The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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 short-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!