“How I wish I could see more of you!” we sigh to the few real friends. Your friend may be at the same dinner — taking out someone else, or, even taking you out — in equal touch with neighbours at either side and eyes opposing. Your friend may be at the same dance — piously keeping step with many another; at the same reception, the same tea, the same luncheon — but you do not meet. As the “society” hand is gloved that there be no touching of real flesh and blood, so is the society soul dressed and defended for the fray in smooth phrase and glossy smile — a well-oiled system, without which the ceaseless press and friction would wear us raw, but within which we do anything but “meet.”
For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the bringing out of the best there is in us, for the maintenance of a pure and restful home-life and the development of an inspiring and fruitful social life, we need some other medium of association than domestic entertainments. And we are rapidly finding it. The woman’s club is a most healthy field of contact, and the woman’s clubhouse offers a legitimate common ground for large gatherings.
The increasing number of women in regular business life alters the whole position. The business woman has her wider range of contact during the day, and is glad to rest and be alone with her family at night. If she desires to go out, it is to see real friends, or to some place of real amusement. When all women are honestly at work the “calling habit” will disappear perforce, with all its waste and dissimulation.
Given a healthy active life of true social usefulness for all women, and given a full accommodation of public rooms for public gatherings, and the whole thing takes care of itself. The enormous demand for association will be met legitimately, and the satisfied soul will gladly return from that vast field of social life to the restful quiet, the loving intimacy, the genuineness of home-life, with its constant possibilities of real hospitality and the blessings of true friendship.
XI
THE LADY OF THE HOUSE
The effect of the house upon women is as important as might be expected of one continuous environment upon any living creature. The house varies with the varying power and preference of the owner; but to a house of some sort the woman has been confined for a period as long as history. This confinement is not to be considered as an arbitrary imprisonment under personal cruelty, but as a position demanded by public opinion, sanctioned by religion, and enforced by law.
In the comparative freedom to “walk abroad” of our present-day civilised women, we too quickly forget the conditions immediately behind us, when even the marketing for the household was done by men, and the conditions still with us for many millions of women in many countries who are house-bound for life.
To briefly recount the situation, we find in the pre-human home the mother sharing the hole or nest with her young, also sharing the outside task of getting food for them. In some species the father assists the mother, he never does it all. In other cases the father is no assistance, even a danger, seeking in cannibal infanticide to eat his own young; the mother in this case must feed and defend the young, as well as feed herself, and so must leave home at frequent intervals.
The common cat is an instance of this. She is found happily nursing the kittens in her hidden nest among the hay; but you often find the kittens alone while the mother goes mousing, and a contributary Thomas you do not find.
As we have before seen, our longer period of infancy and its overlapping continuity, a possible series of babies lasting twenty years or so, demanded a permanent home; and so long as the mother had sole charge of this progressive infant party she must needs be there to attend to her maternal duties. This condition is what we have in mind, or think we have in mind, when maintaining the duty of women to stay at home.
Wherever woman’s labour is still demanded, as among all savages, in the peasant classes where women work in the fields, and in our own recent condition of slavery, either the mother takes her baby with her, or a group of babies are cared for by one woman while the rest are at work. Again, among our higher classes, almost the first step of increasing wealth is to depute to a nurse the mother’s care, in order that she may be free from this too exacting claim. The nurse is a figure utterly unknown to animals, save in the collective creatures, like the bee and ant; a deputy-mother, introduced by us at a very early period. But this sharing of the mother’s duties has not freed the woman from the house, because of quite another element in our human life. This is the custom of ownership in women.
The animal mother is held by love, by “instinct” only; the human mother has been for endless centuries a possession of the father. In his pride and joy of possession, and in his fear lest some other man annex his treasure, he has boxed up his women as he did his jewels, and any attempt at personal freedom on their part he considered a revolt from marital allegiance.
The extreme of this feeling results in the harem-system, and the crippled ladies of China; wherein we find the women held to the house, not by their own maternal ties, of which we talk much but in which we place small confidence, but by absolute force.
This condition modifies steadily with the advance of democratic civilisation, but the mental habit based upon it remains with us. The general opinion that a woman should be in the home is found so lately expressed as in the works of our present philosopher, Mr. Dooley. In his “Expert Evidence” he says, “What the coort ought to ‘ve done was to call him up and say ‘Lootgert, where’s your good woman?’ If Lootgert cudden’t tell, he ought to be hanged on gineral principles; f’r a man must keep his wife around the house, and when she isn’t there it shows he’s a poor provider.”
The extent and depth of this feeling is well shown by a mass of popular proverbs, often quoted in this connection, such as “A woman should leave her house three times — when she is christened, when she is married, and when she is buried” (even then she only leaves it to go to church), or again, “The woman, the cat, and the chimney should never leave the house.” So absolute is this connection in our minds that numbers of current phrases express it, the Housewife — Hausfrau, and the one chosen to head this chapter — The Lady of the House.
Now what has this age-long combination done to the woman, to the mother and moulder of human character; what sort of lady is the product of the house?
Let us examine the physical results first. There is no doubt that we have been whitened and softened by our houses. The sun darkens, the shade pales. In the house has grown the delicate beauty we admire, but are we right in so admiring?
The highest beauty the world has yet known was bred by the sun-loving Athenians. Their women were home-bound, but their men raced and wrestled in the open air. No argument need be wasted to prove that air and sun and outdoor exercise are essential to health, and that health is essential to beauty. If we admire weakness and pallor, it by no means shows those qualities to be good; we can admire deformity itself, if we are taught to.
Without any reference to cause or necessity, it may be readily seen that absolute confinement to the house must have exactly the same effect on women that it would on men, and that effect is injurious to the health and vigour of the race. It is possible by continuous outdoor training of the boys and men to counteract the ill effect of the indoor lives of women; but why saddle the race with difficulties? Why not give our children strong bodies and constitutions from both sides?
The rapid and increasing spread of physical culture in modern life is helping mend the low conditions of human development; but the man still has the advantage.
This was most convincingly shown by the two statues made by Dr. Sargent for the World’s Fair of 1893 from an extended series of measurements of college boys and girls. Thousands and thousands of specimens of our young manhood and young womanhood were carefully measured, and there stand the two white figures to show how we compare in beauty — the men and women of our time.
The figure of the man is far and away more beautiful than that of the woman. It is better proportioned as a whole; she is too s
hort-legged, too long-waisted, too narrow-chested. It is better knit, more strongly and accurately “set up.” She does not hang together well at all — the lines of connection are weak and wavering, and in especial does she lack any power and grace in the main area, the body itself, the torso. There is the undeveloped chest and the over-developed hips; and between them, instead of a beautifully modelled trunk, mere shapeless tissues, crying mutely for the arbitrary shape they are accustomed to put on outside! We are softer and whiter for our long housing; but not more truly beautiful.
The artist seeks his models from the stately burden-bearing, sun-browned women of Italy; strong creatures, human as well as feminine. The house life, with its shade, its foul air, its overheated steaminess, its innumerable tiring small activities, and its lack of any of those fine full exercises which built the proportions of the Greeks, has not benefited the body of the lady thereof; and in injuring her has injured all mankind, her children.
How of her mind? How has the mental growth of the race been affected by the housing of women? Apply the question to men. Think for a moment of the mental condition of humanity, if men too had each and every one stayed always in the home. The results are easy to picture. No enlargement of industry, only personal hand-to-mouth labour: not a trade, not a craft, not a craftsman on earth; no enlargement of exchange and commerce, only the products of one’s own field, if the house-bound were that much free: no market, local, national, or international; no merchant in the world.
No transportation, that at once; no roads — why roads if all men stayed at home? No education — even the child must leave home to go to school; no art, save the squaw-art of personal decoration of one’s own handmade things. No travel, of course, and so no growth of any human ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and peace. In short, no human life at all — if men, all men, had always stayed at home. Merely the life of a self-maintained family — the very lowest type, the type we find most nearly approached by the remote isolated households of the “poor whites,” of the South. Even they have some of the implements and advantages of civilisation, they are not utterly cut off.
The growth of the world has followed the widening lives of men, outside the home. The specialised trade, with its modification of character; the surplus production and every widening range of trade and commerce; the steadily increasing power of distribution, and transportation, with its increased area, ease, and speed; the ensuing increase in travel now so general and continuous; and following that the increase in our knowledge and love of one another; all — all that makes for civilisation, for progress, for the growth of humanity up and on toward the race ideal — takes place outside the home. This is what has been denied to the lady of the house — merely all human life!
Some human life she must needs partake of by the law of heredity, sharing in the growth of the race through the father; and some she has also shared through contact with the man in such time as he was with her in the house, to such a degree as he was willing and able to share his experience. Also her condition has been steadily ameliorated, as he, growing ever broader and wiser by his human relationships, brought wisdom and justice and larger love into his family relationship. But the gain came from without, and filtered down to the woman in most niggardly fashion.
Literature was a great world-art for centuries and centuries before women were allowed to read — to say nothing of write! It is not long since the opinion was held that, if women were allowed to write, they would but write love letters! In our last century, in civilised Christian England, Harriet Martineau and Jane Austen covered their writing with their sewing when visitors came in; writing was “unwomanly!”
The very greatest of our human gains we have been the slowest to share with woman: education and democracy.
We have allowed them religion in a sense — as we have allowed them medicine — to take; not to give! They might have a priest as they might have a doctor, but on no account be one! Religion was for man to preach — and woman to practise.
In some churches, very recently, we are at last permitting women to hold equal place with men in what they deem to be the special service of God, but it is not yet common. Her extra-domestic education has been won within a lifetime; and there are still extant many to speak and write against it, even in the Universities — those men of Mezozoic minds! And her place as active participant in democratic government is still denied by an immense majority, on the ground — the same old underlying ground — that it would take her from the house! Here, clear and strong, stands out that ancient theory, that the very existence of womanhood depends on staying in the house.
We have seen what has been denied to woman by absence from the world; what do we find bestowed upon her by the ceaseless, enclosing presence of the house? How does staying in one’s own house all one’s life affect the mind? We cannot ask this question of a man, for no man has ever done it except a congenital invalid. Nothing short of paralysis will keep a man in the house. He would as soon spend his life in petticoats, they are both part of the feminine environment — no part of his. He will come home at night to sleep, at such hours as suit him. He likes to eat at home, and brings his friends to see the domestic group — house, wife, and children; all, things to be fond and proud of, things a man wishes to own and maintain properly. But for work or play, out he goes to his true companions — men, full-grown human creatures who understand each other; in his true place — the world, our human medium.
The woman, with such temporary excursions as our modern customs permit, works, plays, rests, does all things in her house, or in some neighbouring house — the same grade of environment. The home atmosphere is hers from birth to death. That this custom is rapidly changing I gladly admit. The women of our country and our time are marching out of the home to their daily work by millions, only to return to them at night with redoubled affection; but there are more millions far, many more millions, who are still housewives or ladies of houses.
The first result is a sort of mental myopia. Looking always at things too near, the lens expands, the focus shortens, the objects within range are all too large, and nothing else is seen clearly. To spend your whole time in attending to your own affairs in your own home inevitably restricts the mental vision; inevitably causes those same personal affairs to seem larger to you than others’ personal affairs or the affairs of the nation.
This is a general sweeping consequence of being house-bound; and it is a heavily opposing influence to all human progress. The little-mindedness of the house-lady is not a distinction of sex. It is in no essential way a feminine distinction, but merely associatively feminine in that only women are confined to houses.
A larger range of interest and care instantly gives a resultant largeness of mind, in women as well as men. Such free great lives as have been here and there attained by women show the same broad human characteristics as similar lives of men. It can never be too frequently insisted upon, at least not in our beclouded time, that the whole area of human life is outside of, and irrelevant to, the distinctions of sex. Race characteristics belong in equal measure to either sex, and the misfortune of the house-bound woman is that she is denied time, place, and opportunity to develop those characteristics. She is feminine, more than enough, as man is masculine more than enough; but she is not human as he is human. The house-life does not bring out our humanness, for all the distinctive lines of human progress lie outside.
In the mind of the lady of the house is an arrangement of fact and feeling, which is untrue because it is disproportionate. The first tendency of the incessant home life is to exaggerate personality. The home is necessarily a hotbed of personal feeling. There love grows intense and often morbid; there any little irritation frets and wears in the constant pressure like a stone in one’s shoe. The more isolated the home, the more cut off from the healthy movement of social progress, as in the lonely farmhouses of New England, the more we find those intense eccentric characters such as Mary E. Wilkins so perfectly portrays. The main area of
the mind being occupied with a few people and their affairs, a tendency to monomania appears. The solitary farmer is least able to escape this domestic pressure, and therefore we find these pathological conditions of home life most in scattered farms.
Human creatures, to keep healthy, must mingle with one another. The house-bound woman cannot; therefore she does not maintain a vigorous and growing mind. Such contact as she has is mainly through church opportunities; and along all such lines as are open to her she eagerly flocks, finding great relief therein. But compare the interchange between a group of house-ladies, and a corresponding group of men — their husbands perhaps. Each of these men, touching the world through a different trade, has an area of his own; from which he can bring a new outlook to the others. Even if all are farmers, in which case there is much less breadth and stimulus in their intercourse, they still have some connection with the moving world. They seek to meet at some outside point, the store, the blacksmith’s shop, the railroad station, the post-office; the social hunger appeasing itself as best it may with such scraps of the general social activities as fall to it. But the women, coming together, have nothing to bring each other but personalities. Some slight variation in each case perhaps, a little difference in receipts for sponge-cake, cures for measles, patterns for clothes, or stitches for fancy-work. (Oh, poor, poor lives! where fancy has no work but in stitches, and no play at all!)
The more extended and well-supplied house merely gives its lady a more extended supply of topics of the same nature. She may discuss candle-shades instead of bed-quilts, “entrées” instead of “emptin’s”; ferns for the table instead of “yarbs” for the garret; but the distinction is not vital. It is still the lady prattling of her circumambient house, as snails might (possibly do!) dilate upon the merits of their ever-present shells. The limitations of the house as an area for a human life are most baldly dreary and crippling in the lower grades, the great majority of cases, where the housewife toils, not yet become the lady of the house. Here you see grinding work, and endless grey monotony. Here are premature age, wasting disease, and early death. If a series of photographs could be made of the working housewives in our country districts, with some personal account of the “poor health” which is the main topic of their infrequent talk; we should get a vivid idea of the condition of this grade of house-bound life.
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 223