for the World's Fair of 1893 from an extended series of measurements of
college boys and girls. Thousands and thousands of specimens of our
young manhood and young womanhood were carefully measured, and there
stand the two white figures to show how we compare in beauty--the men
and women of our time.
The figure of the man is far and away more beautiful than that of the
woman. It is better proportioned as a whole; she is too short-legged,
too long-waisted, too narrow-chested. It is better knit, more strongly
and accurately "set up." She does not hang together well at all--the
lines of connection are weak and wavering, and in especial does she
lack any power and grace in the main area, the body itself, the torso.
There is the undeveloped chest and the over-developed hips; and between
them, instead of a beautifully modelled trunk, mere shapeless tissues,
crying mutely for the arbitrary shape they are accustomed to put on
outside! We are softer and whiter for our long housing; but not more
truly beautiful.
The artist seeks his models from the stately burden-bearing,
sun-browned women of Italy; strong creatures, human as well as
feminine. The house life, with its shade, its foul air, its overheated
steaminess, its innumerable tiring small activities, and its lack of
any of those fine full exercises which built the proportions of the
Greeks, has not benefited the body of the lady thereof; and in injuring
her has injured all mankind, her children.
How of her mind? How has the mental growth of the race been affected by
the housing of women? Apply the question to men. Think for a moment of
the mental condition of humanity, if men too had each and every one
stayed always in the home. The results are easy to picture. No
enlargement of industry, only personal hand-to-mouth labour: not a
trade, not a craft, not a craftsman on earth; no enlargement of
exchange and commerce, only the products of one's own field, if the
house-bound were that much free: no market, local, national, or
international; no merchant in the world.
No transportation, that at once; _no roads_--why roads if all men
stayed at home? No education--even the child must leave home to go to
school; no art, save the squaw-art of personal decoration of one's own
handmade things. No travel, of course, and so no growth of any human
ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and peace. In short, no human life
at all--if men, all men, had always stayed at home. Merely the life of
a self-maintained family--the very lowest type, the type we find most
nearly approached by the remote isolated households of the "poor
whites," of the South. Even they have some of the implements and
advantages of civilisation, they are not utterly cut off.
The growth of the world has followed the widening lives of men, outside
the home. The specialised trade, with its modification of character;
the surplus production and every widening range of trade and commerce;
the steadily increasing power of distribution, and transportation, with
its increased area, ease, and speed; the ensuing increase in travel now
so general and continuous; and following that the increase in our
knowledge and love of one another; all--all that makes for
civilisation, for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on toward
the race ideal--takes place outside the home. This is what has been
denied to the lady of the house--merely all human life!
Some human life she must needs partake of by the law of heredity,
sharing in the growth of the race through the father; and some she has
also shared through contact with the man in such time as he was with
her in the house, to such a degree as he was willing and able to share
his experience. Also her condition has been steadily ameliorated, as
he, growing ever broader and wiser by his human relationships, brought
wisdom and justice and larger love into his family relationship. But
the gain came from without, and filtered down to the woman in most
niggardly fashion.
Literature was a great world-art for centuries and centuries before
women were allowed to read--to say nothing of write! It is not long
since the opinion was held that, if women were allowed to write, they
would but write love letters! In our last century, in civilised
Christian England, Harriet Martineau and Jane Austen covered their
writing with their sewing when visitors came in; writing was
"unwomanly!"
The very greatest of our human gains we have been the slowest to share
with woman: education and democracy.
We have allowed them religion in a sense--as we have allowed them
medicine--to take; not to give! They might have a priest as they might
have a doctor, but on no account be one! Religion was for man to
preach--and woman to practise.
In some churches, very recently, we are at last permitting women to
hold equal place with men in what they deem to be the special service
of God, but it is not yet common. Her extra-domestic education has been
won within a lifetime; and there are still extant many to speak and
write against it, even in the Universities--those men of Mezozoic
minds! And her place as active participant in democratic government is
still denied by an immense majority, on the ground--the same old
underlying ground--that it would take her from the house! Here, clear
and strong, stands out that ancient theory, that the very existence of
womanhood depends on staying in the house.
We have seen what has been denied to woman by absence from the world;
what do we find bestowed upon her by the ceaseless, enclosing presence
of the house? How does staying in one's own house all one's life affect
the mind? We cannot ask this question of a man, for no man has ever
done it except a congenital invalid. Nothing short of paralysis will
keep a man in the house. He would as soon spend his life in petticoats,
they are both part of the feminine environment--no part of his. He will
come home at night to sleep, at such hours as suit him. He likes to eat
at home, and brings his friends to see the domestic group--house, wife,
and children; all, things to be fond and proud of, things a man wishes
to own and maintain properly. But for work or play, out he goes to his
true companions--men, full-grown human creatures who understand each
other; in his true place--the world, our human medium.
The woman, with such temporary excursions as our modern customs permit,
works, plays, rests, does all things in her house, or in some
neighbouring house--the same grade of environment. The home atmosphere
is hers from birth to death. That this custom is rapidly changing I
gladly admit. The women of our country and our time are marching out of
the home to their daily work by millions, only to return to them at
night with redoubled affection; but there are more millions far, many
more millions, who are still housewives or ladies of houses.
The first result is a sort of mental myopia. Looking always at things
too near, the lens expands, the focus shortens, the objects within
range are all too large, and nothing else is seen clearly. To spend
your whole time in attending to your own affairs in your own home
inevitably restricts the mental vision; inevitably causes those same
personal affairs to seem larger to you than others' personal affairs or
the affairs of the nation.
This is a general sweeping consequence of being house-bound; and it is
a heavily opposing influence to all human progress. The
little-mindedness of the house-lady is not a distinction of sex. It is
in no essential way a feminine distinction, but merely associatively
feminine in that only women are confined to houses.
A larger range of interest and care instantly gives a resultant
largeness of mind, in women as well as men. Such free great lives as
have been here and there attained by women show the same broad human
characteristics as similar lives of men. It can never be too frequently
insisted upon, at least not in our beclouded time, that the whole area
of human life is outside of, and irrelevant to, the distinctions of
sex. Race characteristics belong in equal measure to either sex, and
the misfortune of the house-bound woman is that she is denied time,
place, and opportunity to develop those characteristics. She is
feminine, more than enough, as man is masculine more than enough; but
she is not human as he is human. The house-life does not bring out our
humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human progress lie outside.
In the mind of the lady of the house is an arrangement of fact and
feeling, which is untrue because it is disproportionate. The first
tendency of the incessant home life is to exaggerate personality. The
home is necessarily a hotbed of personal feeling. There love grows
intense and often morbid; there any little irritation frets and wears
in the constant pressure like a stone in one's shoe. The more isolated
the home, the more cut off from the healthy movement of social
progress, as in the lonely farmhouses of New England, the more we find
those intense eccentric characters such as Mary E. Wilkins so perfectly
portrays. The main area of the mind being occupied with a few people
and their affairs, a tendency to monomania appears. The solitary farmer
is least able to escape this domestic pressure, and therefore we find
these pathological conditions of home life most in scattered farms.
Human creatures, to keep healthy, _must_ mingle with one another.
The house-bound woman cannot; therefore she does not maintain a
vigorous and growing mind. Such contact as she has is mainly through
church opportunities; and along all such lines as are open to her she
eagerly flocks, finding great relief therein. But compare the
interchange between a group of house-ladies, and a corresponding group
of men--their husbands perhaps. Each of these men, touching the world
through a different trade, has an area of his own; from which he can
bring a new outlook to the others. Even if all are farmers, in which
case there is much less breadth and stimulus in their intercourse, they
still have some connection with the moving world. They seek to meet at
some outside point, the store, the blacksmith's shop, the railroad
station, the post-office; the social hunger appeasing itself as best it
may with such scraps of the general social activities as fall to it.
But the women, coming together, have nothing to bring each other but
personalities. Some slight variation in each case perhaps, a little
difference in receipts for sponge-cake, cures for measles, patterns for
clothes, or stitches for fancy-work. (Oh, poor, poor lives! where fancy
has no work but in stitches, and no play at all!)
The more extended and well-supplied house merely gives its lady a more
extended supply of topics of the same nature. She may discuss
candle-shades instead of bed-quilts, "entrées" instead of "emptin's";
ferns for the table instead of "yarbs" for the garret; but the
distinction is not vital. It is still the lady prattling of her
circumambient house, as snails might (possibly do!) dilate upon the
merits of their ever-present shells. The limitations of the house as an
area for a human life are most baldly dreary and crippling in the lower
grades, the great majority of cases, where the housewife toils, not yet
become the lady of the house. Here you see grinding work, and endless
grey monotony. Here are premature age, wasting disease, and early
death. If a series of photographs could be made of the working
housewives in our country districts, with some personal account of the
"poor health" which is the main topic of their infrequent talk; we
should get a vivid idea of the condition of this grade of house-bound
life.
The lady is in a different class, and open to a different danger. She
is not worn out by overwork, but weakened by idleness. She is not
starved and stunted by the hopeless lack of expression, but is, on the
contrary, distorted by a senseless profusion of expression. There is
pathos even to tears in the perforated cardboard fly-traps dangling
from the gaudy hanging lamp in the farmhouse parlour; the little
weazened, withered blossom of beauty thrust forth from the smothered
life below. There is no pathos, rather a repulsive horror, in the mass
of freakish ornament on walls, floors, chairs, and tables, on specially
contrived articles of furniture, on her own body and the helpless
bodies of her little ones, which marks the unhealthy riot of expression
of the overfed and underworked lady of the house.
Every animal want is met, save those of air and exercise, though
nowadays we let her out enough to meet those, if she will do it in
games and athletic sports--anything that has not, as Veblen puts it,
"the slightest taint of utility." She is a far more vigorous lady
physically, than ever before. Also, nowadays, we educate her; in the
sense of a large supply of abstract information. We charge her battery
with every stimulating influence during youth; and then we expect her
to discharge the swelling current in the same peaceful circuit which
contented her great-grandmother! This gives us one of the most
agonising spectacles of modern times.
Here is a creature, inheriting the wide reach of the modern mind; that
socially-developed mind begotten of centuries of broadest human
intercourse; and, in our later years of diffused education, rapid
transit, and dizzying spread of industrial processes, increasing its
range and intensity with each generation. This tremendous engine, the
healthy use of which requires contact with the whole field of social
stimulus to keep up its supplies, and the whole field of social
activity for free discharge, we expect to find peaceful expression in
its own single house. There is of course a margin of escape--there must
be.
In earlier decades the suppressed activity of this growing creature
either still found vent in some refined forms of household industry, as
in the exquisite embroideries of our grandmothers, or frankly boiled
over in "society." The insatiate passion of woman for "society" has
puzzled her unthinking mate. He had society, the real society of large
human activities; but he saw no reason why she should want any. She
ought to be content at home, in the unbroken circle of the family.
While the real labours of the house held her therein she stayed,
content or not; but, free of those, she has reached out widely in such
planes as were open to her, for social contact. As women, any number of
women, failed to furnish any other stimulus than that she was already
overfilled with--they being each and all mere ladies of houses--she was
naturally more attracted to the more humanly developed creature, man.
Man's power, his charm, for woman is far more than that of sex. It is
the all-inclusive vital force of human life--of real social
development. She has hung around him as devotedly as the cripple tags
the athlete. When women have their own field of legitimate social
activity, they retain their admiration for really noble manhood, but
the "anybody, Good Lord!" petition is lost forever. A hint is perhaps
suggested here, as to the world-old charm for women, of the priest and
soldier. Both are forms of very wide social service--detached,
impersonal, giving up life to the good of the whole--infinitely removed
from the close clinging shadow of the house!
In our immediate time the progress of industry has cut the lady off
from even her embroidery. Man, alert and inventive, follows her few
remaining industries relentlessly, and grabs them from her, away from
the house, into the mill and shop where they belong. But she, with ever
idler hands, must stay behind. He will furnish her with everything her
heart can wish--but she must stay right where she is and swallow it.
_"Lady Love! Lady Love! wilt thou be mine?
Thou shalt neither wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine!
But sit on a cushion and sew a gold seam
And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream!"_
This amiable programme, so exquisitely ludicrous, when offered to the
world's most inherently industrious worker, becomes as exquisitely
cruel when applied. The physical energies of the mother--an enormous
fund--denied natural expression in bodily exertion, work morbidly in
manifold disease. The social energies, boundless, resistless, with
which she is brought more in contact every year, denied natural
expression in world-service, work morbidly inside the painfully
inadequate limits of the house.
Here we have the simple explanation of that unreasonable excess which
characterises the lady of the house. The amount of wealth this amiable
prisoner can consume in fanciful caprices is practically unlimited. Her
clothing and ornament is a study in itself. Start any crazy fad or
fashion in this field, and off goes the flood of self-indulgence, the
craving for "expression," absurdity topping extravagance. There is
nothing to check it save the collapse of the source of supplies.
A modern "captain of industry" has a brain so socially developed as to
require for its proper area of expression an enormous range of social
service. He gets it. He develops great systems of transportation,
elaborate processes of manufacture, complex legislation or financial
manoeuvres. Without reference to his purpose, to the money he may
acquire, or the relative good or evil of his methods, the point to be
noted is that he is exercising his full personal capacity.
His sister, his wife, has a similar possibility of brain activity, and
practically no provision for its exercise. So great is the growth, so
tremendous the pressure of live brains against dead conditions, that in
our current life of to-day we find more and more women pouring wildly
out into any and every form of combination and action, good, bad, and
indifferent. The church sewing circle, fair, and donation party no
longer satisfy her. The reception, dinner, ball, and musicale no longer
satisfy her. Even the splendid freedom of physical exercise no longer
satisfies her. More and more the necessity for full and legitimate
social activity makes itself felt; and more and more she is coming out
of the house to take her rightful place in the world.
Not easily is this accomplished, not cheaply and safely. She is
breaking loose from the hardest shell that ever held immortal seed. She
is held from within by every hardened layer of untouched instinct which
has accumulated through the centuries; and she is opposed from without
by such mountain ranges of prejudice as would be insurmountable if
prejudice were made of anything real.
The obsequious terror of a child, cowed by the nurse's bugaboo, is more
reasonable than our docile acquiescence in the bonds of prejudice. It
is pleasantly funny, knowing the real freedom so easily possible, to
see a strong, full-grown woman solemnly state that she cannot pass the
wall of cloudy grandeur with Mrs. Grundy for gate-keeper, that seems to
hem her in so solidly. First one and then another reaches out a
courageous hand against this towering barricade, touches it, shakes it,
finds it not fact at all, but merely feeling--and passes calmly
through. There is really nothing to prevent the woman of to-day from
coming out of her old shell; and there is much to injure her, if she
stays in.
The widespread nervous disorders among our leisure-class women are
mainly traceable to this unchanging mould, which presses ever more
cruelly upon the growing life. Health and happiness depend on smooth
fulfilment of function, and the functional ability of a modern woman
can by no means be exercised in this ancient coop.
The effect of the lady of the house upon her husband is worth special
study. He thinks he likes that kind of woman, he stoutly refuses to
consider any other kind; and yet his very general discontent in her
society has been the theme of all observers for all time. In our time
it has reached such prominence as to be commented upon even in that
first brief halcyon period, the "honeymoon." _Punch_ had a piteous
cartoon of a new-married pair, sitting bored and weary on the beach,
during their wedding journey. "Don't you wish some friend would come
along?" said she. "Yes," he answered--"or even an enemy!"
Men have accepted the insufficiencies and disagreeablenesses of "female
society" as being due to "the disabilities of sex." They are not, being
really due to the disability of the house-bound. Love may lead a man to
"marry his housekeeper," and we condemn the misalliance; but he makes a
housekeeper of his wife without criticism. The misalliance is still
there.
A man, a healthy, well-placed man, has his position in the world and in
the home, and finds happiness in both. He loves his wife, she meets his
requirements as a husband, and he expects nothing more of her. His
other requirements he meets in other ways. That she cannot give him
this, that, and the other form of companionship, exercise,
gratification, is no ground of blame; the world outside does that. So
the man goes smoothly on, and when the woman is uncertain, capricious,
exacting, he lays it to her being a woman, and lets it go at that.
But she, for all field of exertion, has but this house; for all kinds
of companionship, this husband. He stands between her and the world, he
has elected to represent it to her, to be "all the world" to her. Now,
no man that ever lived, no series or combination of husbands that
widowhood or polyandry ever achieved can be equivalent to the world.
The man needs the wife and has her--needs the world and has it. The
woman needs the husband--and has him; needs the world--and there is the
husband instead. He stands between her and the world, with the best of
intentions, doubtless; but a poor substitute for full human life.
"What else should she want?" he inquires in genuine amazement. "I love
her, I am kind to her, I provide a good home for her--she has her
children and she has me--what else should she want?"
What else does he want? He has her--the home and the children--does
that suffice him? He wants also the human world to move freely in, to
act fully in, to live widely in, and _so does she_.
And because she cannot have it, because he stands there in its stead,
she demands of him the satisfaction of all these thwarted human
instincts. She does not know what ails her. She thinks he does not love
her enough; that if he only loved her enough, stayed with her enough,
she would be satisfied. No man can sit down and love a woman eighteen
hours a day, not actively. He does love her, all the time, in a
perfectly reasonable way, but he has something else to do.
He loves her for good and all; it is in the bank, to draw on for the
rest of life, a steady, unfailing supply; but she wants to see it and
hear it and feel it all the time, like the miser of old who "made a
bath of his gold and rolled in it."
The most glaring type of this unfortunate state of mind in recent
fiction is that of the morbid Marna in the "Confessions of a Wife"--a
vivid expression of what it is to be a highly-concentrated,
double-distilled wife--_and nothing else_! No shadow of interest
had she in life except this man; no duty, no pleasure, no use, no
ambition, no religion, no business--nothing whatever but one embodied
demand for her Man. He was indeed all the world to her--and he didn't
like it.
If the woman was fully developed on the human side she would cease to
be overdeveloped on the feminine side. If she had her fair share of
world-life she would expect of her husband that he be a satisfactory
man, but not that he be a satisfactory world, which is quite beyond
him. Cannot men see how deeply benefited they would be by this change,
this growth of woman? She would still be woman, beautiful, faithful,
loving; but she would not be so greedy, either for money or for love.
The lady of the house may be most softly beautiful, she may be utterly
devoted, she may be unutterably appealing; but all her centuries of
cherished existence have but brought us to _Punch's_ "Advice to
Those About to Marry": "Don't!"
The world's incessant complaint of marriage, mockery of marriage,
resistance, outbreak, and default, gives heavy proof that that great
human institution has serious defects. The blame has generally been
laid on man. Suppose we now examine the other fact, the equal factor,
and see if there is not some essential error in her position. This
might furnish a wide field of study in the leisure hours of The Lady of
the House.
XII
THE CHILD AT HOME