As self-conscious creatures, to whom is always open the easy error of
mistaking feeling for fact, to whose consciousness indeed the feeling is
the fact,—a further process of reasoning being required to infer the
fact from the feeling,—we are not greatly to be blamed for laying such
stress on sentiment and emotion. We may perhaps admit, in the light of
cold reasoning, that the home is not the best place in which to do so
much work in, nor the wife and mother the best person to do it. But this
intellectual conviction by no means alters our feeling on the subject.
Feeling, deep, long established, and over-stimulated, lies thick over
the whole field of home life. Not what we think about it (for we never
have thought about it very much), but what we feel about it, constitutes
the sum of our opinion. Many of our feelings are true, right,
legitimate. Some are fatuous absurdities, mere dangling relics of
outgrown tradition, slowly moulting from us as we grow.
Consider, for instance, that long-standing popular myth known as “the
privacy of the home.” There is something repugnant in the idea of food
cooked outside the home, even though served within it; still more in the
going out of the family to eat, and more yet in the going out of
separate individuals to eat. The limitless personal taste developed by
“home cooking” fears that it will lose its own particular shade of brown
on the bacon, its own hottest of hot cakes, its own corner biscuit.
This objection must be honestly faced, and admitted in some degree. A
_menu_, however liberally planned by professional cooks, would not allow
so much play for personal idiosyncrasy as do those prepared by the
numerous individual cooks now serving us. There would be a far larger
range of choice in materials, but not so much in methods of preparation
and service. The difference would be like that between every man’s
making his own coat or having his women servants make it for him, on the
one hand, and his selecting one from many ready made or ordering it of
his tailor, on the other.
In the regular professional service of food there would be a good
general standard, and the work of specialists for special occasions. We
have long seen this process going on in the steady increase of
professionally prepared food, from the cheap eating-house to the
fashionable caterer, from the common “cracker” to the delicate “wafer.”
“Home cooking,” robbed of its professional adjuncts, would fall a long
way. We do not realize how far we have already progressed in this line,
nor how fast we are going.
One of the most important effects of a steady general standard of good
food will be the elevation of the popular taste. We should acquire a
cultivated appreciation of what _is_ good food, far removed from the
erratic and whimsical self-indulgence of the private table. Our only
standard of taste in cooking is personal appetite and caprice. That we
“like” a dish is enough to warrant full approval. But liking is only
adaptation. Nature is forever seeking to modify the organism to the
environment; and, when it becomes so modified, so adapted, the organism
“likes” the environment. In the earlier form, “it likes me,” this
derivation is plainer.
Each nation, each locality, each family, each individual, “likes,” in
large measure, those things to which it has been accustomed. What else
it might have liked, if it had had it, can never be known; but the slow
penetration of new tastes and habits, the reluctant adoption of the
potato, the tomato, maize, and other new vegetables by old countries,
show that it is quite possible to change a liking.
In the narrow range of family capacity to supply and of family ability
to prepare our food, and in our exaggerated intensity of personal
preference, we have grown very rigid in our little field of choice. We
insist on the superiority of our own methods, and despise the methods of
our neighbors, with a sublime ignorance of any higher standard of
criticism than our own uneducated tastes. When we become accustomed from
childhood to scientifically and artistically prepared foods, we shall
grow to know what is good and to enjoy it, as we learn to know good
music by hearing it.
As we learn to appreciate a wider and higher range of cooking, we shall
also learn to care for simplicity in this art. Neither is attainable
under our present system by the average person. As cooking becomes
dissociated from the home, we shall gradually cease to attach emotions
to it; and we shall learn to judge it impersonally upon a scientific and
artistic basis. This will not, of course, prevent some persons’ having
peculiar tastes; but these will know that they are peculiar, and so will
their neighbors. It will not prevent, either, the woman who has a
dilettante fondness for some branch of cookery, wherewith she loves to
delight herself and her friends, from keeping a small cooking plant
within reach, as she might a sewing-machine or a turning-lathe.
In regard to the eating of food we are still more opposed by the
“privacy of the home” idea, and a marked—indeed, a pained—disinclination
to dissociate that function from family life. To eat together does, of
course, form a temporary bond. To establish a medium of communication
between dissimilar persons, some common ground must be found,—some rite,
some game, some entertainment,—something that they can _do_ together.
And, if the persons desiring to associate have no other common ground
than this physical function,—which is so common, indeed, that it
includes not only all humanity, but all the animal kingdom,—then by all
means let them seek that. On occasions of general social rejoicing to
celebrate some event of universal importance, the feast will always be a
natural and satisfying institution.
To the primitive husband with fighting for his industry, the primitive
wife with domestic service for hers, the primitive children with no
relation to their parents but the physical,—to such a common table was
the only common tie; and the simplicity of their food furnished a medium
that hurt no one. But in the higher individualization of modern life the
process of eating is by no means the only common interest among members
of a family, and by no means the best. The sweetest, tenderest, holiest
memories of family life are not connected with the table, though many
jovial and pleasant ones may be so associated. And on many an occasion
of deep feeling, whether of joy or of pain, the ruthless averaging of
the whole group three times a day at table becomes an unbearable strain.
If good food suited to a wide range of needs were always attainable, a
family could go and feast together when it chose or simply eat together
when it chose; and each individual could go alone when he chose. This is
not to be forced or hurried; but, with a steady supply of food, easy of
access to all, the stomach need no longer be compelled to serve as a
family tie.
We have so far held that the lower animals ate alone in their brutality,
and that man has made eating a social function, and so elevated it. The
elevation is the difficult part to prove, when we look at humanity’s
gross habits, morbid tastes, and deadly diseases, its artifice, and its
unutterable depravity of gluttony and intemperance. The animals may be
lower than we in their simple habit of eating what is good for them when
they are hungry, but it serves their purpose well.
One result of our making eating a social function is that, the more
elaborately we socialize it, the more we require at our feasts the
service of a number of strangers absolutely shut out from social
intercourse,—functionaries who do not eat with us, who do not talk with
us, who must not by the twinkling of an eyelash show any interest in
this performance, save to minister to the grosser needs of the occasion
on a strictly commercial basis. Such extraneous presence must and does
keep the conversation at one level. In the family without a servant both
mother and father are too hard worked to make the meal a social success;
and, as soon as servants are introduced, a limit is set to the range of
conversation. The effect of our social eating, either in families or in
larger groups, is not wholly good. It is well open to question whether
we cannot, in this particular, improve our system of living.
When the cooking of the world is open to full development by those whose
natural talent and patient study lead them to learn how better and
better to meet the needs of the body by delicate and delicious
combinations of the elements of nutrition, we shall begin to understand
what food means to us, and how to build up the human body in sweet
health and full vigor. A world of pure, strong, beautiful men and women,
knowing what they ought to eat and drink, and taking it when they need
it, will be capable of much higher and subtler forms of association than
this much-prized common table furnishes. The contented grossness of
to-day, the persistent self-indulgence of otherwise intelligent adults,
the fatness and leanness and feebleness, the whole train of food-made
disorders, together with all drug habits,—these morbid phenomena are
largely traceable to the abnormal attention given to both eating and
cooking, which must accompany them as family functions. When we detach
them from this false position by untangling the knot of our
sexuo-economic relation, we shall give natural forces a chance to work
their own pure way in us, and make us better.
Our domestic privacy is held to be further threatened by the invasion of
professional cleaners. We should see that a kitchenless home will
require far less cleaning than is now needed, and that the daily
ordering of one’s own room could be easily accomplished by the
individual, when desired. Many would so desire, keeping their own rooms,
their personal inner chambers, inviolate from other presence than that
of their nearest and dearest. Such an ideal of privacy may seem
ridiculous to those who accept contentedly the gross publicity of our
present method. Of all popular paradoxes, none is more nakedly absurd
than to hear us prate of privacy in a place where we cheerfully admit to
our table-talk and to our door service—yes, and to the making of our
beds and to the handling of our clothing—a complete stranger, a stranger
not only by reason of new acquaintance and of the false view inevitable
to new eyes let in upon our secrets, but a stranger by birth, almost
always an alien in race, and, more hopeless still, a stranger by
breeding, one who can never truly understand.
This stranger all of us who can afford it summon to our homes,—one or
more at once, and many in succession. If, like barbaric kings of old or
bloody pirates of the main, we cut their tongues out that they might not
tell, it would still remain an irreconcilable intrusion. But, as it is,
with eyes to see, ears to hear, and tongues to speak, with no other
interests to occupy their minds, and with the retaliatory fling that
follows the enforced silence of those who must not “answer back,”—with
this observing and repeating army lodged in the very bosom of the
family, may we not smile a little bitterly at our fond ideal of “the
privacy of the home”? The swift progress of professional sweepers,
dusters, and scrubbers, through rooms where they were wanted, and when
they were wanted, would be at least no more injurious to privacy than
the present method. Indeed, the exclusion of the domestic servant, and
the entrance of woman on a plane of interest at once more social and
more personal, would bring into the world a new conception of the
sacredness of privacy, a feeling for the rights of the individual as yet
unknown.
Closely connected with the question of cleaning is that of household
decoration and furnishing. The economically dependent woman, spending
the accumulating energies of the race in her small cage, has thrown out
a tangled mass of expression, as a large plant throws out roots in a
small pot. She has crowded her limited habitat with unlimited
things,—things useful and unuseful, ornamental and unornamental,
comfortable and uncomfortable; and the labor of her life is to wait upon
these things, and keep them clean.
The free woman, having room for full individual expression in her
economic activities and in her social relation, will not be forced so to
pour out her soul in tidies and photograph holders. The home will be her
place of rest, not of uneasy activity; and she will learn to love
simplicity at last. This will mean better sanitary conditions in the
home, more beauty and less work. And the trend of the new conditions,
enhancing the value of real privacy and developing the sense of beauty,
will be toward a delicate loveliness in the interiors of our houses,
which the owners can keep in order without undue exertion.
Besides these comparatively external conditions, there are psychic
effects produced upon the family by the sexuo-economic relation not
altogether favorable to our best growth. One is the levelling effect of
the group upon its members, under pressure of this relation. Such
privacy as we do have in our homes is family privacy, an aggregate
privacy; and this does not insure—indeed, it prevents—individual
privacy. This is another of the lingering rudiments of methods of living
belonging to ages long since outgrown, and maintained among us by the
careful preservation of primitive customs in the unchanged position of
women. In very early times a crude and undifferentiated people could
flock in family groups in one small tent without serious inconvenience
or injury. The effects of such grouping on modern people is known in the
tenement districts of large cities, where families live in single rooms;
and these effects are of a distinctly degrading nature.
The progressive individuation of human beings requires a personal home,
one room at least for each person. This need forces some recognition for
itself in family life, and is met so far as private purses in private
houses can meet it; but for the vast majority of the population no such
provision is possible. To women, especially, a private room is the
luxury of the rich alone. Even where a partial provision for personal
needs is made under pressure of social development, the other pressure
of undeveloped family life is constantly against it. The home is the one
place on earth where no one of the component individuals can have any
privacy. A family is a crude aggregate of persons of different ages,
sizes, sexes, and temperaments, held together by sex-ties and economic
necessity; and the affection which should exist between the members of a
family is not increased in the least by the economic pressure, rather it
is lessened. Such affection as is maintained by economic forces is not
the kind which humanity most needs.
At present any tendency to withdraw and live one’s own life on any plane
of separate interest or industry is naturally resented, or at least
regretted, by the other members of the family. This affects women more
than men, because men live very little in the family and very much in
the world. The man has his individual life, his personal expression and
its rights, his office, studio, shop: the women and children live in the
home—because they must. For a woman to wish to spend much time elsewhere
is considered wrong, and the children have no choice. The historic
tendency of women to “gad abroad,” of children to run away, to be
forever teasing for permission to go and play somewhere else; the
ceaseless, futile, well-meant efforts to “keep the boys at home,”—these
facts, together with the definite absence of the man of the home for so
much of the time, constitute a curious commentary upon our patient
belief that we live at home, and like it. Yet the home ties bind us with
a gentle dragging hold that few can resist. Those who do resist, and who
insist upon living their individual lives, find that this costs them
loneliness and privation; and they lose so much in daily comfort and
affection that others are deterred from following them.
There is no reason why this painful choice should be forced upon us, no
reason why the home life of the human race should not be such as to
allow—yes, to promote—the highest development of personality. We need
the society of those dear to us, their love and their companionship.
These will endure. But the common cook-shops of our industrially
undeveloped homes, and all the allied evils, are not essential, and need
not endure.
To our general thought the home just as it stands is held to be what is
best for us. We imagine that it is at home that we learn the higher
traits, the nobler emotions,—that the home teaches us how to live. The
truth beneath this popular concept is this: the love of the mother for
the child is at the base of all our higher love for one another. Indeed,
even behind that lies the generous giving impulse of sex-love, the
outgoing force of sex-energy. The family relations ensuing do underlie
our higher, wider social relations. The “home comforts” are essential to
the preservation of individual life. And the bearing and forbearing of
home life, with the dominant, ceaseless influence of conservative
femininity, is a most useful check to the irregular flying impulses of
masculine energy. While the world lasts, we shall need not only the
individual home, but the family home, the common sheath for the budded
leaflets of each new branch, held close to the parent stem before they
finally diverge.
Granting all this, there remains the steadily increasing ill effect, not
of home life _per se_, but of the kind of home life based on the
sexuo-economic relation. A home in which the rightly dominant feminine
force is held at a primitive plane of development, and denied free
participation in the swift, wide, upward movement of the world, reacts
upon those who hold it down by holding them down in turn. A home in
which the inordinate love of receiving things, so long bred into one
sex, and the fierce hunger for procuring things, so carefully trained
into the other, continually act upon the child, keeps ever before his
eyes the fact that life consists in getting dinner and in getting the
money to pay for it, getting the food from the market, working forever
and ever to cook and serve it. These are the prominent facts of the home
as we have made it. The kind of care in which our lives are spent, the
things that wear and worry us, are things that should have been outgrown
long, long ago if the human race had advanced evenly. Man has advanced,
but woman has been kept behind. By inheritance she advances, by
experience she is retarded, being always forced back to the economic
grade of many thousand years ago.
If a modern man, with all his intellect and energy and resource, were
forced to spend all his days hunting with a bow and arrow, fishing with
a bone-pointed spear, waiting hungrily on his traps and snares in hope
of prey, he could not bring to his children or to his wife the uplifting
influences of the true manhood of our time. Even if he started with a
college education, even if he had large books to read (when he had time
to read them) and improving conversation, still the economic efforts of
his life, the steady daily pressure of what he had to do for his living,
would check the growth of higher powers. If all men had to be hunters
from day to day, the world would be savage still. While all women have
to be house servants from day to day, we are still a servile world.
A home life with a dependent mother, a servant-wife, is not an ennobling
influence. We all feel this at times. The man, spreading and growing
with the world’s great growth, comes home, and settles into the tiny
talk and fret, or the alluring animal comfort of the place, with a
distinct sense of coming down. It is pleasant, it is gratifying to every
sense, it is kept warm and soft and pretty to suit the needs of the
feebler and smaller creature who is forced to stay in it. It is even
considered a virtue for the man to stay in it and to prize it, to value
his slippers and his newspaper, his hearth fire and his supper table,
his spring bed, and his clean clothes above any other interests.
The harm does not lie in loving home and in staying there as one can,
but in the kind of a home and in the kind of womanhood that it fosters,
in the grade of industrial development on which it rests. And here,
without prophesying, it is easy to look along the line of present
progress, and see whither our home life tends. From the cave and tent
and hovel up to a graded, differentiated home, with as much room for the
individual as the family can afford; from the surly dominance of the
absolute patriarch, with his silent servile women and chattel children,
to the comparative freedom, equality, and finely diversified lives of a
well-bred family of to-day; from the bottom grade of industry in the
savage camp, where all things are cooked together by the same person in
the same pot,—without neatness, without delicacy, without
specialization,—to the million widely separated hands that serve the
home to-day in a thousand wide-spread industries,—the man and the mill
have achieved it all; the woman has but gone shopping outside, and
stayed at the base of the pyramid within.
And, more important and suggestive yet, mark this: whereas, in historic
beginnings, nothing but the home of the family existed; slowly, as we
have grown, has developed the home of the individual. The first wider
movement of social life meant a freer flux of population,—trade,
commerce, exchange, communication. Along river courses and sea margins,
from canoe to steamship, along paths and roads as they made them, from
“shank’s mare to the iron horse,” faster and freer, wider and oftener,
the individual human beings have flowed and mingled in the life that is
humanity. At first the traveller’s only help was hospitality,—the right
of the stranger; but his increasing functional use brought with it, of
necessity, the organic structure which made it easy, the transitory
individual home. From the most primitive caravansary up to the square
miles of floor-space in our grand hotels, the public house has met the
needs of social evolution as no private house could have done.
To man, so far the only fully human being of his age, the bachelor
apartment of some sort has been a temporary home for that part of his
life wherein he had escaped from one family and not yet entered another.
To woman this possibility is opening to-day. More and more we see women
presuming to live and have a home, even though they have not a family.
The family home itself is more and more yielding to the influence of
progress. Once it was stationary and permanent, occupied from generation
to generation. Now we move, even in families,—move with reluctance and
painful objection and with bitter sacrifice of household goods; but move
we must under the increasing irritation of irreconcilable conditions.
And so has sprung up and grown to vast proportions that startling,
portent of our times, the “family hotel.”
Consider it. Here is the inn, once a mere makeshift stopping-place for
weary travellers. Yet even so the weary traveller long since noted the
difference between his individual freedom there and his home
restrictions, and cheerfully remarked, “I take mine ease in mine inn.”
Here is this temporary stopping-place for single men become a permanent
dwelling-place for families! Not from financial necessity. These are
inhabited by people who could well afford to “keep house.” But they do
not want to keep house. They are tired of keeping house. It is so
difficult to keep house, the servant problem is so trying. The health of
their wives is not equal to keeping house. These are the things they
say.
But under these vague perceptions and expressions is heaving and
stirring a slow, uprising social tide. The primitive home, based on the
economic dependence of woman, with its unorganized industries, its
servile labors, its smothering drag on individual development, is
becoming increasingly unsuitable to the men and women of to-day. Of
course, they hark back to it, of necessity, so long as marriage and
child-bearing are supposed to require it, so long as our fondest
sentiments and our earliest memories so closely cling to it. But in its
practical results, as shown by the ever-rising draught upon the man’s
purse and the woman’s strength, it is fast wearing out.
We have watched the approach of this condition, and have laid it to
every cause but the real one. We have blamed men for not staying at home
as they once did. We have blamed women for not being as good
housekeepers as they once were. We have blamed the children for their
discontent, the servants for their inefficiency, the very brick and
mortar for their poor construction. But we have never thought to blame
the institution itself, and see whether it could not be improved upon.
On wide Western prairies, or anywhere in lonely farm houses, the women
of to-day, confined absolutely to this strangling cradle of the race, go
mad by scores and hundreds. Our asylums show a greater proportion of
insane women among farmers’ wives than in any other class. In the
cities, where there is less “home life,” people seem to stand it better.
There are more distractions, the men say, and seek them. There is more
excitement, amusement, variety, the women say, and seek them. What is
really felt is the larger social interests and the pressure of forces
newer than those of the home circle.
Many fear this movement, and vainly strive to check it. There is no
cause for alarm. We are not going to lose our homes nor our families,
nor any of the sweetness and happiness that go with them. But we are
going to lose our kitchens, as we have lost our laundries and bakeries.
The cook-stove will follow the loom and wheel, the wool-carder and
shears. We shall have homes that are places to live in and love in, to
rest in and play in, to be alone in and to be together in; and they will
not be confused and declassed by admixture with any industry whatever.
In homes like these the family life will have all its finer, truer
spirit well maintained; and the cares and labors that now mar its beauty
will have passed out into fields of higher fulfilment. The relation of
wife to husband and mother to child is changing for the better with this
outward alteration. All the personal relations of the family will be
open to a far purer and fuller growth.
Nothing in the exquisite pathos of woman’s long subjection goes deeper
to the heart than the degradation of motherhood by the very conditions
we supposed were essential to it. To see the mother’s heart and mind
longing to go with the child, to help it all the way, and yet to see it
year by year pass farther from her, learn things she never was allowed
to know, do things she never was allowed to do, go out into “the world
”—their world, not hers—alone, and
“To bear, to nurse, to rear, to love, and then to lose!”
this not by the natural separation of growth and personal divergence,
but by the unnatural separation of falsely divided classes,—rudimentary
women and more highly developed men. It is the fissure that opens before
the boy is ten years old, and it widens with each year.
A mother economically free, a world-servant instead of a house-servant;
a mother knowing the world and living in it,—can be to her children far
more than has ever been possible before. Motherhood in the world will
make that world a different place for her child.