The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The latest of our home-ideas, personal convenience and expression, are themselves resultant from larger development of personality, and lead out necessarily. The accumulating power of individuality developed in large social processes by the male, is inherited by the female; she, still confined to the home, begins to fill and overfill it with the effort at individual expression, and must sooner or later come out to find the only normal field for highly specialised human power—the world.

Thus we may be encouraged in our study of domestic evolution. The forces and sentiments originating in the home have long since worked out to large social processes. We have gone far on our way toward making the world our home. What most impedes our further progress is the persistent retention of certain lines of industry within domestic limits, and the still more persistent retention of certain lines of home feelings and ideas. Even here, in the deepest, oldest, darkest, slowest place in all man's mind, the light of science, the stir of progress, is penetrating. The world does move—and so does the home.

III
DOMESTIC MYTHOLOGY

There is a school of myths connected with the home, more tenacious in their hold on the popular mind than even religious beliefs. Of all current superstitions none are deeper rooted, none so sensitive to the touch, so acutely painful in removal. We have lived to see nations outgrow some early beliefs, but others are still left us to study, in their long slow processes of decay. Belief in "the divine right of kings," for instance, is practically outgrown in America; and yet, given a king,—or even a king's brother,—and we show how much of the feeling remains in our minds, disclaim as we may the idea. Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

Wherever the pouring stream of social progress has had little influence,—in remote rural regions, hidden valleys, and neglected coasts,—we find still in active force some of the earliest myths. They may change their names as new religions take the place of old, Santa Claus and St. Valentine holding sway in place of forgotten deities of dim antiquity, but the festival or custom embodied is the same that was enjoyed by those most primitive ancestors. Of all hidden valleys none has so successfully avoided discovery as the Home. Church and State might change as they would—as they must; science changed, art changed, business changed, all human functions changed and grew save those of the home. Every man's home was his castle, and there he maintained as far as possible the facts and fancies of the place, unaltered from century to century.

The facts have been too many for him. The domestic hearth, with its undying flame, has given way to the gilded pipes of the steam heater and the flickering evanescence of the gas range. But the sentiment about the domestic hearth is still in play. The original necessity for the ceaseless presence of the woman to maintain that altar fire—and it was an altar fire in very truth at one period—has passed with the means of prompt ignition; the matchbox has freed the housewife from that incessant service, but the feeling that women should stay at home is with us yet.

The time when all men were enemies, when out-of-doors was one promiscuous battlefield, when home, well fortified, was the only place on earth where a man could rest in peace, is past, long past. But the feeling that home is more secure and protective than anywhere else is not outgrown.

So we have quite a list of traditional sentiments connected with home life well worth our study; not only for their interest as archaeological relics, but because of their positive injury to the life of to-day, and in the hope that a fuller knowledge will lead to sturdy action. So far we have but received and transmitted this group of myths, handed down from the dim past; we continue to hand them down in the original package, never looking to see if they are so; if we, with our twentieth-century brains really believe them.

A resentful shiver runs through the reader at the suggestion of such an examination. "What! Scrutinise the home, that sacred institution, and even question it? Sacrilegious!" This very feeling proves the frail and threadbare condition of this group of ideas. Good healthy young ideas can meet daylight and be handled, but very old and feeble ones, that have not been touched for centuries, naturally dread inspection, and no wonder—they seldom survive it.

Let us begin with one especially dominant domestic myth, that fondly cherished popular idea—"the privacy of the home." In the home who has any privacy? Privacy means the decent seclusion of the individual, the right to do what one likes unwatched, uncriticised, unhindered. Neither father, mother, nor child has this right at home. The young man setting up in "chambers," the young woman in college room or studio, at last they realise what privacy is, at last they have the right to be alone. The home does provide some privacy for the family as a lump—but it remains a lump—there is no privacy for the individual. When homes and families began this was enough, people were simple, unspecialised, their tastes and wishes were similar; it is not enough to-day.