"To talk of 'men born free' is a mere phrase. There are none such. Marriages, the relations of man and woman, have ruined the whole race and set on all the brand of slavery."[26]
In the same case is what we may call the stage-setting of the monogamous family, the home. The home ceases to be regarded as the sacred and eternal Palladium of society. It, too, is destined to change, if not to disappear. "With the transformation of the means of production into collective property," Engels writes, "the private household changes to a social industry. The care and education of children becomes a public matter."[27]
This does not deny the splendid role that the Home has played in the history of the last three centuries. Many an English and American home to-day still merits even such an offensively pretentious epithet as "Palladium." What morals our people have known and practised they have learned and been drilled in in the homes. That these morals should have been warped by a class-bias was inevitable. A home, itself the product of a society divided into classes, could not teach anything but a class-morality. A purely social morality (if morality be the proper name for the highest conduct in a classless society) is even yet impossible.
But, much as we owe to the home, (I pity the reader who can recall his or her early home life with dry eyes), the Nihilism of Socialism tells us the day of the home is drawing to its close. So it may be as well for us to consider for a moment the bad side of the home as we know it to-day. It may be that when we have done so, we shall be able to anticipate its passing with greater equanimity.
At this late day—when seventeen years have rolled by since Ibsen's "The Doll's House" was first introduced to an English-speaking audience at the Novelty Theatre in London—it is surely not necessary to dwell upon the dwarfing and stifling effects upon women of even "happy" homes. In the brilliant preface to "Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant," Bernard Shaw, referring to middle-class home life, speaks of "the normal English way being to sit in separate families in separate rooms in separate houses, each person silently occupied with a book, a paper, or a game of halma, cut off equally from the blessings of society and solitude." "The result," he continues, "is that you may make the acquaintance of a thousand streets of middle-class English families without coming on a trace of any consciousness of citizenship, or any artistic cultivation of the senses."
In the following paragraph he adds:
"In proportion as this horrible domestic institution is broken up by the active social circulation of the upper classes in their own orbit, or its stagnant isolation made impossible by the overcrowding of the working classes, manners improve enormously. In the middle classes themselves the revolt of a single clever daughter (nobody has yet done justice to the modern clever Englishwoman's loathing of the very word 'home'), and her insistence on qualifying herself for an independent working life, humanizes her whole family in an astonishingly short time; and the formation of a habit of going to the suburban theatre once a week, or to the Monday Popular Concerts, or both, very perceptibly ameliorates its manners. But none of these breaches in the Englishman's castle-house can be made without a cannonade of books and pianoforte music. The books and music cannot be kept out, because they alone can make the hideous boredom of the hearth bearable. If its victims may not live real lives, they may at least read about imaginary ones, and perhaps learn from them to doubt whether a class that not only submits to home life, but actually values itself on it, is really a class worth belonging to. For the sake of the unhappy prisoners of the home, then, let my plays be printed as well as acted."
A concrete picture may give us a better idea of what Shaw means when he calls women "the unhappy prisoners of the home." In that magnificent scene in the third act of "Candida," after Morell has called on Candida to choose between him and the poet, Marchbanks, Candida gives us a vivid glimpse of what her home life had been, in this speech, addressed to Marchbanks, and, in reading it, remember that Morell was "a good husband" and that Candida loved him.