members, rather than the number of its families. For instance, in those
vast, fat, ancient empires, where a vast population, scattered over
wide territory, supported local life in detached families, by
individual effort; there was almost no national life, no general sense
of unity, no conscious connection of interests. The one tie was
taxation; and if some passing conqueror annexed a province, the only
change was in the tax-collector, and the people were not injured unless
he demanded more than the previous one.
A vital nation must exist in the vivid common consciousness of its
people; a consciousness naturally developed by enlarging social
functions, by undeniable common interests and mutual services. If any
passing conqueror were to annex--or seek to annex--a portion of our
vast territory, he would find no slice of jellyfish, no mere cellular
existence with almost no organised life. He would find that every last
and least part of the country was vitally one with the whole, and would
submit to no dismemberment. This social consciousness, on which our
civilised life depends, in the growth of which lies social progress, is
not developed in the home. On the contrary it is opposed by it. Up to a
certain level the home promotes social development. Beyond that level
it hinders it, if allowed to do so.
Self-interest drove men into military combination--where they learned
much. Family interest drove them into industrial activity, and even
allowed a low form of combination. But social interest is what leads us
all farthest and highest; the impulse to live, not for self-preservation
only, not for reproduction only, but for social progress. It should not
be hard to see that these apparently dissimilar and opposed interests
can only be harmonised by the dominance of the greatest. The man who
would strive for his own advantage at the expense of his family, we
call a brute. The man who strives for the advantage of his family at
the expense of his country--we should call a traitor! Yet this is the
common attitude of the citizen of to-day, and in this attitude he is
maintained and extolled by the home! The soldier who would seek to save
his own life to the injury of the army we promptly shoot. If he should
seek to save his home at the same risk, we should still dishonour and
punish him.
The army, very highly developed in a very low scheme of action, knows
that neither self nor family must stand for a moment against the public
service. Industry is not so well organised as warfare, and so our scale
of industrial virtues is not so high. We degrade and punish for
"conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman"; but we take no
cognisance of "conduct unbecoming a manufacturer and a gentleman,"
unless he is an open malefactor. Yet a manufacturer is a far higher and
more valuable social servant than a soldier of any grade. We do not yet
know the true order of importance in our social functions, nor their
distinctly organic nature.
With our proven capacity, why do we manifest so little progress in
industrial organisation and devotion? A student of prehuman evolution,
one familiar only with nature's long, slow, stumbling process of
developing by exclusion--like driving a flock of sheep by killing those
who went the wrong way--might answer the question in this manner: That
we have not been engaged in industrial processes long enough to develop
the desired qualities. This is usually considered the evolutionary
standpoint; and from it we are advised not to be impatient, and are
told that a few thousand years' more killing will do much for us.
But social evolution takes place on quite other grounds. We have added
education to heredity; mutual help to the cruel and wasteful processes
of elimination. The very essence of social relation is its transmission
of individual advance to the collective. Physical evolution acts only
through physical heredity; we have that in common with all animals; but
we have also social heredity, that great psychic current of transmitted
wisdom and emotion which immortalises the gains of the past and
generalises the gains of the present.
A system of free public education does more to develop the brains of a
people than many thousand years of "natural selection," and does not
prevent natural selection, either.
The one capacity wherein the world does not progress as it should is
the power of social intelligence; of a rational, efficiently acting,
common consciousness. Our "body politic" is like that of a vigorous,
well-grown idiot. We have all the machinery for large, rich, satisfying
life; and inside is the dim, limited mind, incapable of enjoyment or
action. It has been found in recent years that idiocy may result from a
too small skull; the bones have not enlarged, and the brain, compressed
and stunted, cannot perform its functions. In one case this was most
cruelly proven, by an operation upon an old man, from birth and idiot.
His skull was opened and so treated as to give more room to the
imprisoned brain, and, with what hopeless horror can be imagined, the
man became intelligently conscious at last--conscious of what his life
had been!
There is some similar arrest in the development of the social
consciousness; else our cities would not sit gnawing and tearing at
themselves, indifferent to dirt, disease, or vice, and enjoying only
physical comfort. If any operation should give sudden new light to this
long-clouded civic brain, we might feel the same horror of the years
behind us, but not the same hopelessness--society is immortal.
It is here suggested that one check to the social development proper to
our time is the pressure of the rudimentary home. We are quite willing
to admit that a home life we consider wrong, as the Chinese or Turkish,
can paralyse a nation. We have even come to see that the position of
women is a good gauge of progress. Is it so hard, then, to admit at
least a possibility that the position of our women, the nature of our
homes, may have some important influence upon our social growth? There
is no demand that we destroy the home, any more than that we destroy
the women, _but we must change their relative position_.
The brain is the medium of social contact, the plane of human
development. The savage is incapable of large relation because his
mental area is not big enough; he is not used to such extensive
combinations. Where the brain is accustomed only to incessant
consideration of its own private interests, and to direct personal
service of those interests, it is thereby prevented from developing the
capacity for seeing the public interests, and for indirect collective
service of those interests. The habit, continuous and unrelieved, of
thinking in a small circuit checks the power to think in a large
circuit.
This arrested brain development, this savage limitation to the
personal, and mainly to the physical, is what we have so rigidly
enforced upon women. The primitive home to the primitive mind is
sufficient; but the progress of the mind requires a commensurate
progress of the home--and has not had it. Owing to our peculiar and
unnatural division of life-area, half the race has been free to move
on, and so has accomplished much for all of us; but the other half,
being confined to the same position it occupied in the infancy of
society, has been denied that freedom and that progress. Owing again to
the inexorable reunion of these divided halves in each child, physical
heredity does what it can to bridge the gulf, the ever-widening gulf;
pouring into the stationary woman some share of the modern abilities of
social man; and also forcing upon the moving man some share of the
primitive disabilities of the domestic woman. We thus have a strange
and painful condition of life.
Social progress, attained wholly by the male, gives to the
unprogressive woman unrest, discontent, disease. The more society
advances, the less she can endure her ancient restrictions. Hence
arises much evil and more unhappiness. Domestic inertia, maintained by
the woman, gives to the progressive man a tremendous undertow of
private selfishness and short-sightedness. Hence more evil, far more;
for the social processes are the most important; and a deeper
unhappiness too; for the shame of the social traitor, the helplessness
of the home-bound man who knows his larger duty but cannot meet it, is
a higher plane of suffering than hers, and also adds to hers
continually.
All this evil and distress is due not at all to the blessed influence
of the true home, suited to our time, but to the anything but blessed
influence of a home suited to the Stone Age--or perhaps the Bronze! It
is not in the least necessary. The change we require does not involve
the loss of one essential good and lovely thing. It does not injure
womanhood, but improves it. It does not injure childhood, but improves
it. It does not injure manhood, but improves that too.
What is the proposed change? It is the recognition of a new order of
duties, a new scale of virtues; or rather it is the practical adoption
of that order long since established by the facts of business, the
science of government, and by all great religions. Our own religion in
especial, the most progressive, the most social, gives no sanction
whatever to our own archaic cult of home-worship.
What is there in the teachings of Christianity to justify--much less
command--this devotion to animal comfort, to physical relations, to the
A B C of life? In his own life Christ rose above all family ties; his
disciples he called to leave all and follow him; the devotion he
recognised was that of Mary to the truth, not of Martha to the
housekeeping; and the love he taught, that love which is the beginning
and the end of Christian life, is not the love of one's own merely, but
of the whole world. "Whoso careth not for his own is worse than an
infidel"--truly. And whoso careth only for his own is _no better_!
Besides--and this should reconcile the reluctant heart--this antiquated
method of serving the family _does not serve them to the best
advantage_. In what way does a man best benefit his family? By staying
at home and doing what he can with his own two hands--whereby no family
on earth would ever have more than the labour of one affectionate
amateur could provide; or by going out from the home and serving other
people in a specialised trade--whereby his family and all families are
gradually supplied with peace and plenty, supported and protected by
the allied forces of civilisation?
In what way does a woman best benefit her family? By staying at home
and doing what she can with her own two hands--whereby no family ever
has more than the labour of one affectionate amateur can provide--or by
enlarging her motherhood as man has enlarged his fatherhood, and giving
to her family the same immense advantages that he has given it? We have
always assumed that the woman could do most by staying at home. Is this
so? Can we prove it? Why is that which is so palpably false of a man
held to be true of a woman? "Because men and woman are different!" will
be stoutly replied. Of course they are different--in sex, _but not in
humanity_. In every human quality and power they are alike; and the
right service of the home, the right care and training of the child,
call for human qualities and powers, not merely for sex-distinctions.
The home, in its arbitrary position of arrested development, does not
properly fulfil its own essential functions--much less promote the
social ones. Among the splendid activities of our age it lingers on,
inert and blind, like a clam in a horse-race.
It hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot, by keeping the modern
child under the tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social
conscience of the man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of
the domestic conscience of the woman. It hinders by its enormous
expense; making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to
mankind; whereas, in our stage of civilisation, they should have been
long since reduced to a minor incident.
Consider what the mere protection and defence of life used to cost,
when every man had to be fighter most of his life. Ninety per cent.,
say, of masculine energy went to defend life; while the remaining ten,
and the women, in a narrow, feeble way, maintained it. They lived, to
be sure, fighting all the time for the sorry privilege. Now we have
systematised military service so that only a tiny fraction of our men,
for a very short period of life, need be soldiers; and peace is
secured, not by constant painful struggles, but by an advanced economic
system. "Eternal vigilance" may be "the price of liberty," but it is a
very high price; and paid only by the barbarian who has not risen to
the stage of civilised service.
Organisation among men has reduced this wasteful and crippling habit of
being every-man-his-own-soldier. We do not have to carry a rifle and
peer around every street-corner for a hidden foe. As a result the
released energy of the ninety per cent. men, a tenth being large
allowance for all the fighting necessary, is now poured into the
channels that lead to wealth, peace, education, general progress.
Yet we are still willing that the personal care of life, the service of
daily physical needs, shall monopolise as many women as that old custom
of universal warfare monopolised men! Ninety per cent. of the feminine
energy of the world is still spent in ministering laboriously to the
last details of bodily maintenance; and the other tenth is supposed to
do nothing but supervise the same tasks, and flutter about in fruitless
social amusement. This crude waste of half the world's force keeps back
human progress just as heavily as the waste of the other half did.
By as much as the world has grown toward peace and power and unity
since men left off spending their lives in universal warfare, will it
grow further toward that much-desired plane when women leave off
spending their lives in universal house-service. The mere release of
that vast fund of energy will in itself increase all the facilities of
living; but there is a much more important consequence.
The omnipresent domestic ideal is a deadly hinderance to the social
ideal. When half our population honestly believe that they have no
duties outside the home, the other half will not become phenomenal
statesmen. This cook-and-housemaid level of popular thought is the
great check. The social perspective is entirely lost; and a million
short-sighted homes, each seeing only its own interests, cannot singly
or together grasp the common good which would benefit them all.
That the home has improved as much as it has is due to the freedom of
man outside it. That it is still so clumsy, so inadequate, so wickedly
wasteful of time, of money, of human life, is due to the confinement of
woman inside it.
What sort of citizens do we need for the best city--the best state--the
best country--the best world? We need men and women who are
sufficiently large-minded to see and feel a common need, to work for a
common good, to rejoice in the advance of all, and to know as the
merest platitude that their private advantage is to be assured
_only_ by the common weal. That kind of mind is not bred in the
kitchen.
A citizenship wherein all men were either house-servants or idlers
would not show much advance. Neither does a community wherein all
women, save that noble and rapidly increasing minority of
self-supporting ones, are either house-servants or idlers. Our progress
rests on the advance of the people, all the people; the development of
an ever-widening range of feeling, thought, action; while its flowers
are found in all the higher arts and sciences, it is rooted firmly in
economic law.
This little ganglion of aborted economic processes, the home, tends to
a sort of social paralysis. In its innumerable little centres of egoism
and familism are sunk and lost the larger vibrations of social energy
which should stimulate the entire mass. Again, society's advance rests
on the personal health, sanity, and happiness of its members. The home,
whose one justification is in its ministering to these, does not
properly fulfil its purpose, and cannot unless it is managed on modern
lines.
Social progress rests on the smooth development of personal character,
the happy fulfilment of special function. The home, in its ceaseless
and inexorable demands, stops this great process of specialisation in
women, and checks it cruelly in men. A man's best service to society
lies in his conscientious performance of the work he is best fitted
for. But the service of the home demands that he do the work he is best
paid for. Man after man, under this benumbing, strangling pressure, is
diverted from his true path in social service, and condemned to
"imprisonment with hard labour for life."
The young man, for a time, is comparatively free; and looks forward
eagerly to such and such a line of growth and large usefulness. But let
him marry and start a home, and he must do, not what he would--what is
best for him and best for all of us; but what he must--what he can be
sure of pay for. We have always supposed this to be a good thing, as it
forced men to be industrious. As if it was any benefit to society to
have men industrious in wrong ways--or useless ways, or even slow,
stupid, old-fashioned ways!
Human advance calls for each man's best, for his special faculties, for
the work he loves best and can therefore do best and do most of. This
work is not always the kind that commands the greater wages; at least
the immediate wages he must have. The market will pay best for what it
wants, and what it wants is almost always what it is used to, and often
what is deadly bad for it. Having a family to support, in the most
wasteful possible way, multiplies a man's desire for money; but in no
way multiplies his ability, his social value.
Therefore the world is full of struggling men, putting in for one and
trying to take out for ten; and in this struggle seeking continually
for new ways to cater to the tastes of the multitude, and especially to
those of the rich; that they may obtain the wherewithal to support the
ten, or six, or simply the one; who though she be but one and not a
worker, is quite ready to consume more than any ten together! Social
advantage is ruthlessly sacrificed to private advantage in our life
to-day; not to necessary and legitimate private interests either; not
to the best service of the individual, but to false and scandalously
wasteful private interests; to the maintenance and perpetuation of
inferior people.
The position is this: the home, as now existing, costs three times what
is necessary to meet the same needs. It involves the further waste of
nearly half the world's labour. It does not fulfil its functions to the
best advantage, thus robbing us again. It maintains a low grade of
womanhood, overworked or lazy; it checks the social development of men
as well as women, and, most of all, of children. The man, in order to
meet this unnecessary expense, must cater to the existing market; and
the existing market is mainly this same home, with its crude tastes and
limitless appetites. Thus the man, to maintain his own woman in
idleness, or low-grade labour, must work three times as hard as is
needful, to meet the demands of similar women; the home-bound woman
clogging the whole world.
Change this order. Set the woman on her own feet, as a free,
intelligent, able human being, quite capable of putting into the world
more than she takes out, of being a producer as well as a consumer. Put
these poor antiquated "domestic industries" into the archives of past
history; and let efficient modern industries take their place, doing
far more work, far better work, far cheaper work in their stead.
With an enlightened system of feeding the world we shall have better
health--and wiser appetites. The more intelligent and broad-minded
woman will assuredly promote a more reasonable, healthful, beautiful,
and economical system of clothing, for her own body and that of the
child. The wiser and more progressive mother will at last recognise
child-culture as an art and science quite beyond the range of instinct,
and provide for the child such surroundings, such training, as shall
allow of a rapid and enormous advance in human character.
The man, relieved of two-thirds of his expenses; provided with double
supplies; properly fed and more comfortable at home than he ever
dreamed of being, and associated with a strong, free, stimulating
companion all through life, will be able to work to far better purpose
in the social service, and with far greater power, pride, and
enjoyment.
The man and woman together, both relieved of most of their personal
cares, will be better able to appreciate large social needs and to meet
them. Each generation of children, better born, better reared, growing
to their full capacity in all lines, will pour into the world a rising
flood of happiness and power. Then we shall see social progress.
XVI
LINES OF ADVANCE
It will be helpful and encouraging for us to examine the development of
the home to this date, and its further tendencies; that we may cease to
regret here, and learn to admire there; that we may use our personal
powers definitely to resist the undertow of habit and prejudice, and
definitely to promote all legitimate progress.
There is a hopelessness in the first realisation of this old-world
obstacle still stationary in our swift to-day; but there need not be.
While apparently as strong as ever, it has in reality been undermined
on every side by the currents of evolution; its whilom prisoners have
been stimulated and strengthened by the unavoidable force of those same
great currents, and little remains to do beyond the final opening of
one's own eyes to the facts--not one's grandmother's eyes, but one's
_own_--and the beautiful work of reconstruction.
Examine the main root of the whole thing--the exclusive confinement of
women to the home, to their feminine functions and a few crude
industries; and see how rapidly that condition is changing. The advance
of women, during the last hundred years or so, is a phenomenon
unparalleled in history. Never before has so large a class made as much
progress in so small a time. From the harem to the forum is a long
step, but she has taken it. From the ignorant housewife to the
president of a college is a long step, but she has taken it. From the
penniless dependent to the wholly self-supporting and often
other-supporting business woman, is a long step, but she has taken it.
She who knew so little is now the teacher; she who could do so little
is now the efficient and varied producer; she who cared only for her
own flesh and blood is now active in all wide good works around the
world. She who was confined to the house now travels freely, the
foolish has become wise, and the timid brave. Even full political
equality is won in more than one country and state; it is a revolution
of incredible extent and importance, and its results are already
splendidly apparent.
This vast number of human beings, formerly as separate as sand grains
and as antagonistic as the nature of their position compelled, are now
organising, from house to club, from local to general, in federations
of city, state, nation, and world. The amount of social energy
accumulated by half of us is no longer possible of confinement to that
half; the woman has inherited her share, and has grown so large and
strong that her previous surroundings can no longer contain or content
her.
The socialising of this hitherto subsocial, wholly domestic class, is a
marked and marvellous event, now taking place with astonishing
rapidity. That most people have not observed it proves nothing. Mankind
has never yet properly perceived historic events until time gave him
the perspective his narrow present horizon denied.
Where most of our minds are home-enclosed, like the visual range of one
sitting in a hogshead, general events make no impression save as they
impinge directly on that personal area. The change in the position of
woman, largely taking place in the home, is lost to general view; and
so far as it takes place in public, is only perceived in fractions by
most of us.