The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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?