The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This young woman is in no way attached to the family. A family is connected by the ties of sex, by marriage and heredity, with occasional cases of adoption. If the servant is not a relative, or adopted, she does not belong to the family. She has left her father's family, and looks forward to her husband's, meanwhile as an aid to the first or a means to the latter, she serves ours. She is of the lower classes because no others will do this work. She is ignorant because, if she were intelligent, she would not do it—does not do it; the well-schooled, well-trained young woman much prefers other work. So we find household industry in that tenth of our homes not served by the housewife, is in the hands of ignorant and inferior young women, under conditions of constant change.

The position of the lady of the house, as this procession of untrained, half-trained, ill-trained, or at least otherwise-trained young women march through her domain, is like that of the sergeant of companies of raw recruits. She "lifts 'em—lifts 'em—lifts 'em"—but there is never any "charge that wins the day."

Household industry we must constantly remember never rises to the level of a regular trade. It is service—not "skilled labour." What is done there is done under no broad light of public improvement, but is merely catering to the personal tastes and habits, whims and fancies of one family. The lady of the house is by no means a captain of industry. She is not a trainer and governor of able subordinates, like the mate of a ship or the manager of a hotel. Her position is not one of power, but of helplessness. She has to be done for and waited on. Whatever maternal instinct may achieve at first hand in the woman-who-does-her-own-work, it does not make competent instructors. When the lady of the house's husband gets rich enough she hires a house-keeper to engage, discharge, train, and manage the housemaids.

Here and there we do find an efficient lady of the house who can do wonders even with this stream of transient incapacity, but the prominence of the servant-question proves her rarity. If all ladies of houses could bring order out of such chaos, could meet constant needs by transient means, the subtleties of refined tastes by the inefficiencies of unskilled labour, then nothing more need be said. But the thing cannot be done. The average house-mistress is not a servant-charmer and the average housemaid is necessarily incapable. This is what should be squarely faced and acknowledged. The kind of work that needs to be done to keep a modern home healthy, comfortable, and refined, cannot be done—can never be done—by this office-boy grade of labour. Because home industry is home industry, because it has been left aborted in the darkness of private life while other industries have grown so broad and high in the light of public life, we have utterly failed to recognise its true value.

These industries, so long neglected and misused, are of supreme importance. The two main ones—the preparation of food and the care of children—can hardly be over-estimated in value to the race. On the one the health of the world mainly depends, yes, its very life. On the other the progress of the world depends, and that is more than life. That these two great social functions should be left contentedly to the hands of absolutely the lowest grade of labour in our civilisation is astounding. It is the lowest grade of labour not because it is performed by the lowest class of labour—humanity can grow to splendid heights from that beginning, and does so every day; but it is the lowest because it is carried on in the home.

The conditions of home industry as practised by either housewife or housemaid are hopelessly restrictive. They are, as we have seen, the low standard of average capacity; the element of sex-tendency; the isolation and the unspecialised nature of the work. In two of these conditions the housemaid gains on the housewife. She is partly out of the sex-tendency status and partly into the contract relation; hence the patient, submissive, conservative influence is lightened. In families of greater affluence there is some specialisation; we have varieties in housemaid; cookmaid, scullerymaid, nursemaid, chambermaid, parlourmaid,—as many as we can afford; and in such families we find such elevation of home-industry as is possible; marred, however, by serious limitations.

Household industry is a world question; and in no way to be answered by a solution only possible of application to one family in a thousand. It is a question of our time and the future, and not met by a solution which consists in maintaining an elaborate archaism. The proper feeding of the world to-day is no more to be guaranteed by one millionaire's French cook, than was the health of the Roman world by one patrician's Greek doctor.

Human needs, in remote low stages of social development, were met by privately owned labourers. As late as the Middle Ages the great lord had in hismenie every kind of functionary to minister to his wants; not only his private servants of the modern kind, with butlers and sutlers and pantlers in every degree; but his armourer, his tailor, his minstrel, and his fool.

The feudal lord kept a fool to amuse him, whereas we go to the theatre. He kept a cook to feed him—and we do it yet. He kept a poet to celebrate his deeds and touch his emotions. We have made poetry the highest class in literature, and literature the world's widest art—by setting the poet free.

To work for the world at large is necessary to the development of the work. A private poet is necessarily ignoble. So is a private cook. The iron limitations of household service are immutable—world service has none. To cater to the whims of one master lowers both parties concerned. To study the needs of humanity and minister to them is the line of social progress.