heaven; a
mother, completely wrapped up in her children and devotedly spending
her life in their service, working miracles of advantage to them in so
doing; children, happy in the home and growing up beautifully under its
benign influence--everybody healthy, happy, and satisfied with the
whole thing.
This ideal is what we are asked to lay aside temporarily; and in its
place to bring our minds to bear on the palpable facts in the case.
Readers of a specially accurate turn of mind may perhaps be interested
enough to jot down on paper their own definite observations of, say, a
dozen homes they know best.
One thing may be said here in defence of our general ignorance on this
subject: the actual conditions of home life are studiously concealed
from casual observation. Our knowledge of each other's homes is
obtained principally by "calling" and the more elaborate forms of
social entertainments.
The caller only reaches the specially prepared parlour or reception
room; the more intimate friends sometimes the bedroom or even nursery,
if they are at the time what we call "presentable"; and it is part of
our convention, our age-long habit of mind, to accept this partial and
prepared view as a picture of the home life. It is not.
To know any home really, you must live in it, "winter and summer" it,
know its cellar as well as parlour, its daily habits as well as its
company manners. So we have to push into the background not only the
large, generally beautiful home ideal, smiling conventionally like a
big bronze Buddha; but also that little pocket ideal which we are
obliged to use constantly to keep up the proper mental attitude.
We are not used to looking squarely, open-eyed and critical, at any
home, so "sacred" is the place to us. Now, having laid aside both the
general ideal and the pocket ideal, what do we see?
As to physical health and comfort and beauty: Ask your Health Board,
your sanitary engineer, how the laws of health are observed in the
average home--even of the fairly well-to-do, even of the fairly
educated. Learn what we may of art and science, the art of living, the
science of living is not yet known to us. We build for ourselves
elaborate structures in which to live, following architectural
traditions, social traditions, domestic traditions, quite regardless of
the laws of life for the creature concerned.
This home is the home of a live animal, a large animal, bigger than a
sheep--about as big as a fallow deer. The comfort and health of this
animal we seek to insure by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of
cloth and then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with cloth
and paper and occasionally "aired" by opening windows. We feed the
animal in the box, bringing into it large and varied supplies of food,
and cooking them there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant
upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and smell of our own
preferred food-processes, yet holding it essential that they shall all
be carried on in the same box with the animal to be fed; we proceed to
enlarge the box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed doors
these offensive details (which we would not do without for the world),
and to introduce into the box still other animals of different grades
to perform the offensive processes.
You thus find in a first-class modern home peculiar warring conditions,
in the adjustment of which health and comfort are by no means assured.
The more advanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find
complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential
disease, involved in the integral--supposedly integral--processes of
the place. The more lining and stuffing there are, the more waste
matter fills the air and settles continually as dust; the more
elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a
healthy animal to live in; the more labour required, the greater the
wear and tear on both the heads of the family.
The conditions of health in a representative modern home are by no
means what we are capable of compassing.
We consider "antiseptic cleanliness" as belonging only to hospitals,
and are content to spend our daily, and nightly, lives in conditions of
septic dirt.
An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic feet of air in an hour.
How many homes provide such an amount, fresh, either by day or night?
Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to wrong conditions in
shop and office, to chances of the crowd, or to special drug habits.
Diseases of women and children must be studied at home, where they take
rise. The present conditions of the home as to health and comfort are
not satisfactory.
As to beauty: we have not much general knowledge of beauty, either in
instinct or training; yet, even with such as we have, how ill satisfied
it is in the average home. The outside of the house is not beautiful;
the inside is not beautiful; the decorations and furnishings are not
beautiful. The home, by itself, in its age-long traditionalism, does
not allow of growth in these lines; nor do its physical limitations
permit of it. But as education progresses and money accumulates we hire
"art-decorators" and try to creep along the line of advance.
A true natural legitimate home beauty is rare indeed. We may be
perfectly comfortable among our things, and even admire them; people of
any race or age do that; but that sense of "a beautiful home" is but
part of the complex ideal, not a fact recognised by those who love and
study beauty and art. We do not find our common "interiors" dear to the
soul of the painter. So we may observe that in general the home does
not meet the demands of the physical nature, for simple animal health
and comfort; nor of the psychical for true beauty.
Now for our happy family. Let it be carefully borne in mind that no
question is raised as to the happiness of husband and wife; or of
parent and child in their essential relation; but of their happiness as
affected by the home.
The effect of the home, as it now is, upon marriage is a vitally
interesting study. Two people, happily mated, sympathetic physically
and mentally, having many common interests and aspirations, proceed
after marrying to enter upon the business of "keeping house," or
"home-making." This business is not marriage, it is not parentage, it
is not child-culture. It is the running of the commissary and dormitory
departments of life, with elaborate lavatory processes.
The man is now called upon to pay, and pay heavily, for the maintenance
of this group of activities; the woman to work, either personally, by
deputy, or both, in its performance.
Then follows one of the most conspicuous of conditions in our present
home: the friction and waste of its supposedly integral processes. The
man does spend his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain--not a
"little heaven," but a bunch of ill-assorted trades, wherein everything
costs more than it ought to cost, and nothing is done as it should be
done--on a business basis.
How many men simply hand out a proper sum of money for "living
expenses," and then live, serene and steady, on that outlay?
Home expenses are large, uncertain, inexplicable. In some families an
exceptional "manager," provided with a suitable "allowance," does
keep the thing in comparatively smooth running order, at considerable
cost to herself; but in most families the simple daily processes of
"housekeeping" are a constant source of annoyance, friction, waste, and
loss. Housekeeping, as a business, is not instructively successful. As
the structure of the home is not what we so readily took for granted in
our easily fitting ideals, so the functions of the home are not,
either. We are really struggling and fussing along, trying to live
smoothly, healthfully, peacefully; studying all manner of "new thought"
to keep us "poised," pining for a "simpler life"; and yet all spending
our strength and patience on the endless effort to "keep house," to
"make a home"--to live comfortably in a way which is not comfortable;
and when this continuous effort produces utter exhaustion, we have
_to go away from home_ for a rest! Think of that, seriously.
The father is so mercilessly overwhelmed in furnishing the amount of
money needed to maintain a home that he scarce knows what a home is.
Time, time to sit happily down with his family, or to go happily out
with his family, this is denied to the patient toiler on whose
shoulders this ancient structure rests. The mother is so overwhelmed in
her performance or supervision of all the inner workings of the place
that she, too, has scant time for the real joys of family life.
The home is one thing, the family another; and when the home takes all
one's time, the family gets little. So we find both husband and wife
overtaxed and worried in keeping up the institution according to
tradition; both father and mother too much occupied in home-making to
do much toward child-training, man-making!
What is the real condition of the home as regards children--its primal
reason for being? How does the present home meet their needs? How does
the home-bound woman fill the claims of motherhood? As a matter of
fact, _are_ our children happy and prosperous, healthy and good,
at home? Again the ideal rises; picture after picture, tender, warm,
glowing; again we must push it aside and look at the case as it is. In
our homes to-day the child grows up--when he does not die--not at all
in that state of riotous happiness we are so eager to assume as the
condition of childhood. The mother loves the child, always and always;
she does what she can, what she knows how; but the principal work of
her day is the care of the house, not of the child; the construction of
clothes--not of character.
Follow the hours in the day of the housewife: count the minutes spent
in the care and service of the child, as compared with those given to
the planning of meals, the purchase of supplies, the labour either of
personally cleaning things or of seeing that other persons do it; the
"duties" to society, of the woman exempt from the actual house-labour.
"But," we protest, "all this is for the child--the meals, the well-kept
house, the clothes--the whole thing!"
Yes? And in what way do the meals we so elaborately order and prepare,
the daintily furnished home, the much-trimmed clothing, contribute to
the body-growth, mind-growth, and soul-growth of the child? The
conditions of home life are not those best suited to the right growth
of children. Infant discipline is one long struggle to coerce the
growing creature into some sort of submission to the repressions, the
exactions, the arbitrary conventions of the home.
In broad analysis, we find in the representative homes of to-day a
condition of unrest. The man is best able to support it because he is
least in it; he is part and parcel of the organised industries of the
world, he has his own special business to run on its own lines; and he,
with his larger life-basis, can better bear the pressure of
house-worries. The wife is cautioned by domestic moralists not to annoy
her husband with her little difficulties; but in the major part of
them, the economic difficulties, she must consult him, because he pays
the bills.
When a satisfactory Chinaman is running a household; when the money is
paid, the care deputed, the whole thing done as by clock-work, this
phase of home unrest is removed; but the families so provided for are
few. In most cases the business of running a home is a source of
constant friction and nervous as well as financial waste.
Quite beyond this business side come the conditions of home life, the
real conditions, as affecting the lives of the inmates. With great
wealth, and a highly cultivated taste, we find the members of the
family lodged in as much privacy and freedom as possible in a home, and
agreeing to disagree where they are not in accord. With great love and
highly cultivated courtesy and wisdom, we find the members of the
family getting on happily together, even in a physically restricted
home. But in the average home, occupied by average people, we find the
members of the family jarring upon one another in varying degree.
That harmony, peace, and love which we attribute to home life is not as
common as our fond belief would maintain. The husband, as we have seen,
finds his chief base outside, and bears up with greater or less success
against the demands and anxieties of the home. The wife, more closely
bound, breaks down in health with increasing frequency. The effect of
home life on women seems to be more injurious in proportion to their
social development. Our so-called "society" is one outlet, though not a
healthful one, through which the woman seeks to find recreation,
change, and stimulus to enable her to bear up against a too continuous
home life.