Concerning Children

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The respect and care for aged persons, which is so distinguishing a mark of advanced civilisation, is due to two things: first, the prolonged serviceability of parents; and, second, the social relation which allows of usefulness to even the very old. In an early savage tribe the elderly parent is of no special value to the newly matured young, and the tribal service has more use for juvenile warriors than for the ancient ones: wherefore the old folk are of small account, and do not meet much encouragement to prolonged living. But with us, though the child is grown quite sufficiently to hunt and fight and reproduce his kind, he is not yet properly equipped for the social service. He needs more years yet of parental assistance while he accumulates knowledge in his profession or skill in his trade.

Therefore, parentage is a longer and more elaborate operation with us than with lower races, animal or human, and the parent consequently more appreciated. This position is fondly taken advantage of by the designing aged, oft-times with a pious belief in their righteous ground which is most convincing.

Because the human parent is of far more service to the young than earlier parents, therefore our elders calmly assume that it is the duty of the young to provide for and serve them,—not only to render them natural assistance when real incapacity comes, but to alter the course of their young and useful lives to suit the wishes of the old. Among poor and degraded classes we see children early set to work for the parents instead of parents working for the children,—a position as unnatural as for a hen to eat eggs. Life is not a short circle, a patent self-feeder. The business of the hen is to hatch the egg, and of the egg to grow to another and different hen,—not to turn round and sacrificially nourish the previous fowl.

The duty of the parent is a deep-seated, natural law. Without the parent's care of the child, no race, no life. The duty of the child to the parent was largely invented by parents, from motives of natural self-interest, and has been so long sanctioned and practised that we look on without a shudder and see a healthy middle-aged mother calmly swallowing the life of her growing daughter. A girl is twenty-one. She has been properly reared by her mother, whom we will suppose to be a widow. Being twenty-one, the girl is old enough to begin to live her own life, and naturally wishes to. I do not speak of marrying,—that is generally allowed,—but of so studying and working as to develope a wide, useful life of her own in case she does not marry.

"Not so," says her mother. "Your duty is to stay with me. I need you."

Now the mother is not bed-ridden. She is, we will say, an able-bodied woman of forty-five or fifty. She could easily occupy herself in one of several trades; but, being in possession of a house and a tiny income, she "does not have to work." She prefers to live in that house, on that income, and have her daughter live with her. The daughter prefers to go to New York, and study music or art or dressmaking, whatever she is fit for. But here is her dear mother claiming her presence at home as a duty; and she gives it. She does her duty, living there with her mother in the capacity of—of what? In no capacity at all. Fancy a young man living at home in the capacity of a "son," with no better occupation than dusting the parlour and arranging flowers! In course of time the mother dies. The daughter has lost her position as "a daughter," and has no other place in life. She has never been allowed to form part of the living organism of society, and remains a withered offshoot, weak and fruitless.

These cases are common enough. But consider from another point of view the serene presumption of the elder woman. Because she had done—so far—her duty by the child that was, she now claims a continuous hold on the grown woman and a return for her services.

In still earlier days this claim was made even more strenuously. The child awe-fully addressed the father as "author of my being," and was supposed to "owe" him everything. The child does not owe the parent. Parental duty is not a loan. It is the never-ending gift of nature,—an unbroken, outpouring river of love and labour from the earliest beginnings of life. The child, while a child, has also some duty to the parent; but even there it is reflex, and based in last analysis on the child's advantage.

Meanwhile it is a poor parent who cannot win the affection and command the respect of the young creature growing up so near, so that a beautiful relation shall be established between them for the rest of life. This love and honest admiration, this affectionate friendliness, and all the ties of long association would naturally prompt the child to desire the society of the parent, and, of course, to provide for illness and old age; but that is a very different position from the one taken by an able-bodied, middle-aged parent demanding the surrender of a young life.

Parentage is not a profession with a sort of mutual insurance return to it. The claim that humanity is born saddled with this retroactive obligation requires more convincing proof than has yet been offered.