What now frequently diminishes externally the value even of good homes, is that they are arranged to promote a kind of “aspiration,” diametrically opposed to genuine life-enhancement, whose first condition is that the home in a material respect should bear a relation to the health and comfort of its own members, not the habits of life of outsiders. What again detracts in a spiritual respect from even the very best homes is that their members still retain the family rudeness and want of consideration of older days, a rudeness which—owing to the new sensitiveness, the deeper strength of personal consciousness—causes even from childhood daily pain that, as infallibly as the grosser faults of bad homes, poisons air and food.
People still allow themselves within the home circle a scornfulness of each other’s peculiarities, a silencing of each other’s opinions, a prying into each other’s secrets, a betrayal of each other’s confidences, which in daily life place the members of the circle on a footing of armed neutrality. In good homes, affection, and in inferior ones fear, stops them from breaking out into open war; for in both cases all know each other’s vulnerable spots so well, that they are perfectly well aware how severe the conflict would be for themselves as well as for the others.
But so long as homes, even the best ones, have these faults, institutions must exhibit similar results—since both will be formed of the same human material. The institutions, on the other hand, would not possess the advantages which in the case of homes outweigh the faults. These faults may be gradually diminished by a higher spiritual culture. But nothing could compensate for what mankind would lose by the abolition of the home.
The conclusion is thus that—however differently the conflict must be resolved in exceptional cases between woman’s personal claims and her motherly feelings—in the main those women who, in order to serve humanity, renounce motherhood or its cares, are conducting themselves like a warrior who should prepare for the battle of the morrow by opening his veins the evening before.
CHAPTER VII
COLLECTIVE MOTHERLINESS
At a Scandinavian meeting on the woman’s question, a cantata was sung which proclaimed that the human race under the supremacy of man had stumbled in darkness and crime. But the race was now to be newly born from the soul of woman, the sunrise would scatter the darkness of night, and the advent of the Messiah was certain.
That men during the period of their ascendancy had nevertheless produced a few trifles—for example, religions and laws, sciences and arts, discoveries and inventions—that the darkness of their night was thus at least illumined by a Milky Way, all this her majesty Woman was pleased to forget.
If man were sufficiently vindictive to set about finding out what woman has accomplished in the course of ages to justify her towering self-esteem—or in other words to justify her challenging the comparison with these works of man—then he would find only one thing.