Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  The passionate love of the wife, the mother, and equally of the husband, the father, makes all geese swans. The parents idealise their children; and the children, even more restricted by the home atmosphere — for they know no other — idealise the parents. This is sometimes to their advantage — often the other way. Constant study of near objects, with no distant horizon to rest and change the focus, makes us short-sighted; and, as we all know, the smallest object is large if you hold it near enough. Constant association with one’s nearest and dearest necessarily tends to a disproportionate estimate of their values.

  There is no perspective — cannot be — in these close quarters. The infant prodigy of talent, praised and petted, brings his production into the cold light of the market, under the myriad facets of the public eye, to the measurement of professional standards — and no most swift return to the home atmosphere can counterbalance the effect of that judgment day. A just estimate of one’s self and one’s work can only be attained by the widest and most impersonal comparison. The home estimate is essentially personal, essentially narrow. It sometimes errs in underrating a world-talent; but nine times out of ten it errs the other way — overrating a home-talent. Humility, in the sense of an honest and accurate estimate of one’s self, is not a home-made product. A morbid modesty or an unfounded pride often is. The intense self-consciousness, the prominent and sensitive personality developed by home life, we are all familiar with in women.

  The woman who has always been in close personal relation with someone, — daughter, sister, wife, mother, — and so loved, valued, held close, feels herself neglected and chilly when she comes into business relations. She feels personal neglect in the broad indifference of office or shop; and instantly seeks to establish personal relations with all about her. As a business woman she outgrows it in time. It is not a sex-quality, it is a home-quality; found in a boy brought up entirely at home as well as in a girl. It tends to a disproportionate estimate of self; it is a primitive quality, common to children and savages; it is not conducive to justice and true social adjustment.

  Closely allied to this branch of character is the power of self-control. As an initial human virtue none lies deeper than this; and here the home has credit for much help in developing some of the earlier stages of this great faculty. Primitive man brought to his dawning human relation a long-descended, highly-developed Ego. He had been an individual animal “always and always,” he had now to begin to be a social animal, a collective animal, to develop the social instincts and the social conduct in which lay further progress.

  The training of the child shows us in little what history shows us in the large. What the well-bred child has to learn to make him a pleasing member of the family is self-control. To restrain and adjust one’s self to one’s society — that is the line of courtesy — the line of Christianity — the line of social evolution. The home life does indeed teach the beginning of self-control; but no more. As compared with the world, it represents unbridled license. “In company” one must wear so and so, talk so and so, do so and so, look so and so. To “feel at home” means relaxation of all this.

  This is as it should be. The home is the place for personal relief and rest from the higher plane of social contact. But social contact is needed to develop social qualities, constant staying at home does not do it.

  The man, accustomed to meet all sorts of people in many ways, has a far larger and easier adjustment. The woman, used only to the close contact of a few people in a few relations, as child, parent, servant, tradesman; or to the set code of “company manners,” has no such healthy human plane of contact.

  “I never was so treated in my life!” she complains — and she never was — at home. This limits the range of life, cuts off the widest channels of growth, overdevelops the few deep ones; and does not develop self-control. The dressing-gown-and-slippers home attitude is temporarily changed for that of “shopping,” or “visiting,” but the childish sensitiveness, the disproportionate personality, remain dominant.

  A too continuous home atmosphere checks in the woman the valuable social faculties. It checks it in the man more insidiously, through his position of easy mastery over these dependents, wife, children, servants; and through the constant catering of the whole ménage to his special tastes. If each man had a private tailor shop in his back yard he would be far more whimsical and exacting in his personal taste in clothes. Every natural tendency to self-indulgence is steadily increased by the life service of an entire wife. This having one whole woman devoted to one’s direct personal service is about as far from the cultivation of self-control as any process that could be devised.

  The man loves the woman and serves her — but he serves her through his service of the world — and she serves him direct. He can fuss and dictate as to details, he can develop all manner of notions as to bacon, or toast, or griddle cakes; the whole cuisine is his, he supports it, it is meant to please him, and under its encompassing temptation he increases in girth and weight; but not in self-control. He may be a wise, temperate, judicious man, but the home, with its disproportionate attention to personal desires, does not make him so.

  No clearer instance could be given of the effect of domestic ethics. In this one field may be shown the beneficent effects of the early home upon early man, the continued beneficent effects of what is essential in the home upon modern man; and the most evil effects of the domestic rudiments upon modern man. The differing ages and sexes held together by love, yet respecting one another’s privacy, demand of one another precisely this power of self-control. Children together, with no adults, become boisterous and unruly; adults together, with no children, become out of sympathy with childhood; the sexes, separated, tend to injurious excesses; but the true home life checks excess, develops what is lacking, harmonises all.

  What does the morbid, disproportioned, overgrown home life do? It tends to develop a domineering selfishness in man and a degrading abnegation in woman — or sometimes reverses this effect. The smooth, unconscious, all-absorbing greed which the unnaturally developed home of to-day produces in some women, is as evil a thing as life shows. Here is a human creature who has all her life been loved and cared for, sheltered, protected, defended; everything provided for her and nothing demanded of her except the exercise of her natural feminine functions, and some proficiency in the playground regulations of “society.”

  The degree of sublimated selfishness thus produced by home life is quite beyond the selfishness we so deplore in men. A man may be — often is — deplorably selfish in his home life; but he does not expect all the world to treat him with the same indulgence. He has to give as well as take in the broad, healthy, growing life of the world.

  The woman has her home-life to make her selfish, and has no world life to offset it. Men are polite to her on account of her sex — not on account of any power, any achievement, any distinctive human value, but simply because she is a woman. Her guests are necessarily polite to her. Her hosts are necessarily polite to her, and so are her fellow-guests. Her servants are necessarily polite to her. Her children also; if they are not she feels herself abused, denied a right.

  The home and its social tributaries steadily work to develop a limitless personal selfishness in which the healthy power of self-control is all unknown. One way or the other swings the pendulum; here the woman pours out her life in devotion to her husband and children; in which case she is developing selfishness in them with as much speed and efficacy as if she were their worst enemy; and here again the woman sits, plump and fair, in her padded cage, bedizening its walls with every decoration; covering her own body with costly and beautiful things; feeding herself, her family, her guests; running from meal to meal as if eating were really the main business of a human being. This is the extreme.

  Our primitive scheme requires that the entire time of the woman-who-does-her-own-work shall be spent in ministering to the physical needs of her family; and in the small minority who have other women to do it for them,
that she shall still have this ministry her main care — and shall have no others. It is this inordinate demand for the life and time of a whole woman to keep half a dozen people fed, cleaned, and waited on, which keeps up in us a degree of self-indulgence we should, by every step of social development, have long since outgrown.

  The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and mother does not ensure right nourishment — that we have shown at length; but it does ensure that every human soul thus provided for shall give far too much thought to what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be clothed. The yielding up of a woman’s life to the service of these physical needs of mankind does not develop self-control, nor its noble line of ensuing virtues — temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endurance.

  See the child growing up under this disproportionate attention; fussy, critical, capricious, always thinking of what he wants and how he wants it. The more his mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he knows no better than to help himself to the offered life. See the husband, criticising the coffee and the steak; or so enjoying and praising them that the happy wife eagerly spends more hours in preparing more dishes that John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate atmosphere. All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it is a hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly maintains a degree of personal devotion to one’s appetites which would disappear under a system of living suited to our age.

  Self-control is developed by true home life; by true family love. Family, love, unmodified by social relation, gives also the family feud; the unconscionably narrow pride of the clansman; the home life of the first century, arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us its constant contribution of first-century ethics.

  As to honour — that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive ethical sense; applied so rigidly to this, so little to that; showing so variously; “business honour,” “military honour,” “professional honour,” “the honour of a gentleman” — what is the standard of honour in the home?

  The only “honour” asked of the woman is chastity; quite a special sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in any great degree of the man.

  If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate sharply in its preferred exponent. But apart from that virtue, what sense of honour do we find in the home-bound woman? Is it to keep her word inflexibly? A woman’s privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the weaker? Would that some dream of this high grace could stand between the angry woman and the defenceless child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn eavesdropping, to regard the letter of another person as inviolate?

  The standard of honour in the home is not that of “an officer and a gentleman.” The things a decent and well-educated woman will sometimes do to her own children, do cheerfully and unblushingly, are flatly dishonourable; but she does not even know it. And the things she does outside the home, with only her home-bred sense of honour to guide her, are equally significant. To slip in front of others who are standing in line; to make engagements and break them; to even engage rooms and board, and then change her plans without letting the other party know; thus entailing absolute money loss to a perfectly innocent person, without a qualm; this is frequently done by women with a high standard of chastity; but no other sense of honour whatever.

  The home is the cradle of all the virtues, but we are in a stage of social development where we need virtues beyond the cradle size. The virtues begun at home need to come out and grow in the world as men need to do — and as woman need to do, but do not know it. The ethics of the home are good in degree. The ethics of human life are far larger and more complex.

  Our moral growth is to-day limited most seriously by the persistent maintenance in half the world of a primitive standard of domestic ethics.

  X

  DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT

  Long is the way from the primal home, with its simple child-motif, to the large and expensive house of entertainment we call home to-day. The innocent “guest-chamber” early added to the family accommodations has spread its area and widened its demands, till we find the ultra-type of millionaire mansion devoting its whole space, practically, to the occupation of guests — for even the private rooms are keyed up to a comparison with those frankly built and furnished for strangers. The kitchen, the dining-room, the pantry, the table-furniture of all sorts, are arranged in style and amplitude to meet the needs of guests. The sitting-room becomes a “parlour,” the parlour a “drawing-room” with “reception-room” addition; and then comes the still more removed “ballroom” — a remarkable apartment truly, to form part of a home. Some even go so far as to add a theatre — that most essentially public of chambers — in this culminating transformation of a home to a house of entertainment.

  From what once normal base sprang this abnormal growth? How did this place of love and intimacy, the outward form of our most tender and private relations, so change and swell to a place of artificial politeness and most superficial contact? The point of departure is not hard to find; it lies in that still visible period when hospitality was one of our chief virtues.

  Of all the evolving series of human virtues none is more easily studied in its visible relation to condition and its rapid alterations than hospitality. Moreover, though considered a virtue, it is not so intermingled with our deepest religious sanction as to be painful to discuss; we respect, but do not worship it.

  Hospitality is a quality of human life, a virtue which appears after a certain capacity for altruism is developed; not a very high degree, for we find a rigid code of hospitality among many savage tribes; and which obtains in exact proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of travelling.

  We still find its best type among the Bedouin Arabs and the Scotch Highlanders; we find it in our own land more in the country than the city, more in the thinly settled and poorly roaded south than in the more thickly settled and better roaded north; and most of all on the western frontier, where mountain and desert lie between ranch and ranch.

  To call out the most lively sense of hospitality the traveller must be weary (that means a long, hard road), and “distressed” — open to injury, if not hospitably received. To have a fresh, clean, rosy traveller drop in after half an hour’s pleasant stroll does not touch the springs of hospitality. The genuine figure to call out this virtue is the stranger, the wanderer, the pilgrim.

  Hospitality will not stand constant use. The steady visitor must be a friend; and friendship is quite a different thing from hospitality. That finds its typical instance in the old Scotch chief sheltering the hunted fugitive; and defending him against his pursuers even when told that his guest was the murderer of his son. As guest he was held sacred; he had claimed the rights of hospitality and he received them. Had he returned to make the same demand every few days, even without renewing his initial offence, it is doubtful if hospitality would have held out.

  A somewhat thin, infrequent virtue is hospitality at its heights, requiring intervals of relaxation. “Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house, lest he weary of thee and hate thee,” says the proverb of the very people where the laws of hospitality were sacred; and “the stranger within thy gates” came under the regular provision of household law.

  Hospitality became a sort of standing custom under feudalism, as part of the parental care of the Lord of the Land; and thus acquired its elements of pride and ostentation. Each nobleman owned all the land about him; the traveller had to claim shelter of him either directly or through his dependents, and the castle was the only place big enough for entertainment. The nobleman saw to it that no other person on his domain should be able to offer much hospitality. So the Castle or the Abbey had it all.

  A little of this spirit gave character to the partly danger-based southern hospitality. It was necessary to the occasional stranger on the original and legitimate grounds; it became a steady custom to the modern Lord of the Manor, none of whose subsidiary fellow-citizens had the wherewithal to feed and shelter guests. But hospitality, even in t
hat form, is not what issues cards and lays red carpet under awnings from door to curb.

  Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor to dinner — the dinner where the plates are named and numbered and the caterer ready with due complement of each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and apologise— “I’m sorry, but you must excuse me, I have to dress for dinner!” and “Why, of course! I forgot it was so late! — dear me! the Jenkinses will have come before me if I don’t hurry home!” On what ground, then, is that dinner given — why are the Jenkinses asked that night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality, is it the still sacred spirit of friendship?

  Are the people we so expensively and elaborately entertain — and who so carefully retaliate, card for card, plat for plat and dollar for dollar — are these the people whom we love? Among our many guests is an occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to come and see us when we are not entertaining!

  Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression, the drawing together that follows recognition, the manifest kinships of the outspoken soul. In friendship we discriminate, we particularise, we enjoy the touch and interchange of like characteristics, the gentle stimulus of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally, spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of a casual propinquity that gives rein to the unforced thought. More friendships are formed in the prolonged association of school-life or business life, in the intimacy of a journey together or a summer’s camping, than ever grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friendship may coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in spite of it, but is neither cause nor result of that strange process.

  What, then, is “entertainment,” to which the home is sacrificed so utterly — which is no part of fatherhood, motherhood, or childhood, of hospitality or friendship?