in it any more than he can help. The young woman at home finds her
growing individuality an increasing disadvantage, and many times makes
a too hasty marriage because she is not happy at home--in order to have
"a home of her own," where she still piously believes all will be well.
The child at home has no knowledge of any other and better environment
wherewith to compare this. He accepts his home as the unavoidable base
of all things--he cannot think of life with a different home. But the
eagerness with which he hails any proposition that takes him out of it,
his passionate hunger for change, for novelty; the fever which most
boys have for "running away"; the eager, intense interest in stories of
anything and everything as far removed from home life as possible; the
dreary _ennui_ of the child who is punished by being kept at home--or
who has to stay there continuously for any reason--standing at the
window which can give sight of the world outside and longing for
something to happen--all this goes to indicate that home life does not
satisfy the child. There was a time when it did, when it satisfied
every member of the family; but that was under far more primitive
conditions.
The home has not developed in the same ratio as its occupants. The
people of to-day are not content in the homes of a thousand years
before yesterday. Our present home conditions are being changed--very
gradually, owing to the stiffness of the material, but are slowly
changing before our eyes. As a matter of fact, we are ready--more than
ready--for the homes of the future; as a matter of feeling, we are
clinging with all our might to the homes of the past; and, in their
present conditions, our homes are not by any means those centres of
rest, peace, and satisfaction we are so religiously taught to think
them.
Suppose for an instant that they were. Suppose the trouble, the
weariness, the danger and evils of outside life were all laid aside the
moment we entered the home. There all was well. No financial trouble.
No industrial trouble. No physical trouble. No mental trouble. No moral
trouble. Just a place where everything ran on wheels; and where the
world-worn soul could count on peace and refreshment.
Vain supposition! Whatever the financial troubles of the world, the
place where they are felt most is in the home. Here is where the money
is spent, and most wastefully misspent as we shall see later. Here is
where there is never enough, where the demand continually exceeds the
supply.
As to industrial trouble, the labour question is a large one
everywhere. The introduction of machinery has brought its train of
needless disadvantages as well as its essential advantages. There are
dishonesty and inefficiency to meet and cope with. But compare the
conversation of a hundred business men with that of a hundred
housekeeping women, and learn respect for the magnitude of the
industrial troubles of the home.
For physical troubles, as we have before indicated, the home is no
relief. We struggle to enforce laws improving the physical conditions
of the coal mine and the factory, but these laws find their utmost
difficulty of application in the "sweatshops," the place where work is
done at home. There is no law to improve the sanitary condition of the
kitchen, to compel the admission of oxygen to the bedroom. In the home
every law of health may be disregarded with impunity. We strive by
building regulations and Boards of Health to make some improvement, but
the conditions of home life, as now existing, are no guarantee of
safety from physical troubles.
As to the mental and moral--the whole field of psychical error and
difficulty--the home is the place where we suffer most. The struggles
and falls of the soul, our most intimate sins, the keenest pain we
know--the home is the arena for these in large measure. Tender virtues
grow there, too--deep and abiding love, generous devotion, patient
endurance--faithfulness and care; but for one home that shows us these
is another where dominant injustice, selfishness, unthinking cruelty,
impatience, grossest rudeness, a callous disregard for the oft-trodden
feelings of others is found instead. No wide acquaintance with present
homes can fail to note these things in every shade of growth. Home is a
place where people live, people good and bad, great and small, wise and
unwise. The home does not make the bad good, the small great, or the
foolish wise. Many a man who _has_ to be decent in his social life
is domineering and selfish at home. Many a woman who has to be
considerate and polite in her social life, such as it is, is exacting
and greedy at home, and cruel as only the weak and ignorant can be. Now
if the home was what produced the virtues we commonly attribute to it,
then all homes, of all times and peoples, would have the same effect.
The American man holds pre-eminence as sacrificed to the home; the
American woman as being most petted and indulged therein. In England we
find the man more the centre of indulgence, in Germany still more
so--and the women subsidiary to his use and pleasure.
How can "the home" be credited with such opposite results? If, as is
commonly assumed, the home has any unfailing general effect, we must be
able to point out that effect in the homes of Russia, China, France,
and Egypt. If we find the homes of the nations differ we must look for
the cause in the national institutions--not the domestic.
That our well-loved homes are as good as they are is due to our race
progress; to our religion, our education, our general social advance.
When a peasant family from Hungary comes to America, they establish a
Hungarian home. As they become Americanised the home changes and
improves. The credit is not due to the home, but to the country.
Meanwhile the home does have certain definite effects upon our life;
due to its own nature, and acting upon us in every time and place.
These we shall analyse and follow in studying the effects of the home
upon society in a later chapter. In this observation of present
conditions we should note merely how our average home life now stands.
And we may plainly see these things; a general condition of unrest and
more or less dissatisfaction. A tendency to ever-growing expense, which
threatens the very existence of the home and is forcing many into
boarding houses. An increasing difficulty in the industrial
processes--a difficulty so great that the lives of our women are
embittered and shortened by it, and the periods of anxiety and
ill-adjustment are longer than those of satisfactory service. An
improvement in sanitary conditions so far as public measures can reach
the home, but a wide field of disease owing to wrong habits of
clothing, eating, and breathing. A rudimentary custom of child-culture
only beginning to show signs of progress; and a degree of unhappiness
to which the divorce and criminal courts, as well as insane asylums and
graveyards, bear crushing testimony.
With conditions of home life as far from our cherished ideal as these,
is it not time for us bravely to face the problem, and study home life
with a view to its improvement? Not "to abolish the home," as is wildly
feared by those who dare not discuss it. A pretty testimony this to
their real honour and belief! Is the home so light a thing as to be
blown away by a breath of criticism? Are we so loosely attached to our
homes as to give them up when some defects are pointed out? Is it not a
confession of the discord and pain we so stoutly deny, that we are not
willing to pour light into this dark place and see what ails it?
There is no cause for fear. So long as life lasts we shall have homes;
but we need not always have the same kind.
Our present home is injured by the rigidly enforced maintenance of
long-outgrown conditions. We may free ourselves, if we will, from every
one of those injurious, old conditions, and still retain all that is
good and beautiful and right in the home.
V
THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP
_I. The Housewife_
All industry began at home.
All industry was begun by women.
Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation, during that long period
of slowly changing savagery which antedates our really human life,
whatever work was done on earth was done by the woman in the home. From
that time to this we have travelled far, spread wide, grown broad and
high; and our line of progress is the line of industrial evolution.
Where the patient and laborious squaw once carried on her back the
slaughtered game for her own family, now wind and steam and lightning
distribute our provisions around the world. Where she once erected a
rude shelter of boughs or hides for her own family, now mason and
carpenter, steel and iron worker, joiner, lather, plasterer, glazier,
plumber, locksmith, painter, and decorator combine to house the world.
Where she chewed and scraped the hides, wove bark and grasses, made
garments, made baskets, made pottery, made all that was made for her
own family, save the weapons of slaughter, now the thousand
manufactures of a million mills supply our complex needs and pleasures.
Where she tamed and herded a few beasts for her own family, now from
ranchman to packer move the innumerable flocks and herds of the great
plains; where she ploughed with a stick and reaped with a knife, for
her own family, now gathered miles of corn cross continent and ocean to
feed all nations. Where she prepared the food and reared the child for
her own family--what! Has the world stopped? Is history a dream? Is
social progress mere imagination?--_there she is yet!_ Back of history,
at the bottom of civilisation, untouched by a thousand whirling
centuries, the primitive woman, in the primitive home, still toils at
her primitive tasks.
All industries began at home, there is no doubt of that. All other
industries have left home long ago. Why have these stayed? All other
industries have grown. Why have not these?
What conditions, social and economic, what shadowy survival of oldest
superstitions, what iron weight of custom, law, religion, can be
adduced in explanation of such a paradox as this? Talk of Siberian
mammoths handed down in ice, like some crystallised fruit of earliest
ages! What are they compared with this antediluvian relic! By what art,
what charm, what miracle, has the twentieth century preserved _alive_
the prehistoric squaw!
This is a phenomenon well worth our study, a subject teeming with
interest, one that concerns every human being most closely--most
vitally. Sociology is beginning to teach us something of the processes
by which man has moved up and on to his present grade, and may move
farther. Among those processes none is clearer, simpler, easier to
understand, than industrial evolution. Its laws are identical with
those of physical evolution, a progression from the less to the
greater, from the simple to the complex, a constant adaptation of means
to ends, a tendency to minimise effort and maximise efficiency. The
solitary savage applies his personal energy to his personal needs. The
social group applies its collective energy to its collective needs. The
savage works by himself, for himself; the civilised man works in
elaborate inter-dependence with many, for many. By the division of
labour and its increasing specialisation we vastly multiply skill and
power; by the application of machinery we multiply the output; by the
development of business methods we reduce expense and increase results;
the whole line of growth is the same as that which makes a man more
efficient in action than his weight in shell-fish. He is more highly
organised and specialised. So is modern industry.
The solitary savage knew neither specialisation nor organisation--he
"did his own work." This process gives the maximum of effort and the
minimum of results. Specialised and organised industry gives the
minimum of effort and the maximum of results. That is civilised
industry.
The so idealised and belauded "home industries" are still savage. The
modern home is built and furnished by civilised methods. Arts, crafts,
and manufactures, sciences, professions, many highly sublimated
processes of modern life combine to make perfect the place where we
live; but the industries practised in that place remain at the first
round of the ladder.
Instead of having our pick of the latest and best workers, we are here
confined to the two earliest--the Housewife and the Housemaid. The
housewife is the very first, and she still predominates by so large a
majority as to make us wonder at the noisy prominence of "the servant
question." (It is not so wonderful, after all, for that class of the
population which keeps servants is the class which makes the most
noise.) Even in rich America, even in richest New York, in
_nine-tenths_ of the families the housewife "does her own work."
This is so large a proportion that we will consider the housewife
first--and fully.
Why was woman the first worker? Because she is a mother. All living
animals are under the law of, first, self-preservation, and, second,
race-preservation. But the second really comes first; the most
imperative forces in nature compel the individual to sacrifice to the
race. This law finds its best expression in what we call "the maternal
sacrifice." Motherhood means giving. There is no limit to this urgency.
The mother gives all she has to the young, including life. In many low
organisms the sacrifice is instantaneous and complete--the mother dies
in giving birth to the young--just lays her eggs and dies. Such forms
of life have to remain low, however. The defunct mothers can be of no
further use to the young, so they have to be little instinctive
automata, hopelessly arrested in the path of progress.
Nature perceived that this wholly sacrified mother was not the best
kind. Little by little the usefulness of the mother was prolonged, the
brooding mother, the feeding mother, lastly the nursing mother, highest
of all. Order mammalia stands at the top, type of efficient motherhood.
When human development began, new paths were open to mother-love--new
tasks to maternal energy. The human mother not only nursed and guarded
the child, but exercised her dawning ingenuity in adding to its comfort
by making things.
The constructive tendency is essentially feminine; the destructive
masculine. Male energy tends to scatter and destroy, female to gather
and construct. So human labour comes by nature from the woman, was hers
entirely for countless ages, while the man could only hunt and fight,
or prance and prophesy as "medicine man"; and this is still so in those
races which remain savage. Even in so advanced a savage race as the
Zulus, the women do the work; and our own country has plenty of similar
examples near at hand.
As human civilisation is entirely dependent on progressive industry,
while hunting and fighting are faculties we share with the whole
carnivora, it is easy to see that during all those ages of savagery the
woman was the leader. She represented the higher grade of life; and
carried it far enough to bring to birth many of the great arts as well
as the humbler ones, especially the invaluable art of language.[1]
[1] See Otis Mason, "Woman's Share in Primitive Culture."
But maternal energy has its limits. What those limits are may be best
studied in an ant's nest or a beehive. These marvellous insects,
perfected types of industry and of maternity, have succeeded in
_organising motherhood_. Most creatures reproduce individually,
these collectively--all personal life absolutely lost in the group
life. Moved by an instinct coincident with its existence, the
new-hatched ant, still weak and wet from the pupa, staggers to the
nearest yet unborn to care for it, and cares for it devotedly to the
end of life.
One bee group-mother, crawling from cell to cell, lays eggs unnumbered
for the common care; the other group-mothers, their own egg-laying
capacity in abeyance, labour unceasingly in the interests of those
common eggs; and the delicate perfection of provision and service thus
attained results in--what? In a marvellous motherhood and a futile
fatherhood; the predominant female, the almost negligible male--a
temporary fertilising agent merely; in infinite reproduction, and that
is all; in more bees, and more ants, more and more for ever, like the
sands of the sea. They would cover the earth like a blanket but for
merciful appetites of other creatures. But this is only
multiplication--not improvement. Nature has one more law to govern life
besides self-preservation and reproduction--progress. To be, to re-be,
and to be better is the law. It is not enough to keep one's self alive,
it is not enough to keep one's kind alive, we must improve. This law of
growth, which is the grand underlying one that moves the universe, acts
on living species mainly through the male. He is progressive where the
female is conservative by nature. He is a variant where she is the race
type. This tendency to vary is one of the most beneficent in nature.
Through it comes change, and, through change, improvement. The
unbridled flow of maternal energy is capable of producing an exquisite
apparatus for child-rearing, and no more. The masculine energy is
needed also, for the highest evolution.
Well is it for the human race that the male savage finally took hold of
the female's industry. Whether he perceived her superiority and sought
to emulate it is doubtful; more probably it was the pressure of
economic conditions which slowly forced him to it. The glaring proofs
of time taught him that the pasture was more profitable than the
hunting ground, and the cornfield than the pasture. The accumulating
riches produced by the woman's industry drew him on. Slowly,
reluctantly, the lordly fighter condescended to follow the humble
worker, who led him by thousands of years. In the hands of the male,
industry developed. The woman is a patient, submissive, inexhaustible
labourer. The pouring forces of maternity prompt her to work for
ever--for her young. Not so the man. Working is with him an acquired
habit, and acquired very late in his racial life. The low-grade man
still in his heart despises it, he still prefers to be waited on by
women, he still feels most at home in hunting and fighting. And man
alone being represented in the main fields of modern industry, this
male instinct for hunting and fighting plays havoc with the true
economic processes. He makes a warfare of business, he makes prey of
his competitors, he still seeks to enslave--to make others work for
him, instead of freely and joyously working all he can. The best
industrial progress needs both elements--ours is but a compromise as
yet, something between the beehive and the battlefield.
But, with all the faults of unbridled male energy, it has lifted
industry from the limits of the home to that of the world. Through it
has come our splendid growth; much marred by evils of force and fraud,
crude, wasteful, cruel, but progressive; and infinitely beyond the
level of these neglected rudimentary trades left at home; left to the
too tender mercies of the housewife.
The iron limits of her efficiency are these: First, that of average
capacity. Just consider what any human business would be in which there
was no faintest possibility of choice, of exceptional ability, of
division of labor. What would shoes be like if every man made his own,
if the shoemaker had never come to his development? What would houses
be like if every man made his own? Or hats, or books, or waggons? To
confine any industry to the level of a universal average is to strangle
it in its cradle. And there, for ever, lie the industries of the
housewife. What every man does alone for himself, no man can ever do
well--or woman either. That is the first limit of the "housewife."
The next is the maternal character of this poor primeval labourer.
Because of her wealth of power and patience it does not occur to her to
make things easier for herself. The fatal inertia of home industries
lies in their maternal basis. The work is only done for the family--the
family is satisfied--what remains? There is no other ambition, no other
incentive, no other reward. Where the horizon of duty and aspiration
closes down with one's immediate blood relations, there is no room for
growth.
All that has pushed and pulled reluctant man up the long path of social
evolution has not touched the home-bound woman. Whatever height he
reached, her place was still the same. The economic relation of the
sexes here works[2] with tremendous force. Depending on the male for
her economic profit, her own household labours kept to the sex-basis,
and never allowed to enter the open market, there was nothing to modify
her original sex-tendency to work with stationary contentment. If we
can imagine for a moment a world like ours, with all our elaborate
business processes in the hands of women, and the men still in the
position of the male savage--painted braves, ready for the warpath, and
good for little else--we get a comparison with this real condition,
where the business processes are in the hands of men, and the women
still in the position of the female savage--docile toilers for the
family, and good for little else. That is the second limit of the
housewife--that she is merely working for her own family--in the
sex-relation--not the economic relation; as servant to the family
instead of servant to the world.
[2] See "Women and Economics," C. P. Stetson.
Next comes her isolation. Even the bottom-level of a universal
average--even the blind patience of a working mother--could be helped
up a little under the beneficent influence of association. In the days
when the ingenious squaw led the world, she had it. The women toiled
together at their primitive tasks and talked together as they toiled.
The women who founded the beginnings of agriculture were founders also
of the village; and their feminine constructive tendencies held it
together while the destructive tendencies of the belligerent male
continually tore it apart. All through that babyhood of civilisation,
the hunting and fighting instinct made men prey upon the accumulated
wealth resultant from the labouring instinct of women--but industry
conquered, being the best. As industry developed, as riches increased,
as property rights were defined, as religions grew, women were confined
more and more closely at home. Later civilisations have let them out to
play--but not to work. The parasitic female of the upper classes is
allowed the empty freedom of association with her useless kind; but the
housewife is still confined to the house.
We are now giving great attention to this matter of home industry. We
are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on
Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of
home industry--and we omit to notice that it is just because it is home
industry that all this trouble is necessary.
So far as home industry had been affected by world industry, it has
improved. The implements of cooking and cleaning, for instance--where
should we be if our modern squaw had to make her own utensils, as did
her ancient prototype? The man, in world industry, makes not only the
house, with all its elaborate labour-saving and health-protecting
devices; not only the furniture of the house, the ornaments, hangings,
and decorations, but the implements of the home industries as well. Go
to the household furnishing store of our day--remember the one pot of
the savage family to boil the meat and wash the baby--and see the
difference between "homemade" and "world-made" things.
So far as home industry has progressed, it is through contact with the
moving world outside; so far as it remains undeveloped, it is through
the inexorable limitations of the home in itself.