interdependent complexity, developing in the human soul an ever-growing
capacity and necessity for wide, free, general association, and
transmitting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as well as
the son, the enormous pressure had to find some outlet. "What will
happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable body?" is the old
question, and the answer is "The irresistible force will be resisted
and the immovable body be moved." That is exactly what has happened.
The irresistible force of the public spirit has met the immovable body
of the private house--and that great, splendid, working social force
has been frittered away in innumerable little processes of private
amusement; the quiet, beautiful, private home has been bloated and
coarsened in immeasurable distention as a place of public
entertainment.
There is more than one line of tendency, good and bad, at work to bring
about this peculiar phenomenon of domestic entertainment; but the major
condition, without which it could not exist, is the home-bound woman;
and the further essential, without which it could not develop to the
degree found in what we call "society," is that the home-bound woman be
exempt from the domestic industries, exempt from the direct cares of
motherhood, exempt from any faintest hint of the great human
responsibility of mutual labour; exempt from any legitimate connection
with the real social body; and so, still inheriting the enormously
increasing pressure of the social spirit, she pours out her energies in
this simulacrum of social life we still call "social."
What is the effect, or rather what are some of the effects, of this
artificial game of living upon the real course of life? And in
particular how does it affect the home, and how does the home affect
it? In the first place this form of human association, based upon the
activities of otherwise idle women, and requiring the home as its
vehicle of expression, tends to postpone marriage. The idle woman,
contributing nothing to the household labours or expenses, requires to
be wholly supported by her husband. This would be a check on marriage
even if she stayed at home twirling her thumbs; for he would have to
provide women to wait on her, on him, on the children, in default of
her service as "house-wife." He could not marry as soon as the man
whose wife, strong and skilled in house-service, held up her end of the
business, as does the farmer's and mechanic's wife to-day.
But when to the expense of maintaining a useless woman is added the
expense of entertaining her useless friends; when this entertainment
takes the form, not of hospitality sharing the accommodations of the
home, the food of the family, but of providing extra rooms, furniture,
dishes, and servants; of special elaboration of costly food; and of a
whole new gamut of expensive clothing wherein to entertain and be
entertained--then indeed does marriage recede, and youth wither and
blacken in awaiting it.
Current fiction, current jokes, current experience, and all the
background of history and literature, show us this strong and vicious
tendency at work; and ugly is the work it does. No personal
necessities, no family necessities, call for the expenses lavished on
entertainment. Once started, the process races on, limited by no law of
nature, for it is an unnatural process; excess following excess, in
nightmare profusion. Veblen in his great book "The Theory of the
Leisure Class," treats of the general development of this form of
"conspicuous waste," but this special avenue of its maintenance is open
to further study.
Women who work in their homes may be ignorant, uncultured, narrow; they
may act on man as a check to mental progress; they may retard the
development of their remaining industries and be a heavy brake on the
wheels of social progress; they may and they do have this effect; but
they are at least honest workers, though primitive ones. Their homes
are held back from full social development, but they are legitimate
homes. Their husbands, if selfish and vicious, waste money and life in
the saloons, finding the social contact they must have somewhere; but
the wives, getting along as they can without social contact, meet the
basic requirements of home life, and offer to the honest and
self-controlled young man a chance to enjoy "the comforts of a home,"
and to save money if he will. I am by no means pointing out this grade
of woman's labour as desirable; that is sufficiently clear in previous
chapters; but it is in origin right, and, though restricted, not
abnormal.
Domestic entertainment is abnormal. It is an effort to meet a natural
craving in an unnatural way. It continually seeks to "bring people
together" because they are unnaturally kept apart; and to furnish them
with entertainment in lieu of occupation. Any person whose work is too
hard, too long, too monotonous, or not in itself attractive, needs
"relaxation," "amusement," "recreation"; but this does not account in
the least for domestic entertainment. That is offered to people who do
not work at all. Those of them who do, part of the time, as business
men sufficiently wealthy to be "in society," and yet sufficiently human
to keep on in real social activities, are not relaxed, amused, or
recreated by the alleged entertainment.
Those who most conspicuously and entirely give themselves up to it are
most wearied by it. They may develop a morbid taste for the game, which
cannot be satisfied without it; but neither are they satisfied within
it.
The proofs of this are so patent to the sociologist as to seem tedious
in enumeration; one alone carries weight enough to satisfy any
questioner--that is the ceaseless and rapid contortions of invention
with which the "entertainment" varies.
If the happy denizens of the highest "social circles" sat serene and
content like the gods upon Olympus, banqueting eternally in royal calm,
argument and criticism would fall to the ground. If they rose from
their eternal banqueting, refreshed and strong, recreated in vigour and
enthusiasm, and able to plunge into the real activities of life, then
we might well envy them, and strive, with reason, to attain their
level. But this is in no wise the case. Look for your evidence at the
requisites of entertainment in any age of sufficient wealth and peace
to maintain idlers, and in no age more easily typical than our own, and
see the convulsive and incessant throes of change, the torrent of
excess, the license, the eccentricity, the sudden reaction to this and
that extreme, with which the wearied entertainers seek to devise
entertainment that will entertain.
The physiologist knows that where normal processes are arrested
abnormal processes develop. The persistent energy of the multiplying
cell finds expression in cyst and polypus as readily as in good muscle
and gland; and, whereas the normal growth finds its natural limit and
proportion in the necessary organic interchange with other working
parts of the mechanism, no such healthy check acts upon the abnormal
growth.
Legs and arms do not grow and stretch indefinitely, putting out
wabbling, pendulous eccentricities here and there; but a tumour grows
without limit and without proportion; without use, and, therefore,
without beauty. It takes no part in the bodily functions, and,
therefore, is a disease. Yet it is connected with the body, grows in
it, and swells hugely upon stolen blood. Social life has this
possibility of morbid growth as has the physical body.
All legitimate social functions check and limit each other, as do our
physical functions. No true branch of the social service can wax great
at the expense of the others. If there are more in any trade or
profession than are needed, the less capable are dropped out--cannot
maintain a place in that line of work. Our use to each other is the
natural check and guide in normal social growth. This whole field of
domestic entertainment is abnormal in its base and direction, and
therefore has no check in its inordinate expansion. As long as money
can be found and brains be trained to minister to its demands the
stream pours on; and all industry and art are corrupted in the service.
True social intercourse, legitimate amusement, is quite another matter.
Human beings must associate, in innumerable forms and degrees of
intimacy. Perfect friendship is the most intense, the closest form, and
our great national and international organisations the largest and
loosest. Between lies every shade of combination, temporary and
permanent, deep and shallow, all useful and pleasant in their place. A
free human being, rightly placed in society, has first his work--or her
work--the main line of organic relation. That means special
development, and all affiliations, economic and personal, that rest on
that specialisation.
Then come the still larger general human connections, religious,
political, scientific, educational, in which we join and work with
others in the great world-functions that include us all. Play is almost
as distinctively a human function as work--perhaps quite as much so;
and here again we group and re-group, in sports and games, by "eights,"
by "nines," by "elevens," and all progressive associations. Then, where
the play is so subtle and elaborate as to require a life's work, as in
the great social function of the drama, we have people devoting their
time to that form of expression, though they may seek their own
recreation in other lines.
All natural mingling to perform together--as in the harvest dances and
celebrations of all peoples--or to enjoy together the performance of
others, as when we gather in the theatre, this is legitimate human
life; and, while any one form may be overdeveloped, by excessive use,
as an unwise athlete may misuse his body, it is still in its nature
right, and good, if not misused.
But the use of the home as a medium of entertainment is abnormal in
itself, in its relation, or, rather, in its total lack of relation to
the real purpose of the place. The happy privacy of married love is at
once lost. The quiet wisdom, peace, and loving care which should
surround the child are at once lost. The delicate sincerity of personal
expression, which should so unerringly distinguish one's dress and
house, is at once lost. The only shadow of excuse for cumbering the
home with crude industries--our claim that we do this so as to more
accurately meet the needs of the family--is at once lost. The whole
household machinery, once so nobly useful, and still interesting, as a
hand-loom or spinning wheel, is prostituted to uses of which the primal
home had no conception.
In an ideal home we should find, first, the perfect companionship of
lovers; then the happy, united life of father, mother, and child, of
brother and sister; then all simple, genuine hospitality; then the
spontaneous intercourse of valued friends--the freedom to meet and
mingle, now more, now less, in which, as character develops, we slowly
find our own, and our whole lives are enriched and strengthened by
right companionship.
Right here is the point of departure from the legitimate to the
illegitimate; from what is natural, true, and wholly good to this
avenue of diseased growth. As we reach out more and more for a wider
range of contact--a chance of more varied association--we should leave
the home and find what we seek in its own place: the general functions
of human life, the whole wide field of human activity. In school, in
college, the growing soul finds at once possibilities of contact
impossible at home.
True association is impossible without common action. We do not sit
voiceless and motionless, shaking hands with each other's souls. True
and long-established friends and lovers may do this for a season.
"Silence is the test of friendship," someone has said; but friendship
and love require something more than this for birth and maintenance.
The "ties" of love and friendship are found in the common memories and
common hopes, the things we have done, do, and will do, for and with
each other.
The home is for the family, and at most, a few "familiar" friends. The
wider range of friendship, actual and potential, that the human soul of
to-day requires, is not possible at home. See the broad graded list of
a man's school friends and college friends, classmates, and fellows in
club and society, associates in games and sports, business friends of
all degrees, friends and associates in politics; he has an enormous
range of social contact, from every grade of which he gets some good,
and, out of the whole, some personal friends he likes to have come
freely to his home.
Contrast with this the woman's scale--the average woman, she whose
"sphere" is wholly in the home. By nature--that is, by human
nature--she has the same need and capacity for large association. Being
pruned down to a few main branches, confined almost wholly to the basic
lines of attachment known equally to the savage, she pours a passionate
intensity of feeling into her narrow range. The life-long give-and-take
with a friend of whose private life one knows nothing is impossible to
her. She must monopolise, being herself monopolised from birth.
This intensity of feeling, finally worn down by the rebuff it must
needs meet, gives place in the life of the woman who is able to
"entertain," to the "dear five hundred friends" of that sterile
atmosphere. It is no longer the free reaching out of the individual
toward those who mean help and strength, breadth and change and
progress, rest and relaxation. In the varied life of the world we are
brought in contact with many kinds of people, in different lines of
work, and are drawn to those who belong to us. In the monotonous life
of "society" we are brought in contact with the same kind of people, or
people whose life effort is to appear the same--all continually engaged
in doing the same thing. If any new idea jars the monotony, off rushes
the whole crowd after it--bicycle, golf, or ping-pong--till they have
made it monotonous, too.
No true and invigorating social intercourse can take place among people
who are cut off from real social activities, whose medium of contact is
the utterly irrelevant and arbitrary performance of what they so
exquisitely miscall "social functions." The foundation error lies in
the confinement of a social being to a purely domestic scale of living.
By bringing into the home people who have no real business there, they
are instantly forced into an artificial position. The home is no place
for strangers. They cannot work there, they cannot play there, so they
must be "entertained." So starts the merry-go-round. The woman must
have social contact, she cannot go where it is in the normal business
of life, so she tries to drag it in where she is; forcing the social
life into the domestic. The domestic life is crowded out by this
foreign current, and, as there is no place for legitimate social
activities, in any home or series of homes, however large and costly,
the illegitimate social activities are at once set up.
The train of evils to the health of society we are all acquainted with,
though not with their causes. Sociology is yet too new to us for
practical application. We are too unfamiliar with normal social
processes to distinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly
under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of everyone that it
would seem easy to understand.
The human being's best growth requires a happy, quiet, comfortable
home; with peace and health, order and beauty in its essential
relations. The human being also requires right social relation, the
work he is best suited to, full range of expression in that work, and
intercourse free and spontaneous with his kind. Women are human beings.
They are allowed the first class of relations--the domestic; but denied
the other--the social. Hence they are forced to meet a normal need in
an abnormal way, with inevitable evil results.
We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury and
extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health, of the defrauded
home, the withering family life, the black shadows beyond that; but
there are others we do not see. Large among these is our loneliness.
The machinery of domestic entertainment is paradoxically in our way. We
are for ever and for ever flocking together, being brought together,
arranging to meet people, to be met by people, to have other people
meet each other, and meanwhile life passes and we have not met.
"How I wish I could see more of you!" we sigh to the few real friends.
Your friend may be at the same dinner--taking out someone else, or,
even taking you out--in equal touch with neighbours at either side and
eyes opposing. Your friend may be at the same dance--piously keeping
step with many another; at the same reception, the same tea, the same
luncheon--but you do not meet. As the "society" hand is gloved that
there be no touching of real flesh and blood, so is the society soul
dressed and defended for the fray in smooth phrase and glossy smile--a
well-oiled system, without which the ceaseless press and friction would
wear us raw, but within which we do anything but "meet."
For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the bringing out of
the best there is in us, for the maintenance of a pure and restful
home-life and the development of an inspiring and fruitful social life,
we need some other medium of association than domestic entertainments.
And we are rapidly finding it. The woman's club is a most healthy field
of contact, and the woman's clubhouse offers a legitimate common ground
for large gatherings.
The increasing number of women in regular business life alters the
whole position. The business woman has her wider range of contact
during the day, and is glad to rest and be alone with her family at
night. If she desires to go out, it is to see real friends, or to some
place of real amusement. When all women are honestly at work the
"calling habit" will disappear perforce, with all its waste and
dissimulation.
Given a healthy active life of true social usefulness for all women,
and given a full accommodation of public rooms for public gatherings,
and the whole thing takes care of itself. The enormous demand for
association will be met legitimately, and the satisfied soul will
gladly return from that vast field of social life to the restful quiet,
the loving intimacy, the genuineness of home-life, with its constant
possibilities of real hospitality and the blessings of true friendship.
XI
THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
The effect of the house upon women is as important as might be expected
of one continuous environment upon any living creature. The house
varies with the varying power and preference of the owner; but to a
house of some sort the woman has been confined for a period as long as
history. This confinement is not to be considered as an arbitrary
imprisonment under personal cruelty, but as a position demanded by
public opinion, sanctioned by religion, and enforced by law.
In the comparative freedom to "walk abroad" of our present-day
civilised women, we too quickly forget the conditions immediately
behind us, when even the marketing for the household was done by men,
and the conditions still with us for many millions of women in many
countries who are house-bound for life.
To briefly recount the situation, we find in the pre-human home the
mother sharing the hole or nest with her young, also sharing the
outside task of getting food for them. In some species the father
assists the mother, he never does it all. In other cases the father is
no assistance, even a danger, seeking in cannibal infanticide to eat
his own young; the mother in this case must feed and defend the young,
as well as feed herself, and so must leave home at frequent intervals.
The common cat is an instance of this. She is found happily nursing the
kittens in her hidden nest among the hay; but you often find the
kittens alone while the mother goes mousing, and a contributary Thomas
you do not find.
As we have before seen, our longer period of infancy and its
overlapping continuity, a possible series of babies lasting twenty
years or so, demanded a permanent home; and so long as the mother had
sole charge of this progressive infant party she must needs be there to
attend to her maternal duties. This condition is what we have in mind,
or think we have in mind, when maintaining the duty of women to stay at
home.
Wherever woman's labour is still demanded, as among all savages, in the
peasant classes where women work in the fields, and in our own recent
condition of slavery, either the mother takes her baby with her, or a
group of babies are cared for by one woman while the rest are at work.
Again, among our higher classes, almost the first step of increasing
wealth is to depute to a nurse the mother's care, in order that she may
be free from this too exacting claim. The nurse is a figure utterly
unknown to animals, save in the collective creatures, like the bee and
ant; a deputy-mother, introduced by us at a very early period. But this
sharing of the mother's duties has not freed the woman from the house,
because of quite another element in our human life. This is the custom
of ownership in women.
The animal mother is held by love, by "instinct" only; the human mother
has been for endless centuries a possession of the father. In his pride
and joy of possession, and in his fear lest some other man annex his
treasure, he has boxed up his women as he did his jewels, and any
attempt at personal freedom on their part he considered a revolt from
marital allegiance.
The extreme of this feeling results in the harem-system, and the
crippled ladies of China; wherein we find the women held to the house,
not by their own maternal ties, of which we talk much but in which we
place small confidence, but by absolute force.
This condition modifies steadily with the advance of democratic
civilisation, but the mental habit based upon it remains with us. The
general opinion that a woman should be in the home is found so lately
expressed as in the works of our present philosopher, Mr. Dooley. In
his "Expert Evidence" he says, "What the coort ought to 've done was to
call him up and say 'Lootgert, where's your good woman?' If Lootgert
cudden't tell, he ought to be hanged on gineral principles; f'r a man
must keep his wife around the house, and when she isn't there it shows
he's a poor provider."
The extent and depth of this feeling is well shown by a mass of popular
proverbs, often quoted in this connection, such as "A woman should
leave her house three times--when she is christened, when she is
married, and when she is buried" (even then she only leaves it to go to
church), or again, "The woman, the cat, and the chimney should never
leave the house." So absolute is this connection in our minds that
numbers of current phrases express it, the Housewife--Hausfrau, and the
one chosen to head this chapter--The Lady of the House.
Now what has this age-long combination done to the woman, to the mother
and moulder of human character; what sort of lady is the product of the
house?
Let us examine the physical results first. There is no doubt that we
have been whitened and softened by our houses. The sun darkens, the
shade pales. In the house has grown the delicate beauty we admire, but
are we right in so admiring?
The highest beauty the world has yet known was bred by the sun-loving
Athenians. Their women were home-bound, but their men raced and
wrestled in the open air. No argument need be wasted to prove that air
and sun and outdoor exercise are essential to health, and that health
is essential to beauty. If we admire weakness and pallor, it by no
means shows those qualities to be good; we can admire deformity itself,
if we are taught to.
Without any reference to cause or necessity, it may be readily seen
that absolute confinement to the house must have exactly the same
effect on women that it would on men, and that effect is injurious to
the health and vigour of the race. It is possible by continuous outdoor
training of the boys and men to counteract the ill effect of the indoor
lives of women; but why saddle the race with difficulties? Why not give
our children strong bodies and constitutions from both sides?
The rapid and increasing spread of physical culture in modern life is
helping mend the low conditions of human development; but the man still
has the advantage.