The home: its work and influence. Gilman Charlotte Perkins

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СКАЧАТЬ 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!

      IV

      PRESENT CONDITIONS

      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 СКАЧАТЬ