The changes in our conception and expression of home life, so rapidly
and steadily going on about us, involve many far-reaching effects, all
helpful to human advancement. Not the least of these is the improvement
in our machinery of social intercourse.
This necessity of civilization was unknown in those primitive ages when
family intercourse was sufficient for all, and when any further contact
between individuals meant war. Trade and its travel, the specialization
of labor and the distribution of its products, with their ensuing
development, have produced a wider, freer, and more frequent movement
and interchange among the innumerable individuals whose interaction
makes society. Only recently, and as yet but partially, have women as
individuals come to their share of this fluent social intercourse which
is the essential condition of civilization. It is not merely a pleasure
or an indulgence: it is the human necessity.
For women as individuals to meet men and other women as individuals,
with no regard whatever to the family relation, is a growing demand of
our time. As a social necessity, it is perforce being met in some
fashion; but its right development is greatly impeded by the clinging
folds of domestic and social customs derived from the sexuo-economic
relation. The demand for a wider and freer social intercourse between
the sexes rests, primarily, on the needs of their respective natures,
but is developed in modern life to a far subtler and higher range of
emotion than existed in the primitive state, where they had but one need
and but one way of meeting it; and this demand, too, calls for a better
arrangement of our machinery of living.
Always in social evolution, as in other evolution, the external form
suited to earlier needs is but slowly outgrown; and the period of
transition, while the new functions are fumbling through the old organs,
and slowly forcing mechanical expression for themselves, is necessarily
painful. So far in our development, acting on a deep-seated conviction
that the world consisted only of families and the necessary business
arrangements involved in providing for those families, we have
conscientiously striven to build and plan for family advantage, and
either unconsciously or grudgingly have been forced to make transient
provision for individuals. Whatever did not tend to promote family life,
and did tend to provide for the needs of individuals not at the time in
family relation, we have deprecated in principle, though reluctantly
forced to admit it in practice.
To this day articles are written, seriously and humorously, protesting
against the increasing luxury and comfort of bachelor apartments for
men, as well as against the pecuniary independence of women, on the
ground that these conditions militate against marriage and family life.
Most men, even now, pass through a period of perhaps ten years, when
they are individuals, business calling them away from their parental
family, and business not allowing them to start new families of their
own. Women, also, more and more each year, are entering upon a similar
period of individual life. And there is a certain permanent percentage
of individuals, “odd numbers” and “broken sets,” who fall short of
family life or who are left over from it; and these need to live.
The residence hotel, the boarding-house, club, lodging-house, and
restaurant are our present provision for this large and constantly
increasing class. It is not a travelling class. These are people who
want to live somewhere for years at a time, but who are not married or
otherwise provided with a family. Home life being in our minds
inextricably connected with married life, a home being held to imply a
family, and a family implying a head, these detached persons are unable
to achieve any home life, and are thereby subjected to the
inconvenience, deprivation, and expense, the often unhygienic, and
sometimes immoral influences, of our makeshift substitutes.
What the human race requires is permanent provision for the needs of
individuals, disconnected from the sex-relation. Our assumption that
only married people and their immediate relatives have any right to live
in comfort and health is erroneous. Every human being needs a
home,—bachelor, husband, or widower, girl, wife, or widow, young or old.
They need it from the cradle to the grave, and without regard to
sex-connections. We should so build and arrange for the shelter and
comfort of humanity as not to interfere with marriage, and yet not to
make that comfort dependent upon marriage. With the industries of home
life managed professionally, with rooms and suites of rooms and houses
obtainable by any person or persons desiring them, we could live singly
without losing home comfort and general companionship, we could meet
bereavement without being robbed of the common conveniences of living as
well as of the heart’s love, and we could marry in ease and freedom
without involving any change in the economic base of either party
concerned.
Married people will always prefer a home together, and can have it; but
groups of women or groups of men can also have a home together if they
like, or contiguous rooms. And individuals even could have a house to
themselves, without having, also, the business of a home upon their
shoulders.
Take the kitchens out of the houses, and you leave rooms which are open
to any form of arrangement and extension; and the occupancy of them does
not mean “housekeeping.” In such living, personal character and taste
would flower as never before; the home of each individual would be at
last a true personal expression; and the union of individuals in
marriage would not compel the jumbling together of all the external
machinery of their lives,—a process in which much of the delicacy and
freshness of love, to say nothing of the power of mutual rest and
refreshment, is constantly lost. The sense of lifelong freedom and
self-respect and of the peace and permanence of one’s own home will do
much to purify and uplift the personal relations of life, and more to
strengthen and extend the social relations. The individual will learn to
feel himself an integral part of the social structure, in close, direct,
permanent connection with the needs and uses of society.
This is especially needed for women, who are generally considered, and
who consider themselves, mere fractions of families, and incapable of
any wholesome life of their own. The knowledge that peace and comfort
may be theirs for life, even if they do not marry,—and may be still
theirs for life, even if they do,—will develope a serenity and strength
in women most beneficial to them and to the world. It is a glaring proof
of the insufficient and irritating character of our existing form of
marriage that women must be forced to it by the need of food and
clothes, and men by the need of cooks and housekeepers. We are absurdly
afraid that, if men or women can meet these needs of life by other
means, they will cheerfully renounce the marriage relation. And yet we
sing adoringly of the power of love!
In reality, we may hope that the most valuable effect of this change in
the basis of living will be the cleansing of love and marriage from this
base admixture of pecuniary interest and creature comfort, and that men
and women, eternally drawn together by the deepest force in nature, will
be able at last to meet on a plane of pure and perfect love. We shame
our own ideals, our deepest instincts, our highest knowledge, by this
gross assumption that the noblest race on earth will not mate, or, at
least, not mate monogamously, unless bought and bribed through the
common animal necessities of food and shelter, and chained by law and
custom.
The depth and purity and permanence of the marriage relation rest on the
necessity for the prolonged care of children by both parents,—a law of
racial development which we can never escape. When parents are less
occupied in getting food and cooking it, in getting furniture and
dusting it, they may find time to give new thought and new effort to the
care of their children. The necessities of the child are far deeper than
for bread and bed: those are his mere racial needs, held in common with
all his kind. What he needs far more and receives far less is the
companionship, the association, the personal touch, of his father and
mother. When the common labors of life are removed from the home, we
shall have the time, and perhaps the inclination, to make the personal
acquaintance of our children. They will seem to us not so much creatures
to be waited on as people to be understood. As the civil and military
protection of society has long since superseded the tooth-and-claw
defence of the fierce parent, without in the least endangering the truth
and intensity of the family relation, so the economic provision of
society will in time supersede the bringing home of prey by the parent,
without evil effects to the love or prosperity of the family. These
primitive needs and primitive methods of meeting them are unquestionably
at the base of the family relation; but we have long passed them by, and
the ties between parent and child are not weakened, but strengthened, by
the change.
The more we grow away from these basic conditions, the more fully we
realize the deeper and higher forms of relation which are the strength
and the delight of human life. Full and permanent provision for
individual life and comfort will not cut off the forces that draw men
and women together or hold children to their parents; but it will purify
and intensify these relations to a degree which we can somewhat foretell
by observing the effect of such changes as are already accomplished in
this direction. And, in freeing the individual, old and young, from
enforced association on family lines, and allowing this emergence into
free association on social lines, we shall healthfully assist the
development of true social intercourse.
The present economic basis of family life holds our friendly and
familiar intercourse in narrow grooves. Such visiting and mingling as is
possible to us is between families rather than between individuals; and
the growing specialization of individuals renders it increasingly
unlikely that all the members of a given family shall please a given
visitor or he please them. This, on our present basis, either checks the
intercourse or painfully strains the family relation. The change of
economic relation in families from a sex-basis to a social basis will
make possible wide individual intercourse without this accompanying
strain on the family ties.
This outgoing impulse among members of families, their growing desire
for general and personal social intercourse, has been considered as a
mere thirst for amusement, and deprecated by the moralist. He has so far
maintained that the highest form of association was association with
one’s own family, and that a desire for a wider and more fluent
relationship was distinctly unworthy. “He is a good family man,” we say
admiringly of him who asks only for his newspaper and slippers in the
evening; and for the woman who dares admit that she wishes further
society than that of her husband we have but one name. With the
children, too, our constant effort is to “keep the boys at home,” to
“make home attractive,” so that our ancient ideal, the patriarchal
ideal, of a world of families and nothing else, may be maintained.
But this is a world of persons as well as of families. We are persons as
soon as we are born, though born into families. We are persons when we
step out of families, and persons still, even when we step into new
families of our own. As persons, we need more and more, in each
generation, to associate with other persons. It is most interesting to
watch this need making itself felt, and getting itself supplied, by fair
means or foul, through all these stupid centuries. In our besotted
exaggeration of the sex-relation, we have crudely supposed that a wish
for wider human relationship was a wish for wider sex-relationship, and
was therefore to be discouraged, as in Spain it was held unwise to teach
women to write, lest they become better able to communicate with their
lovers, and so shake the foundations of society.
But, when our sex-relation is made pure and orderly by the economic
independence of women, when sex-attraction is no longer a consuming
fever, forever convulsing the social surface, under all its bars and
chains, we shall not be content to sit down forever with half a dozen
blood relations for our whole social arena. We shall need each other
more, not less, and shall recognize that social need of one another as
the highest faculty of this the highest race on earth.
The force which draws friends together is a higher one than that which
draws the sexes together,—higher in the sense of belonging to a later
race-development. “Passing the love of women” is no unmeaning phrase.
Children need one another: young people need one another. Middle-aged
people need one another: old people need one another. We all need one
another, much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to
be alone in, a sacred, private “home” of his own, so all human creatures
need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other
their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and
stir in unison.
Humanity means being together, and our unutterably outgrown way of
living keeps us apart. How many people, if they dare face the fact, have
often hopelessly longed for some better way of seeing their friends,
their own true friends, relatives by soul, if not by body!
Acting always under the heated misconceptions of our over-sexed minds,
we have pictured mankind as a race of beasts whose only desire to be
together was based on one great, overworked passion, and who were only
kept from universal orgies of promiscuity by being confined in homes.
This is not true. It is not true even now in our over-sexed condition.
It will be still less true when we are released from the artificial
pressure of the sexuo-economic relation and grow natural again.
Men, women, and children need freedom to mingle on a human basis; and
that means to mingle in their daily lives and occupations, not to go
laboriously to see each other, with no common purpose. We all know the
pleasant acquaintance and deep friendship that springs up when people
are thrown together naturally, at school, at college, on shipboard, in
the cars, in a camping trip, in business. The social need of one another
rests at bottom on a common, functional development; and the common,
functional service is its natural opportunity.
The reason why friendship means more to men than to women, and why they
associate so much more easily and freely, is that they are further
developed in race-functions, and that they _work together_. In the
natural association of common effort and common relaxation is the true
opening for human companionship. Just to put a number of human beings in
the same room, to relate their bodies as to cubic space, does not relate
their souls. Our present methods of association, especially for women,
are most unsatisfactory. They arise, and go to “call” on one another.
They solemnly “return” these calls. They prepare much food, and invite
many people to come and eat it; or some dance, music, or entertainment
is made the temporary ground of union. But these people do not really
meet one another. They pass whole lifetimes in going through the steps
of these elaborate games, and never become acquainted. There is a
constant thirst among us for fuller and truer social intercourse; but
our social machinery provides no means for quenching it.
Men have satisfied this desire in large measure; but between women, or
between men and women, it is yet far from accomplishment. Men meet one
another freely in their work, while women work alone. But the difference
is sharpest in their play. “Girls don’t have any fun!” say boys,
scornfully; and they don’t have very much. What they do have must come,
like their bread and butter, on lines of sex. Some man must give them
what amusement they have, as he must give them everything else. Men have
filled the world with games and sports, from the noble contests of the
Olympic plain to the brain and body training sports of to-day, good,
bad, and indifferent. Through all the ages the men have played; and the
women have looked on, when they were asked. Even the amusing occupation
of seeing other people do things was denied them, unless they were
invited by the real participants. The “queen of the ball-room” is but a
wall-flower, unless she is asked to dance by the real king.
Even to-day, when athletics are fast opening to women, when tennis and
golf and all the rest are possible to them, the two sexes are far from
even in chances to play. To want a good time is not the same thing as to
want the society of the other sex, and to make a girl’s desire for a
good time hang so largely on her power of sex-attraction is another of
the grievous strains we put upon that faculty. That people want to see
each other is construed by us to mean that “he” wants to see “her,” and
“she” wants to see “him.” The fun and pleasure of the world are so
interwound with the sex-dependence of women upon men that women are
forced to court “attentions,” when not really desirous of anything but
amusement; and, as we force the association of the sexes on this plane,
so we restrict it on a more wholesome one.
Even our little children in their play are carefully trained to
accentuate sex; and a line of conduct for boys, differing from that for
girls, is constantly insisted upon long before either would think of a
necessity for such difference. Girls and boys, as they associate, are so
commented on and teased as to destroy all wholesome friendliness, and
induce a premature sex-consciousness. Young men and women are allowed to
associate more or less freely, but always on a strictly sex-basis,
friendship between man and woman being a common laughing-stock. Every
healthy boy and girl resents this, and tries to hold free, natural
relation; but such social pressure is hard to resist. She may have as
many “beaux” as she can compass, he may “pay attention” to as many girls
as he pleases; but that is their only way to meet.
The general discontinuance of all friendly visiting, upon the engagement
of either party, proves the nature of the bond. Having chosen the girl
he is to marry, why care to call upon any others? having chosen the man
she is to marry, why receive attention from any others? these “calls”
and “attentions” being all in the nature of tentative preliminaries to
possible matrimony. And, after marriage, the wife is never supposed to
wish to see any other man than her husband, or the husband any other
woman than his wife. In some countries, we vary this arrangement by
increasing the social freedom of married people; but the custom is
accompanied by a commensurate lack of freedom before marriage, which
causes questionable results, both in married life and in social life. In
the higher classes of society there is always more freedom of social
intercourse between the sexes after marriage; but, speaking generally of
America, there is very little natural and serious acquaintance between
men and women after the period of pre-matrimonial visiting.
Even the friendship which may have existed between husband and wife
before marriage is often destroyed by that relation and its economic
complications. They have not time to talk about things as they used:
they are too near together, and too deeply involved in the industrial
and financial concern of their new business. This works steadily against
the development of higher and purer relations between men and women, and
tends to keep them forever to the one primitive bond of sex-union.
A young man goes to a city to live and work. He needs the society of
women as well as of men. Formerly he had his mother, his sisters, and
his sisters’ friends, his schoolmates. Now he must face our constrained
social conditions. He may visit two kinds of women,—those whom we call
“good,” and those whom we call “bad.” (This classification rests on but
one moral quality, and that a sexual one.) He naturally prefers the
good. The good are divided, again, into two kinds,—married and single.
If he visit a married woman frequently, it is remarked upon: it becomes
unpleasant, he does not do it. If he visit an unmarried woman
frequently, it is also remarked upon; and he is considered to have
“intentions.” His best alternative is to visit a number of unmarried
women, and distribute his attentions so cautiously that no one can claim
them as personal.
Here he enters on the first phase of our sexuo-economic relation: he
cannot even visit girls freely without paying for it. Simply to see the
girl by calling on her in the family circle is hardly what either wants
of the other. One does not meet half a dozen people of various ages and
of both sexes as one meets a friend alone. To seek to see her alone is
an “attention.” To “take her out” costs money, and he cheerfully pays
it. But he cannot do this too often, or he will become involved in what
is naturally considered a “serious” affair; and every step of the
acquaintance is watched and commented upon from a sexual point of view.
There is no natural, simple medium of social intercourse between men and
women. The young man can but learn that his popularity depends largely
on his pocket-book. The money that he might be saving for marriage is
wasted on these miscellaneous preliminaries. As he sees what women like
and how much it costs to please them, his hope of marriage recedes
farther and farther. The period during which he must live as an
individual grows longer; and he becomes accustomed to superficial
acquaintance with many women, on the shallowest side of life, with no
opportunity for genuine association and true friendship. What wonder
that the other kind of woman, who also costs money, it is true, but who
does not involve permanent obligation, has come to be so steady a factor
in our social life? The sexuo-economic relation promotes vice in more
ways than one.
The economic independence of woman will change all these conditions as
naturally and inevitably as her dependence has introduced them. In her
specialization in industry, she will develope more personality and less
sexuality; and this will lower the pressure on this one relation in both
women and men. And, in our social intercourse, the new character and new
method of living will allow of broad and beautiful developments in human
association. As the private home becomes a private home indeed, and no
longer the woman’s social and industrial horizon; as the workshops of
the world—woman’s sphere as well as man’s—become homelike and beautiful
under her influence; and as men and women move freely together in the
exercise of common racial functions,—we shall have new channels for the
flow of human life.
We shall not move from the isolated home to the sordid shop and back
again, in a world torn and dissevered by the selfish production of one
sex and the selfish consumption of the other; but we shall live in a
world of men and women humanly related, as well as sexually related,
working together, as they were meant to do, for the common good of all.
The home will be no longer an economic entity, with its cumbrous
industrial machinery huddled vulgarly behind it, but a peaceful and
permanent expression of personal life as withdrawn from social contact;
and that social contact will be provided for by the many common
meeting-places necessitated by the organization of domestic industries.
The assembling-room is as deep a need of human life as the
retiring-room,—not some ball-room or theatre, to which one must be
invited of set purpose, but great common libraries and parlors, baths
and gymnasia, work-rooms and play-rooms, to which both sexes have the
same access for the same needs, and where they may mingle freely in
common human expression. The kind of buildings essential to the carrying
out of the organization of home industry will provide such places. There
will be the separate rooms for individuals and the separate houses for
families; but there will be, also, the common rooms for all. These must
include a place for the children, planned and built for the happy
occupancy of many children for many years,—a home such as no children
have ever had. This, as well as rooms everywhere for young people and
old people, in which they can be together as naturally as they can be
alone, without effort, question, or remark.
Such an environment would allow of free association among us, on lines
of common interest; and, in its natural, easy flow, we should develope
far higher qualities than are brought out by the uneasy struggles of our
present “society” to see each other without wanting to. It would make an
enormous difference to woman’s power of choosing the right man. Cut off
from the purchasing power which is now his easiest way to compass his
desires, freely seen and known in his daily work and amusements, a woman
could know and judge a man as she is wholly unable to do now. Her
personality developed by a free and useful life, clear-headed and
open-eyed,—a woman still, but a personality as well as a woman,—the girl
trained to economic independence, and associating freely with young men
in their common work and play, would learn a new estimate of what
constitutes noble manhood.
The young man, no longer able to cover all his shortcomings with a
dress-coat, and to obtain absolution for every offence by the simple
penance of paying for it, unable really to do much that was wrong for
lack of the old opportunity and the old incentive, constantly helped and
inspired by the friendly presence of honest and earnest womanhood, would
have all the force of natural law to lift him up instead of pulling him
heavily downward, as it does now.
With the pressure of our over-developed sex-instinct lifted off the
world, born clean and strong, of noble-hearted, noble-minded,
noble-bodied mothers, trained in the large wisdom of the new motherhood,
and living freely in daily association with the best womanhood, a new
kind of man can and will grow on earth. What this will mean to the race
in power and peace and happiness no eye can foresee. But this much we
can see:—that our once useful sexuo-economic relation is being outgrown,
that it now produces many evil phenomena, and that its displacement by
the economic freedom of woman will of itself set free new forces, to
develope in us, by their natural working, the very virtues for which we
have striven and agonized so long.
This change is not a thing to prophesy and plead for. It is a change
already instituted, and gaining ground among us these many years with
marvellous rapidity. Neither men nor women wish the change. Neither men
nor women have sought it. But the same great force of social evolution
which brought us into the old relation—to our great sorrow and pain—is
bringing us out, with equal difficulty and distress. The time has come
when it is better for the world that women be economically independent,
and therefore they are becoming so.
It is worth while for us to consider the case fully and fairly, that we
may see what it is that is happening to us, and welcome with open arms
the happiest change in human condition that ever came into the world. To
free an entire half of humanity from an artificial position; to release
vast natural forces from a strained and clumsy combination, and set them
free to work smoothly and easily as they were intended to work; to
introduce conditions that will change humanity from within, making for
better motherhood and fatherhood, better babyhood and childhood, better
food, better homes, better society,—this is to work for human
improvement along natural lines. It means enormous racial advance, and
that with great swiftness; for this change does not wait to create new
forces, but sets free those already potentially strong, so that humanity
will fly up like a released spring. And it is already happening. All we
need do is to understand and help.