The home: its work and influence

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests—and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more.

The home-bred brain of the woman continually puzzles and baffles the world-bred brain of the man; and from the beginning of their association it has an effect upon him. In childhood even he sees his sister serving in the home functions far more than he is required to do; she is taught to "clean up" where he is not; different values are assigned to the same act in boy or girl, and he is steadily influenced by it. The first effect of the home on the boy is seen very young in his contempt for girls, and girls' play or work. When, after a period of separation wherein he has consorted as far as possible only with boys and men, he is again drawn towards the girl on lines of sex-attraction, a barrier has risen between them which is never wholly removed.

He has immense areas of experience utterly unknown to her. His words and acts in a given case are modified by a thousand memories and knowledges which she has not; so word and act differ sharply, though the immediate exciting cause be the same. The very terms they use have different weight and meaning; the man must pick and choose and adopt a different speech in talking to a woman. He loves, he admires, he venerates; and from this attitude considering all her foolishness and ignorance as feminine and therefore charming, he is thus taught to worship ignoble things.

Charles Reade in his "Peg Woffington" describes that strong, brave, intelligent, and most charming woman as starting and screaming at a very distant rat—and her lover being therefore more strongly attracted to her. Every sign of weakness, timidity, inability to understand and do, is deemed feminine and admired. Yet we all know that the best love is that which exalts, that which truly respects as well as fondly enjoys.

The smallness of the home-bound woman is not so injurious as the still smaller nature of the harem-bound, by as much as the home is larger and freer than the harem; but just as harem women limit man's growth, so do home women in slighter degree. The influence of women upon men is enormous. The home-bound mother limits the child and boy; the home-bound girl limits the youth; and the home-bound wife keeps up the pressure for life. It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating; but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed, and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.

The woman is narrowed by the home and the man is narrowed by the woman. In proportion as man is great, as his interests are world-wide and his abilities high, is he injured by constant contact with a smaller mind. The more ordinary man feels it less, being himself nearer to the domestic plane of thought and action; but the belittling effect is there all the time.

If the boy's mother commanded as wide a range of action as his father; if her work were something to honour and emulate as well as her dear self something to love, the boy would never learn to use that bitter term "only mother." The father is a soldier, and the boy admires and longs to follow in great deeds. The father is a captain of industry—a skilled tradesman, a good physician—the boy has the father to love, and the work to admire as well. The father is something to other people, as well as all in all to him; and the boy has a new respect for him, seeing him in the social relation as well as the domestic. But his mother he sees only in the domestic relation and is early taught by the father himself, that he is "to take care of her!" Think of it! Teaching a child that he is to take care of his mother! A full-grown able-bodied woman will take a child of ten out with her at night—"to protect her!"

The exquisite absurdity of this position has no comparison or parallel. Think of a cow protected by a calf! A bear by a cub—a cat by a kitten! A tall, swift mare by a lanky colt! An alert, sharp-toothed collie by a tumbling, fat-pawed pup! How can a boy respect a thing that he, a child, can take care of! He can love, and does. He can take care of, and does. He can later on support, and does; and even—this in a recent instance of this sublime monstrosity—he can "give away" his own mother in marriage! No wonder he so soon learns to say "only mother!" When she is not only mother, but mother and much besides, a real human being, usefully exercising her human faculties, the boy will make a better man.

Again, if his sister shared every freedom and advantage of childhood; were equally educated, not only in school, but in play, and in the ever-stimulating experiences of daily life, he would feel far differently toward her.

See two children on a journey, the mother holding fast to the girl from beginning to end, only the car seat and window for her; the boy on the steps, the platform, running about the station, asking questions of brakeman and engineer, learning all the time. The boy gets five times as much out of life as the girl, and he knows it. It is not long before he is ashamed to play with girls, and one cannot blame him.