Another devoutly believed domestic myth is that of the "economy" of the home.
The man is to earn, and the woman to save, to expend judiciously, to administer the products of labour to the best advantage. We honestly suppose that our method of providing for human wants by our system of domestic economy is the cheapest possible; that it would cost more to live in any other way. The economic dependence of women upon men, with all its deadly consequences, is defended because of our conviction that her labour in the home is as productive as his out of it; that the marriage is a partnership in which, if she does not contribute in cash, she does in labour, care, and saving.
It is with a real sense of pain that one remorselessly punctures this beautiful bubble. When plain financial facts appear, when economic laws are explained, then it is shown that our "domestic economy" is the most wasteful department of life. The subject is taken up in detail in the chapter on home industries; here the mere statement is made, that the domestic system of feeding, clothing, and cleaning humanity costs more time, more strength, and more money than it could cost in any other way except absolute individual isolation. The most effort and the least result are found where each individual does all things for himself. The least effort and the most result are found in the largest specialisation and exchange.
The little industrial group of the home—from two to five or ten—is very near the bottom of the line of economic progress. It costs men more money, women more work, both more time and strength than need be by more than half. A method of living that wastes half the time and strength of the world is not economical.
Somewhat along this line of popular belief comes that pretty fiction about "the traces of a woman's hand." It is a minor myth, but very dear to us. We imagine that a woman—any woman—just because she is a woman, has an artistic touch, an æsthetic sense, by means of which she can cure ugliness as kings were supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on of hands. We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers a flower pot, a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly proclaims—"A woman has been here." He thinks it is beautiful because it is feminine—a sexuo-æsthetic confusion common to all animals.
The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions, is a strange field of study. The varied forms of crests, combs, wattles, callosities of blue and crimson, and the like, with which one sex attracts the other, are interesting to follow; but they do not appeal to the cultivated sense of beauty. Beauty—beauty of sky and sea, of flower and shell, of all true works of art—has nothing to do with sex.
When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those whohavebeautified the world for us; on the immortal marbles and mosaics, vessels of gold and glass, on building and carving and modelling and painting; the enduring beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great record of world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a woman's hand.
Then study real beauty in the home—any home—all homes. There are women in our farm-houses—women who painfully strive to produce beauty in many forms; crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck together, made of wax; made—of all awful things—of the hair of the dead! Here are traces of a woman's hand beyond dispute, but is it beauty? Through the hands of women, with their delighted approval, pours the stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture, fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration, fashion in clothing. What miracle does "a woman's hand" work on this varying flood of change?
The woman is as pleased with black horsehair as with magenta reps; she is equally contented with "anti-macassars" as with sofa-cushions, if these things are fashionable. Her "old Canton" is relegated to the garret when "French China" of unbroken white comes in; and then brought down again in triumph when the modern goes out and the antique comes in again.
She puts upon her body without criticism or objection every excess, distortion, discord, and contradiction that can be sewed together. The æsthetic sense of woman has never interfered with her acceptance of ugliness, if ugliness were the fashion. The very hair of her head goes up and down, in and out, backwards and forwards under the sway of fashion, with no hint of harmony with the face it frames or the head it was meant to honour. In her house or on her person "the traces of a woman's hand" may speak loud of sex, and so please her opposite; but there is no assurance of beauty in the result. This sweet tradition is but another of our domestic myths.
Among them all, most prominent of all, is one so general and so devoutly accepted as to call for most thorough exposure. This is our beloved dogma of "the maternal instinct." The mother, by virtue of being a mother, is supposed to know just what is right for her children. We honestly believe, men and women both, that in motherhood inheres the power rightly to care for childhood.
This is a nature-myth, far older than humanity. We base the theory on observation of the lower animals. We watch the birds and beasts and insects, and see that the mother does all for the young; and as she has no instruction and no assistance, yet achieves her ends, we attribute her success to the maternal instinct.
What is an instinct? It is an inherited habit. It is an automatic action of the nervous system, developed in surviving species of many generations of repetition; and performing most intricate feats.
There is an insect which prepares for its young to eat a carefully paralysed caterpillar. This ingenious mother lays her eggs in a neatly arranged hole, then stings a caterpillar, so accurately as to deprive him of motion but not of life, and seals up the hole over eggs and fresh meat in full swing of the maternal instinct. A cruelly inquiring observer took out the helpless caterpillar as soon as he was put in; but the instinct-guided mother sealed up the hole just as happily. She had done the trick, as her instinct prompted, and there was no allowance for scientific observers in that prompting. She had no intelligence, only instinct. You may observe mother instinct at its height in a fond hen sitting on china eggs—instinct, but no brains.
We, being animals, do retain some rudiments of the animal instincts; but only rudiments. The whole course of civilisation has tended to develop in us a conscious intelligence, the value of which to the human race is far greater than instinct. Instinct can only be efficient in directing actions which are unvaryingly repeated by each individual for each occasion. It is that repetition which creates the instinct. When the environment of an animal changes he has to use something more than instinct, or he becomes ex-tinct!
The human environment is in continual flux, and changes more and more quickly as social evolution progresses. No personal conditions are so general and unvarying with us as to have time to develop an instinct; the only true ones for our race are the social instincts—and maternity is not a social process.
Education is a social process, the very highest. To collect the essentials of human progress and supply them to the young, so that each generation may improve more rapidly, that is education. The animals have no parallel to this. The education of the animal young by the animal mother tends only to maintain life, not to improve it. The education of a child, and by education is meant every influence which reaches it, from birth to maturity, is a far more subtle and elaborate process.
The health and growth of the body, the right processes of mental development, the ethical influences which shape character—these are large and serious cares, for which our surviving driblets of instinct make no provision. If there were an instinct inherent in human mothers sufficient to care rightly for their children, then all human mothers would care rightly for their children.
Do they?
What percentage of our human young live to grow up? About fifty per cent. What percentage are healthy? We do not even expect them to be healthy. So used are we to "infantile diseases" that our idea of a mother's duty is to nurse sick children, not to raise well ones! What percentage of our children grow up properly proportioned, athletic and vigorous? Ask the army surgeon who turns down the majority of applicants for military service. What percentage of our children grow up with strong, harmonious characters, wise and good? Ask the great army of teachers and preachers who are trying for ever and ever to somewhat improve the adult humanity which is turned out upon the world from the care of its innumerable mothers and their instincts.
Our eyes grow moist with emotion as we speak of our mothers—our own mothers—and what they have done for us. Our voices thrill and tremble with pathos and veneration as we speak of "the mothers of great men—" mother of Abraham Lincoln! Mother of George Washington! and so on. Had Wilkes Booth no mother? Was Benedict Arnold an orphan?
Who, in the name of all common sense, raises our huge and growing crop of idiots, imbeciles, cripples, defectives, and degenerates, the vicious and the criminal; as well as all the vast mass of slow-minded, prejudiced, ordinary people who clog the wheels of progress? Are the mothers to be credited with all that is good and the fathers with all that is bad?
That we are what we are is due to these two factors, mothers and fathers.
Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our social environment is what modifies heredity and develops human character. The kind of country we live in, the system of government, of religion, of education, of business, of ordinary social customs and convention, this is what develops mankind, this is given by our fathers.
What does maternal instinct contribute to this sum of influences? Has maternal instinct even evolved any method of feeding, dressing, teaching, disciplining, educating children which commands attention, not to say respect? It has not.
The mothers of each nation, governed only by this rudimentary instinct, repeat from generation to generation the mistakes of their more ignorant ancestors; like a dog turning around three times before he lies down on the carpet, because his thousand-remove progenitors turned round in the grass!
That the care and education of children have developed at all is due to the intelligent efforts of doctors, nurses, teachers, and such few parents as chose to exercise their human brains instead of their brute instincts.
That the care and education of children are still at the disgraceful level generally existent is due to our leaving these noble functions to the unquestioned dominance of a force which, even among animals, is not infallible, and which, in our stage of socialisation, is practically worthless.
Of all the myths which befog the popular mind, of all false worship which prevents us from recognising the truth, this matriolatry is one most dangerous. Blindly we bow to the word "mother"—worshipping the recreative processes of nature as did forgotten nations of old time in their great phallic religions.
The processes of nature are to be studied, not worshipped; the laws of nature find best reverence in our intelligent understanding and observance, not in obsequious adoration. When the human mother shows that she understands her splendid function by developing a free, strong, healthy body; by selecting a vigorous and noble mate; by studying the needs of childhood, and meeting them with proficient services, her own or that of others better fitted; by presenting to the world a race of children who do not die in infancy, who are not preyed upon by "preventable diseases," who grow up straight, strong, intelligent, free-minded, and right-intentioned; then we shall have some reason to honour motherhood, and it will be brain-work and soul-work that we honour. Intelligence, study, experience, science, love that has more than a physical basis—human motherhood—not the uncertain rudiments of a brute instinct!
The difference between our current idea of the home to-day, and its real conditions, is easily seen. That is, it is easily seen if we are able temporarily to resist the pressure of inherited traditions, and use our individual brain power for a little while. We must remember, in attempting to look fairly, to see clearly, that a concept is a much stronger stimulus to the brain than a fact.
A fact, reaching the brain through any sensory nerve, is but an impression; and if a previous impression to the contrary exists, especially if that contrary impression has existed, untouched, for many generations, the fact has but a poor chance of acceptance. "What!" cries the astonished beholder of some new phenomenon. "Can I believe my eyes!" and he does not believe his eyes, preferring to believe the stock in trade of his previous ideas. It takes proof, much proof, glaring, positive, persistent, to convince us that what we have long thought to be so is not so. "A preconceived idea" is what we call this immoveable lump in the brain, and if the preconceived idea is deeply imbedded, knit, and rooted as an "underlying conviction," and has so existed for a very long time, then a bombardment of most undeniable facts bounds off it without effect.
Our ideas of the home are, as we have seen, among the very deepest in the brain; and to reach down into those old foundation feelings, to disentangle the false from the true, to show that the true home does not involve this group of outgrown rudiments is difficult indeed. Yet, if we will but use that wonderful power of thought which even the most prejudiced can exercise for a while, it is easy to see what are the real conditions of the average home to-day. By "average" is not meant an average of numbers. The world still has its millions of savage inhabitants who do not represent to-day, but anthropologic yesterdays, long past.
Even in our own nation, our ill-distributed social advance leaves us a vast majority of population who do not represent to-day, but a historic yesterday. The home that is really of to-day is the home of the people of to-day, those people who are abreast of the thought, the work, the movement of our times. The real conditions of the present-day home are to be studied here; not in the tepee of the Sioux, the clay-built walls of the Pueblo, the cabin of the "Georgia cracker," or mountaineer of Tennessee; or even in the thousand farm-houses which still repeat so nearly the status of an earlier time.
The growth and change of the home may be traced through all these forms, in every stage of mechanical, industrial, economic, artistic, and psychic development; but the stage we need to study is that we are now in, those homes which are pushed farthest in the forefront of the stream of progress. An average home of to-day, in this sense, is one of good social position, wherein the husband has sufficient means and the wife sufficient education to keep step with the march of events; one which we should proudly point out to a foreign visitor as "a typical American home."
Now, how does this home really stand under dispassionate observation?
The ideal which instantly obtrudes itself is this: A beautiful, comfortable house meeting all physical needs; a happy family, profoundly enjoying each other's society; a father, devotedly spending his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain this little heaven; a mother, completely wrapped up in her children and devotedly spending her life in their service, working miracles of advantage to them in so doing; children, happy in the home and growing up beautifully under its benign influence—everybody healthy, happy, and satisfied with the whole thing.
This ideal is what we are asked to lay aside temporarily; and in its place to bring our minds to bear on the palpable facts in the case. Readers of a specially accurate turn of mind may perhaps be interested enough to jot down on paper their own definite observations of, say, a dozen homes they know best.
One thing may be said here in defence of our general ignorance on this subject: the actual conditions of home life are studiously concealed from casual observation. Our knowledge of each other's homes is obtained principally by "calling" and the more elaborate forms of social entertainments.
The caller only reaches the specially prepared parlour or reception room; the more intimate friends sometimes the bedroom or even nursery, if they are at the time what we call "presentable"; and it is part of our convention, our age-long habit of mind, to accept this partial and prepared view as a picture of the home life. It is not.
To know any home really, you must live in it, "winter and summer" it, know its cellar as well as parlour, its daily habits as well as its company manners. So we have to push into the background not only the large, generally beautiful home ideal, smiling conventionally like a big bronze Buddha; but also that little pocket ideal which we are obliged to use constantly to keep up the proper mental attitude.
We are not used to looking squarely, open-eyed and critical, at any home, so "sacred" is the place to us. Now, having laid aside both the general ideal and the pocket ideal, what do we see?
As to physical health and comfort and beauty: Ask your Health Board, your sanitary engineer, how the laws of health are observed in the average home—even of the fairly well-to-do, even of the fairly educated. Learn what we may of art and science, the art of living, the science of living is not yet known to us. We build for ourselves elaborate structures in which to live, following architectural traditions, social traditions, domestic traditions, quite regardless of the laws of life for the creature concerned.
This home is the home of a live animal, a large animal, bigger than a sheep—about as big as a fallow deer. The comfort and health of this animal we seek to insure by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of cloth and then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with cloth and paper and occasionally "aired" by opening windows. We feed the animal in the box, bringing into it large and varied supplies of food, and cooking them there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and smell of our own preferred food-processes, yet holding it essential that they shall all be carried on in the same box with the animal to be fed; we proceed to enlarge the box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed doors these offensive details (which we would not do without for the world), and to introduce into the box still other animals of different grades to perform the offensive processes.
You thus find in a first-class modern home peculiar warring conditions, in the adjustment of which health and comfort are by no means assured. The more advanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential disease, involved in the integral—supposedly integral—processes of the place. The more lining and stuffing there are, the more waste matter fills the air and settles continually as dust; the more elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a healthy animal to live in; the more labour required, the greater the wear and tear on both the heads of the family.
The conditions of health in a representative modern home are by no means what we are capable of compassing.
We consider "antiseptic cleanliness" as belonging only to hospitals, and are content to spend our daily, and nightly, lives in conditions of septic dirt.
An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic feet of air in an hour. How many homes provide such an amount, fresh, either by day or night?
Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to wrong conditions in shop and office, to chances of the crowd, or to special drug habits. Diseases of women and children must be studied at home, where they take rise. The present conditions of the home as to health and comfort are not satisfactory.
As to beauty: we have not much general knowledge of beauty, either in instinct or training; yet, even with such as we have, how ill satisfied it is in the average home. The outside of the house is not beautiful; the inside is not beautiful; the decorations and furnishings are not beautiful. The home, by itself, in its age-long traditionalism, does not allow of growth in these lines; nor do its physical limitations permit of it. But as education progresses and money accumulates we hire "art-decorators" and try to creep along the line of advance.
A true natural legitimate home beauty is rare indeed. We may be perfectly comfortable among our things, and even admire them; people of any race or age do that; but that sense of "a beautiful home" is but part of the complex ideal, not a fact recognised by those who love and study beauty and art. We do not find our common "interiors" dear to the soul of the painter. So we may observe that in general the home does not meet the demands of the physical nature, for simple animal health and comfort; nor of the psychical for true beauty.
Now for our happy family. Let it be carefully borne in mind that no question is raised as to the happiness of husband and wife; or of parent and child in their essential relation; but of their happiness as affected by the home.
The effect of the home, as it now is, upon marriage is a vitally interesting study. Two people, happily mated, sympathetic physically and mentally, having many common interests and aspirations, proceed after marrying to enter upon the business of "keeping house," or "home-making." This business is not marriage, it is not parentage, it is not child-culture. It is the running of the commissary and dormitory departments of life, with elaborate lavatory processes.
The man is now called upon to pay, and pay heavily, for the maintenance of this group of activities; the woman to work, either personally, by deputy, or both, in its performance.
Then follows one of the most conspicuous of conditions in our present home: the friction and waste of its supposedly integral processes. The man does spend his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain—not a "little heaven," but a bunch of ill-assorted trades, wherein everything costs more than it ought to cost, and nothing is done as it should be done—on a business basis.
How many men simply hand out a proper sum of money for "living expenses," and then live, serene and steady, on that outlay?
Home expenses are large, uncertain, inexplicable. In some families an exceptional "manager," provided with a suitable "allowance," does keep the thing in comparatively smooth running order, at considerable cost to herself; but in most families the simple daily processes of "housekeeping" are a constant source of annoyance, friction, waste, and loss. Housekeeping, as a business, is not instructively successful. As the structure of the home is not what we so readily took for granted in our easily fitting ideals, so the functions of the home are not, either. We are really struggling and fussing along, trying to live smoothly, healthfully, peacefully; studying all manner of "new thought" to keep us "poised," pining for a "simpler life"; and yet all spending our strength and patience on the endless effort to "keep house," to "make a home"—to live comfortably in a way which is not comfortable; and when this continuous effort produces utter exhaustion, we haveto go away from homefor a rest! Think of that, seriously.
The father is so mercilessly overwhelmed in furnishing the amount of money needed to maintain a home that he scarce knows what a home is. Time, time to sit happily down with his family, or to go happily out with his family, this is denied to the patient toiler on whose shoulders this ancient structure rests. The mother is so overwhelmed in her performance or supervision of all the inner workings of the place that she, too, has scant time for the real joys of family life.
The home is one thing, the family another; and when the home takes all one's time, the family gets little. So we find both husband and wife overtaxed and worried in keeping up the institution according to tradition; both father and mother too much occupied in home-making to do much toward child-training, man-making!
What is the real condition of the home as regards children—its primal reason for being? How does the present home meet their needs? How does the home-bound woman fill the claims of motherhood? As a matter of fact,areour children happy and prosperous, healthy and good, at home? Again the ideal rises; picture after picture, tender, warm, glowing; again we must push it aside and look at the case as it is. In our homes to-day the child grows up—when he does not die—not at all in that state of riotous happiness we are so eager to assume as the condition of childhood. The mother loves the child, always and always; she does what she can, what she knows how; but the principal work of her day is the care of the house, not of the child; the construction of clothes—not of character.
Follow the hours in the day of the housewife: count the minutes spent in the care and service of the child, as compared with those given to the planning of meals, the purchase of supplies, the labour either of personally cleaning things or of seeing that other persons do it; the "duties" to society, of the woman exempt from the actual house-labour.
"But," we protest, "all this is for the child—the meals, the well-kept house, the clothes—the whole thing!"
Yes? And in what way do the meals we so elaborately order and prepare, the daintily furnished home, the much-trimmed clothing, contribute to the body-growth, mind-growth, and soul-growth of the child? The conditions of home life are not those best suited to the right growth of children. Infant discipline is one long struggle to coerce the growing creature into some sort of submission to the repressions, the exactions, the arbitrary conventions of the home.
In broad analysis, we find in the representative homes of to-day a condition of unrest. The man is best able to support it because he is least in it; he is part and parcel of the organised industries of the world, he has his own special business to run on its own lines; and he, with his larger life-basis, can better bear the pressure of house-worries. The wife is cautioned by domestic moralists not to annoy her husband with her little difficulties; but in the major part of them, the economic difficulties, she must consult him, because he pays the bills.
When a satisfactory Chinaman is running a household; when the money is paid, the care deputed, the whole thing done as by clock-work, this phase of home unrest is removed; but the families so provided for are few. In most cases the business of running a home is a source of constant friction and nervous as well as financial waste.
Quite beyond this business side come the conditions of home life, the real conditions, as affecting the lives of the inmates. With great wealth, and a highly cultivated taste, we find the members of the family lodged in as much privacy and freedom as possible in a home, and agreeing to disagree where they are not in accord. With great love and highly cultivated courtesy and wisdom, we find the members of the family getting on happily together, even in a physically restricted home. But in the average home, occupied by average people, we find the members of the family jarring upon one another in varying degree.
That harmony, peace, and love which we attribute to home life is not as common as our fond belief would maintain. The husband, as we have seen, finds his chief base outside, and bears up with greater or less success against the demands and anxieties of the home. The wife, more closely bound, breaks down in health with increasing frequency. The effect of home life on women seems to be more injurious in proportion to their social development. Our so-called "society" is one outlet, though not a healthful one, through which the woman seeks to find recreation, change, and stimulus to enable her to bear up against a too continuous home life.
The young man at home is almost a negligible factor—he does not stay in it any more than he can help. The young woman at home finds her growing individuality an increasing disadvantage, and many times makes a too hasty marriage because she is not happy at home—in order to have "a home of her own," where she still piously believes all will be well.
The child at home has no knowledge of any other and better environment wherewith to compare this. He accepts his home as the unavoidable base of all things—he cannot think of life with a different home. But the eagerness with which he hails any proposition that takes him out of it, his passionate hunger for change, for novelty; the fever which most boys have for "running away"; the eager, intense interest in stories of anything and everything as far removed from home life as possible; the drearyennuiof the child who is punished by being kept at home—or who has to stay there continuously for any reason—standing at the window which can give sight of the world outside and longing for something to happen—all this goes to indicate that home life does not satisfy the child. There was a time when it did, when it satisfied every member of the family; but that was under far more primitive conditions.
The home has not developed in the same ratio as its occupants. The people of to-day are not content in the homes of a thousand years before yesterday. Our present home conditions are being changed—very gradually, owing to the stiffness of the material, but are slowly changing before our eyes. As a matter of fact, we are ready—more than ready—for the homes of the future; as a matter of feeling, we are clinging with all our might to the homes of the past; and, in their present conditions, our homes are not by any means those centres of rest, peace, and satisfaction we are so religiously taught to think them.
Suppose for an instant that they were. Suppose the trouble, the weariness, the danger and evils of outside life were all laid aside the moment we entered the home. There all was well. No financial trouble. No industrial trouble. No physical trouble. No mental trouble. No moral trouble. Just a place where everything ran on wheels; and where the world-worn soul could count on peace and refreshment.
Vain supposition! Whatever the financial troubles of the world, the place where they are felt most is in the home. Here is where the money is spent, and most wastefully misspent as we shall see later. Here is where there is never enough, where the demand continually exceeds the supply.
As to industrial trouble, the labour question is a large one everywhere. The introduction of machinery has brought its train of needless disadvantages as well as its essential advantages. There are dishonesty and inefficiency to meet and cope with. But compare the conversation of a hundred business men with that of a hundred housekeeping women, and learn respect for the magnitude of the industrial troubles of the home.
For physical troubles, as we have before indicated, the home is no relief. We struggle to enforce laws improving the physical conditions of the coal mine and the factory, but these laws find their utmost difficulty of application in the "sweatshops," the place where work is done at home. There is no law to improve the sanitary condition of the kitchen, to compel the admission of oxygen to the bedroom. In the home every law of health may be disregarded with impunity. We strive by building regulations and Boards of Health to make some improvement, but the conditions of home life, as now existing, are no guarantee of safety from physical troubles.
As to the mental and moral—the whole field of psychical error and difficulty—the home is the place where we suffer most. The struggles and falls of the soul, our most intimate sins, the keenest pain we know—the home is the arena for these in large measure. Tender virtues grow there, too—deep and abiding love, generous devotion, patient endurance—faithfulness and care; but for one home that shows us these is another where dominant injustice, selfishness, unthinking cruelty, impatience, grossest rudeness, a callous disregard for the oft-trodden feelings of others is found instead. No wide acquaintance with present homes can fail to note these things in every shade of growth. Home is a place where people live, people good and bad, great and small, wise and unwise. The home does not make the bad good, the small great, or the foolish wise. Many a man whohasto be decent in his social life is domineering and selfish at home. Many a woman who has to be considerate and polite in her social life, such as it is, is exacting and greedy at home, and cruel as only the weak and ignorant can be. Now if the home was what produced the virtues we commonly attribute to it, then all homes, of all times and peoples, would have the same effect.
The American man holds pre-eminence as sacrificed to the home; the American woman as being most petted and indulged therein. In England we find the man more the centre of indulgence, in Germany still more so—and the women subsidiary to his use and pleasure.
How can "the home" be credited with such opposite results? If, as is commonly assumed, the home has any unfailing general effect, we must be able to point out that effect in the homes of Russia, China, France, and Egypt. If we find the homes of the nations differ we must look for the cause in the national institutions—not the domestic.
That our well-loved homes are as good as they are is due to our race progress; to our religion, our education, our general social advance. When a peasant family from Hungary comes to America, they establish a Hungarian home. As they become Americanised the home changes and improves. The credit is not due to the home, but to the country. Meanwhile the home does have certain definite effects upon our life; due to its own nature, and acting upon us in every time and place.
These we shall analyse and follow in studying the effects of the home upon society in a later chapter. In this observation of present conditions we should note merely how our average home life now stands. And we may plainly see these things; a general condition of unrest and more or less dissatisfaction. A tendency to ever-growing expense, which threatens the very existence of the home and is forcing many into boarding houses. An increasing difficulty in the industrial processes—a difficulty so great that the lives of our women are embittered and shortened by it, and the periods of anxiety and ill-adjustment are longer than those of satisfactory service. An improvement in sanitary conditions so far as public measures can reach the home, but a wide field of disease owing to wrong habits of clothing, eating, and breathing. A rudimentary custom of child-culture only beginning to show signs of progress; and a degree of unhappiness to which the divorce and criminal courts, as well as insane asylums and graveyards, bear crushing testimony.
With conditions of home life as far from our cherished ideal as these, is it not time for us bravely to face the problem, and study home life with a view to its improvement? Not "to abolish the home," as is wildly feared by those who dare not discuss it. A pretty testimony this to their real honour and belief! Is the home so light a thing as to be blown away by a breath of criticism? Are we so loosely attached to our homes as to give them up when some defects are pointed out? Is it not a confession of the discord and pain we so stoutly deny, that we are not willing to pour light into this dark place and see what ails it?
There is no cause for fear. So long as life lasts we shall have homes; but we need not always have the same kind.
Our present home is injured by the rigidly enforced maintenance of long-outgrown conditions. We may free ourselves, if we will, from every one of those injurious, old conditions, and still retain all that is good and beautiful and right in the home.
I. The Housewife
All industry began at home.
All industry was begun by women.
Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation, during that long period of slowly changing savagery which antedates our really human life, whatever work was done on earth was done by the woman in the home. From that time to this we have travelled far, spread wide, grown broad and high; and our line of progress is the line of industrial evolution.
Where the patient and laborious squaw once carried on her back the slaughtered game for her own family, now wind and steam and lightning distribute our provisions around the world. Where she once erected a rude shelter of boughs or hides for her own family, now mason and carpenter, steel and iron worker, joiner, lather, plasterer, glazier, plumber, locksmith, painter, and decorator combine to house the world. Where she chewed and scraped the hides, wove bark and grasses, made garments, made baskets, made pottery, made all that was made for her own family, save the weapons of slaughter, now the thousand manufactures of a million mills supply our complex needs and pleasures. Where she tamed and herded a few beasts for her own family, now from ranchman to packer move the innumerable flocks and herds of the great plains; where she ploughed with a stick and reaped with a knife, for her own family, now gathered miles of corn cross continent and ocean to feed all nations. Where she prepared the food and reared the child for her own family—what! Has the world stopped? Is history a dream? Is social progress mere imagination?—there she is yet!Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation, untouched by a thousand whirling centuries, the primitive woman, in the primitive home, still toils at her primitive tasks.
All industries began at home, there is no doubt of that. All other industries have left home long ago. Why have these stayed? All other industries have grown. Why have not these?
What conditions, social and economic, what shadowy survival of oldest superstitions, what iron weight of custom, law, religion, can be adduced in explanation of such a paradox as this? Talk of Siberian mammoths handed down in ice, like some crystallised fruit of earliest ages! What are they compared with this antediluvian relic! By what art, what charm, what miracle, has the twentieth century preservedalivethe prehistoric squaw!
This is a phenomenon well worth our study, a subject teeming with interest, one that concerns every human being most closely—most vitally. Sociology is beginning to teach us something of the processes by which man has moved up and on to his present grade, and may move farther. Among those processes none is clearer, simpler, easier to understand, than industrial evolution. Its laws are identical with those of physical evolution, a progression from the less to the greater, from the simple to the complex, a constant adaptation of means to ends, a tendency to minimise effort and maximise efficiency. The solitary savage applies his personal energy to his personal needs. The social group applies its collective energy to its collective needs. The savage works by himself, for himself; the civilised man works in elaborate inter-dependence with many, for many. By the division of labour and its increasing specialisation we vastly multiply skill and power; by the application of machinery we multiply the output; by the development of business methods we reduce expense and increase results; the whole line of growth is the same as that which makes a man more efficient in action than his weight in shell-fish. He is more highly organised and specialised. So is modern industry.
The solitary savage knew neither specialisation nor organisation—he "did his own work." This process gives the maximum of effort and the minimum of results. Specialised and organised industry gives the minimum of effort and the maximum of results. That is civilised industry.
The so idealised and belauded "home industries" are still savage. The modern home is built and furnished by civilised methods. Arts, crafts, and manufactures, sciences, professions, many highly sublimated processes of modern life combine to make perfect the place where we live; but the industries practised in that place remain at the first round of the ladder.
Instead of having our pick of the latest and best workers, we are here confined to the two earliest—the Housewife and the Housemaid. The housewife is the very first, and she still predominates by so large a majority as to make us wonder at the noisy prominence of "the servant question." (It is not so wonderful, after all, for that class of the population which keeps servants is the class which makes the most noise.) Even in rich America, even in richest New York, innine-tenthsof the families the housewife "does her own work." This is so large a proportion that we will consider the housewife first—and fully.
Why was woman the first worker? Because she is a mother. All living animals are under the law of, first, self-preservation, and, second, race-preservation. But the second really comes first; the most imperative forces in nature compel the individual to sacrifice to the race. This law finds its best expression in what we call "the maternal sacrifice." Motherhood means giving. There is no limit to this urgency. The mother gives all she has to the young, including life. In many low organisms the sacrifice is instantaneous and complete—the mother dies in giving birth to the young—just lays her eggs and dies. Such forms of life have to remain low, however. The defunct mothers can be of no further use to the young, so they have to be little instinctive automata, hopelessly arrested in the path of progress.
Nature perceived that this wholly sacrified mother was not the best kind. Little by little the usefulness of the mother was prolonged, the brooding mother, the feeding mother, lastly the nursing mother, highest of all. Order mammalia stands at the top, type of efficient motherhood.
When human development began, new paths were open to mother-love—new tasks to maternal energy. The human mother not only nursed and guarded the child, but exercised her dawning ingenuity in adding to its comfort by making things.
The constructive tendency is essentially feminine; the destructive masculine. Male energy tends to scatter and destroy, female to gather and construct. So human labour comes by nature from the woman, was hers entirely for countless ages, while the man could only hunt and fight, or prance and prophesy as "medicine man"; and this is still so in those races which remain savage. Even in so advanced a savage race as the Zulus, the women do the work; and our own country has plenty of similar examples near at hand.
As human civilisation is entirely dependent on progressive industry, while hunting and fighting are faculties we share with the whole carnivora, it is easy to see that during all those ages of savagery the woman was the leader. She represented the higher grade of life; and carried it far enough to bring to birth many of the great arts as well as the humbler ones, especially the invaluable art of language.[1]
But maternal energy has its limits. What those limits are may be best studied in an ant's nest or a beehive. These marvellous insects, perfected types of industry and of maternity, have succeeded inorganising motherhood. Most creatures reproduce individually, these collectively—all personal life absolutely lost in the group life. Moved by an instinct coincident with its existence, the new-hatched ant, still weak and wet from the pupa, staggers to the nearest yet unborn to care for it, and cares for it devotedly to the end of life.
One bee group-mother, crawling from cell to cell, lays eggs unnumbered for the common care; the other group-mothers, their own egg-laying capacity in abeyance, labour unceasingly in the interests of those common eggs; and the delicate perfection of provision and service thus attained results in—what? In a marvellous motherhood and a futile fatherhood; the predominant female, the almost negligible male—a temporary fertilising agent merely; in infinite reproduction, and that is all; in more bees, and more ants, more and more for ever, like the sands of the sea. They would cover the earth like a blanket but for merciful appetites of other creatures. But this is only multiplication—not improvement. Nature has one more law to govern life besides self-preservation and reproduction—progress. To be, to re-be, and to be better is the law. It is not enough to keep one's self alive, it is not enough to keep one's kind alive, we must improve. This law of growth, which is the grand underlying one that moves the universe, acts on living species mainly through the male. He is progressive where the female is conservative by nature. He is a variant where she is the race type. This tendency to vary is one of the most beneficent in nature. Through it comes change, and, through change, improvement. The unbridled flow of maternal energy is capable of producing an exquisite apparatus for child-rearing, and no more. The masculine energy is needed also, for the highest evolution.
Well is it for the human race that the male savage finally took hold of the female's industry. Whether he perceived her superiority and sought to emulate it is doubtful; more probably it was the pressure of economic conditions which slowly forced him to it. The glaring proofs of time taught him that the pasture was more profitable than the hunting ground, and the cornfield than the pasture. The accumulating riches produced by the woman's industry drew him on. Slowly, reluctantly, the lordly fighter condescended to follow the humble worker, who led him by thousands of years. In the hands of the male, industry developed. The woman is a patient, submissive, inexhaustible labourer. The pouring forces of maternity prompt her to work for ever—for her young. Not so the man. Working is with him an acquired habit, and acquired very late in his racial life. The low-grade man still in his heart despises it, he still prefers to be waited on by women, he still feels most at home in hunting and fighting. And man alone being represented in the main fields of modern industry, this male instinct for hunting and fighting plays havoc with the true economic processes. He makes a warfare of business, he makes prey of his competitors, he still seeks to enslave—to make others work for him, instead of freely and joyously working all he can. The best industrial progress needs both elements—ours is but a compromise as yet, something between the beehive and the battlefield.
But, with all the faults of unbridled male energy, it has lifted industry from the limits of the home to that of the world. Through it has come our splendid growth; much marred by evils of force and fraud, crude, wasteful, cruel, but progressive; and infinitely beyond the level of these neglected rudimentary trades left at home; left to the too tender mercies of the housewife.
The iron limits of her efficiency are these: First, that of average capacity. Just consider what any human business would be in which there was no faintest possibility of choice, of exceptional ability, of division of labor. What would shoes be like if every man made his own, if the shoemaker had never come to his development? What would houses be like if every man made his own? Or hats, or books, or waggons? To confine any industry to the level of a universal average is to strangle it in its cradle. And there, for ever, lie the industries of the housewife. What every man does alone for himself, no man can ever do well—or woman either. That is the first limit of the "housewife."
The next is the maternal character of this poor primeval labourer. Because of her wealth of power and patience it does not occur to her to make things easier for herself. The fatal inertia of home industries lies in their maternal basis. The work is only done for the family—the family is satisfied—what remains? There is no other ambition, no other incentive, no other reward. Where the horizon of duty and aspiration closes down with one's immediate blood relations, there is no room for growth.
All that has pushed and pulled reluctant man up the long path of social evolution has not touched the home-bound woman. Whatever height he reached, her place was still the same. The economic relation of the sexes here works[2]with tremendous force. Depending on the male for her economic profit, her own household labours kept to the sex-basis, and never allowed to enter the open market, there was nothing to modify her original sex-tendency to work with stationary contentment. If we can imagine for a moment a world like ours, with all our elaborate business processes in the hands of women, and the men still in the position of the male savage—painted braves, ready for the warpath, and good for little else—we get a comparison with this real condition, where the business processes are in the hands of men, and the women still in the position of the female savage—docile toilers for the family, and good for little else. That is the second limit of the housewife—that she is merely working for her own family—in the sex-relation—not the economic relation; as servant to the family instead of servant to the world.
Next comes her isolation. Even the bottom-level of a universal average—even the blind patience of a working mother—could be helped up a little under the beneficent influence of association. In the days when the ingenious squaw led the world, she had it. The women toiled together at their primitive tasks and talked together as they toiled. The women who founded the beginnings of agriculture were founders also of the village; and their feminine constructive tendencies held it together while the destructive tendencies of the belligerent male continually tore it apart. All through that babyhood of civilisation, the hunting and fighting instinct made men prey upon the accumulated wealth resultant from the labouring instinct of women—but industry conquered, being the best. As industry developed, as riches increased, as property rights were defined, as religions grew, women were confined more and more closely at home. Later civilisations have let them out to play—but not to work. The parasitic female of the upper classes is allowed the empty freedom of association with her useless kind; but the housewife is still confined to the house.
We are now giving great attention to this matter of home industry. We are founding chairs of Household Science, we are writing books on Domestic Economics; we are striving mightily to elevate the standard of home industry—and we omit to notice that it is just because it is home industry that all this trouble is necessary.
So far as home industry had been affected by world industry, it has improved. The implements of cooking and cleaning, for instance—where should we be if our modern squaw had to make her own utensils, as did her ancient prototype? The man, in world industry, makes not only the house, with all its elaborate labour-saving and health-protecting devices; not only the furniture of the house, the ornaments, hangings, and decorations, but the implements of the home industries as well. Go to the household furnishing store of our day—remember the one pot of the savage family to boil the meat and wash the baby—and see the difference between "homemade" and "world-made" things.
So far as home industry has progressed, it is through contact with the moving world outside; so far as it remains undeveloped, it is through the inexorable limitations of the home in itself.
There is one more limitation to be considered—the number of occupations practised. Though man has taken out and developed all the great trades, and, indeed, all trades beyond a certain grade, he has left the roots of quite a number at home. The housewife practises the conflicting elements of many kinds of work. First, she is cook. Whatever else is done or undone, we must eat; and since eating is ordained to be done at home, that is her predominant trade. The preparation and service of food is a most useful function; and as a world-industry, in the hands of professionals, students, and experts, it has reached a comparatively high stage of development.
In the nine-tenths of our homes where the housewife is cook, it comes under all these limitations: First, average capacity; second, sex-tendency; third, isolation; fourth, conflicting duties.
The cook, having also the cleaning to do, the sewing, mending, nursing, and care of children, the amount of time given to cooking is perforce limited. But even the plainest of home cooking must take up a good proportion of the day. The cooking, service, and "cleaning up" of ordinary meals, in a farmhouse, with the contributory processes of picking, sorting, peeling, washing, etc., and the extra time given to special baking, pickling, and preserving, take fully six hours a day. To the man, who is out of the house during work-hours, and who seldom estimates woman's work at its real value, this may seem extreme, but the working housewife knows it is a fair allowance, even a modest one.
There are degrees of speed, skill, intelligence, and purchasing power, of course; but this is a modest average; two hours for breakfast, three for dinner, one for supper. The preparation of food as a household industry takes up half the working time of half the population of the world. This utterly undeveloped industry, inadequate and exhausting, takes nearly a quarter of a twelve-hour day of the world's working force.
Cooking and sewing are inimical; the sewing of the housewife is quite generally pushed over into the evening as well as afternoon, thus lengthening her day considerably. Nursing, as applied to the sick, must come in when it happens, other things giving way at that time. Cleaning is continuous. Cooking, of course, makes cleaning; the two main elements of dirt in the household being grease and ashes; another, and omnipresent one, dust. Then, there are the children to clean, and the clothes to clean—this latter so considerable an item as to take two days of extra labour—during which, of course, other departments must be less attended.
We have the regular daily labour of serving meals and "clearing up," we have the regular daily labour of keeping the home in order; then we have the washing day, ironing day, baking day, and sweeping day. Some make a special mending day also. This division, best observed by the most competent, is a heroic monument to the undying efforts of the human worker to specialise. But we have left out one, and the most important one, of our home industries—the care of children.
Where is Children's Day?
The children are there every day, of course. Yes, but which hour of the day? With six for food, with—spreading out the washing and ironing over the week—two for laundry, with—spreading the sweeping day and adding the daily dusting and setting to rights—two for cleaning; and another two for sewing—after these twelve hours of necessary labour are accounted for, what time remains for the children?
The initial purpose of the home is the care of children. The initial purpose of motherhood is the care of children. How are the duties of the mother compatible with the duties of the housewife? How can child-culture, as a branch of human progress, rise to any degree of proficiency in this swarming heap of rudimentary trades?
Nothing is asked—here—as to how the housewife, doing all these things together her life long, can herself find time for culture and development; or how can she catch any glimmer of civic duty or public service beyond this towering pile of domestic duty and household service. The particular point herein advanced is that the conditions of home industryas suchforever limit the growth of the industry so practised; forever limit the growth of the persons so practising them; and also tend to limit the growth of the society which is content to leave any of its essential functions in this distorted state.
Our efforts to "lift the standard of household industry" ignore the laws of industry. We seek by talking and writing, by poetising and sermonising, and playing on every tender sentiment and devout aspiration, to convince the housewife that there is something particularly exalted and beautiful, as well as useful, in her occupation. This shows our deep-rooted error of sex-distinction in industry. We consider the work of the woman in the house as essentially feminine, and fail to see that, as work, it is exactly like any other kind of human activity, having the same limitations and the same possibilities.
Suppose we change the sex and consider for a while the status of a house-husband. He could be a tall, strong, fine-looking person—man-servants often are. He could love his wife and his children—industrial status does not affect these primal instincts. He could toil from morning to night, manfully, to meet their needs.
Suppose we are visiting in such a family. We should find a very rude small hut—no one man could build much of a house, but, ah! the tender love, the pride, the intimate emotion he would put into that hut! For his heart's dearest—for his precious little ones—he had dragged together the fallen logs—chipped them smooth with his flint-ax (there could have been no metal work while every man was a house-husband), and piled them together. With patient, loving hands he had daubed the chinks with clay, made beds of leaves, hung hides upon the walls. Even some rude stools he might have contrived—though furniture really belongs to a later period. But over all comes the incessant demand for food. His cherished family must eat, often and often, and under that imperative necessity all others wait.
So he goes forth to the hunt, brave, subtle, fiercely ingenious; and, actuated by his ceaseless love for his family he performs wonders. He brings home the food—day after day—even sometimes enough for several days, though meat does not keep very long. The family would have food of a sort, shelter of a sort, and love. But try to point out to the house-husband what other things he could obtain for them, create for them, provide for them, if he learned to combine with other men, to exchange labour, to organise industry. See his virtuous horror!
What! Give up his duty to his family! Let another man hunt for them!—another man build their home—another man make their garments! He will not hear of it. "It is my duty as a husband," he will tell you, "to serve my wife. It is my duty as a father to serve my children. No other person could love them as I do, and without that love the work would not be done as well." Strong in this conviction, the house-husband would remain intrenched in his home, serving his family with might and main, having no time, no strength, no brain capacity for undertaking larger methods; and there he and his family would all be, immovable in the Stone Age.
Never was any such idiot on earth as this hypothetical home-husband. It was not in him to stay in such primitive restrictions. But he has been quite willing to leave his wife in that interestingly remote period.
The permanent error of the housewife lies in that assumption that her love for her family makes her service satisfactory. Family affection has nothing to do with the specialist's skill; nor with the specialist's love of his work for the pleasure of doing it. That is the kind of love that makes good work; and that is the kind of work the world needs and the families within it. Men, specialised, give to their families all that we know of modern comforts, of scientific appliances, of works of art, of the complex necessities and conveniences of modern life. Women, unspecialised, refuse to benefit their families in like proportion; but offer to them only the grade of service which was proper enough in the Stone Age, but is a historic disgrace to-day.
A house does not need a wife any more than it does a husband. Are we never to have a man-wife? A really suitable and profitable companion for a man instead of the bond-slave of a house? There is nothing in the work of a house which requires marital or maternal affection. It does require highly developed skill and business sense—but these it fails to get.
Would any amount of love on the part of that inconceivable house-husband justify him in depriving his family of all the fruits of progress? What a colossal charge of malfeasance in office could be brought against such a husband—such a father; who, under the name of love, should so fail in his great first duty—Progress.
How does the woman escape this charge? Why is not she responsible for progress, too? By that strange assumption does she justify this refusal to keep step with the world? She will tell you, perhaps, that she cannot do more than she does—she has neither time nor strength nor ambition for any more work. So might the house-husband have defended himself—as honestly and as reasonably. It is true. While every man had to spend all his time providing for his own family, no man ever had, or ever could have, time, strength, or ambition to do more.
It is notmorework that is asked of women, but less. It isa different methodof work. Human progress rests upon the interchange of labour; upon work done humanly for each other, not, like the efforts of the savage or the brute, done only for one's own. The housewife, blinded by her ancient duty, fails in her modern duty.
It is true that, while she does this work in this way, she can do no more. Therefore she must stop doing it, and learn to do differently. The house will not be "neglected" by her so doing; but is even now most shamefully neglected by her antique methods of labour. The family will not be less loved because it has a skilled worker to love it. Love has to pass muster in results, as well as intentions. Here are five mothers, equally loving. One is a Hottentot. One is an Eskimo. One is a Hindoo. One is a German peasant woman. One is an American and a successful physician.
Which could do most for her children? All might compete on even terms if "love is enough," as poets have claimed; butwhich could best provide for her children?
Neither overflowing heart nor overburdened hand sufficiently counts in the uplifting of the race; that rests onwhat is done. The position of the housewife is a final limitation and a continuous, increasing injury both to the specific industries of the place, and to her first great duty of motherhood. The human race, fathered only by house-husbands, would never have moved at all. The human race, mothered only by housewives, has moved only half as fast and as far as it rightly should have done, and the work the patient housewife spends her life on is pitifully behind in the march of events. The home as a workshop is utterly insufficient to rightly serve the needs of the growing world.
II. The Housemaid
Among that tenth part of the population sufficiently rich to keep servants, the conditions of domestic industry are familiar to us. This is the tenth which is most conscious, and most vocal. It has the widest range of social contact; it is most in touch with literature; both in speech and writing we hear oftenest from the small class who keep servants.
The woman who does her own work is not usually a writer and has little time for reading. Moreover, her difficulties, though great, are not of the sort that confound the mistress of servants. The housewife is held to her work by duty and by love; also by necessity. She cannot "better herself" by leaving; and indeed, without grave loss and pain, she cannot leave at all. So the housewife struggles on, too busy to complain; and accomplishes, under this threefold bond of duty, love, and necessity far more than can be expected of a comparatively free agent.
Therefore we hear little of the "problem" of domestic service where the wife is the servant; and have to draw our conclusions from such data as the large percentage of farmers' wives who become insane, and such generalisations as those of the preceding chapter. But the "Servant Question" is clearly before us. It is an economic problem which presses upon us all, (that tenth of us all which is so prominent that it tacitly assumes its problem to be universal;) and the pressure of which increases daily. We are even beginning to study it scientifically. Miss Salmon's valuable book on "Domestic Service" contributes much useful information. The Household Economic Association exists largely to alleviate the distresses of this system of industry. Scarce one woman (of this tenth) but feels the pinch of our imperfect method of doing housework, and as they become better educated and more intelligent, as some of them even learn something of more advanced economic processes, this crude, expensive, and inadequate system causes more and more uneasiness and distress.
What is the status of household industry as practised by servants? It is this: The Housewife having become the Lady of the House, and the work still having to be done in the house, others must be induced to do it. In the period from which this custom dates it was a simple matter of elevating "the wife or chief wife"[3]to a position of dominance, and leaving the work to be done by the rest of the women. Domestic service, as an industrial status, dates from the period of the polygynous group; the household with the male head and the group of serving women; from the time when wives were slaves and slaves were wives, indiscriminately. (See domestic relations of Jacob.)
The genesis of the relation being thus established, it is easy to account for its present peculiar and dominating condition—celibacy. The housemaid is the modern derivative from the slave-wife. She may no longer be the sub-wife of the master—but neither may she be another man's wife.
No married man wishes his wife to serve another man. This household service, being esteemed as a distinctly feminine function, closely involved with maternity, or at least with marriage, or, if not with marriage, at the very least with woman's devotion, and quite inconsistent with any other marriage; therefore we find the labours of the household performed by celibate women of a lower class. Our modern household is but a variation of the primitive group—the man and his serving women still.
In the period of slave labour, where both men and women were owned and exploited, we find household labour performed by men; and in those Oriental nations where slavery yet exists we find man-service common in the home. Also in nations still influenced by feudalism, where service once went with the soil, where the lord is still attended by what was originally his contingent of fighting men, but which has gradually dwindled to an array of footmen and butlers; there we find men still contented, or partially contented, to do house-service. But it ranks last and lowest in man's mind, and justly. As fast as industrial evolution progresses we find men less and less content to do this work in this way; or, for that matter, women either.
In the highly advanced economic status of America we are especially confronted with this difficulty, and have to supply our needs from nations still largely under the influence of the feudal régime, or those in the yet lower period of slavery. Men-servants, when obtained, are generally satisfactory; no public outcry is made over them. It is the "servant-girl" that constitutes the element of difficulty, and it is she that we must consider.
Let it be clearly held in mind that the very first economic relation was that of sex, based on the natural tendency of the female to work; sex-labour. The second stage of economic relation is that of force; slave-labour. The next is that of payment, what we call the contract system; wage-labour.
Social evolution still shows us all these forms actively present in this age, though belonging to such remote and different ones; just as physical evolution still shows us monad and mollusk as well as vertebrate mammals. Each stage has its use and value. But when an early stage comes into contact with a later one there is trouble.
We have all seen how inevitably a savage status recedes and disappears before the civilised. Individual savages may be assimilated by the civilised competing race; but savagery and civilisation cannot coexist when they come in contact and competition. A savage cult may endure on an island in the South Seas, but not in England or America. So an early status of labour has to give way to a later; as shown so conspicuously in the last great historic instance in our own country.
Household industry is a mixed status, composed mainly of sex-labour, the first stage; and partially of slave-labour, the second. This slave-labour is in the act of changing to contract labour; and, as such, cannot endure the conditions of home industry. The housewife has to, the house-slave had to, the house-servant mostly had to; but the house-employeedoes not have to, and will not if she can help it.
The contract status of labour is incompatible with home industry. Note how the condition of celibacy intereacts upon the relation. We expect of our house-servants that they be "attached," "loyal," "faithful," "respectful," "devoted"; we do not say they always are, but that is our ideal; these are the qualities for which we most praise them. Attachment is especially valued. If only we could stillownthem! Then there would be that pleasant sense of permanence and security so painfully lacking in our modern house-service. Short of owning them we seek by various futile methods to "attach" them. Some societies give medals for long service. The best thing we can say of a servant is "she stayed with me for seven years!" or whatever period we can boast. Now we do not seek to "attach" our butcher or baker or candlestick-maker; why our cook? Because this status of celibacy has necessarily resulted in the most painful conditions of transient incapacity in house-service.
People must marry. People ought to marry. People will marry, whether we say yes or no. Why should the housemaid stay a maid for our sakes? What do we offer in the exciting prospect of always doing the same work for the same wages, compared to the prospect of doing the same work, without wages, it is true, but with a "mechanic's lien" on her husband's purse? Or what would any scale of wages or promotion be against the joys of a home of her own, a husband of her own, children of her own?
We, intrenched in our own homes and families, think she ought to be satisfied with serving our husbands and children, but she is not—and never will be. There is of course a certain percentage of old maids and widows, sufficiently disagreeable not to be wanted by their relatives, or sufficiently independent not to want them; sufficiently capable to hold a place as house-servant, but not sufficiently capable to follow any other trade; or, in last possibility, there is here and there that Blessed Damosel of our domestic dreams—a strong, capable, ingenious woman, not hampered by any personal ties or affections; not choosing to marry; preferring to work in a kitchen to working in a shop; and so impressed by the august virtues and supreme importance of our family that she becomes "attached" to it for life. These cases are, however, rare. In the vast majority of households the maid is a maid, a young woman of the lower classes, doing this work because she can do no other, and doing it only until she marries. The resultant conditions of the industry so practised are precisely what we might expect.
This young woman is in no way attached to the family. A family is connected by the ties of sex, by marriage and heredity, with occasional cases of adoption. If the servant is not a relative, or adopted, she does not belong to the family. She has left her father's family, and looks forward to her husband's, meanwhile as an aid to the first or a means to the latter, she serves ours. She is of the lower classes because no others will do this work. She is ignorant because, if she were intelligent, she would not do it—does not do it; the well-schooled, well-trained young woman much prefers other work. So we find household industry in that tenth of our homes not served by the housewife, is in the hands of ignorant and inferior young women,under conditions of constant change.
The position of the lady of the house, as this procession of untrained, half-trained, ill-trained, or at leastotherwise-trained young women march through her domain, is like that of the sergeant of companies of raw recruits. She "lifts 'em—lifts 'em—lifts 'em"—but there is never any "charge that wins the day."