A Square Deal

by Theodore Roosevelt

¶In the last analysis the welfare of the State depends absolutely on whether or not the average family, the average man and woman, and their children, represent the kind of citizenship for the foundation of a great Nation, and if we fail to appreciate this we fail to appreciate the root morality upon which all healthy civilization is based.

¶No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage, common-sense, and decency; unless he works hard and is willing at need to fight hard, and unless the average woman is a good wife, a good mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of womanhood, able and willing to bear and to bring up as they should be brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind and character, and numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.

¶¶There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the home-maker, the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty of the woman is to be the helpmeet, the housewife, the mother.

¶The woman should have ample educational advantages; but save in exceptional cases the man must be, and the woman need not be, and generally ought not to be, trained for a life long career as the family breadwinner; and, therefore, after a certain point the training of the two must normally be different because the duties of the two are normally different.

¶This does not mean inequality of function, but it does mean that normally there must be dissimilarity of function. On the whole, I think the duty of the woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more honorable of the two; on the whole I respect the woman who does her duty even more than I respect the man who does his.

¶¶No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the day but often every hour of the night. She may have to get up night after night to take care of a sick child, and yet must by day continue to do all her household duties as well; and if the family means are scant she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking her whole brood of children with her. The birth-pangs make all men the debtors of all women.

¶Above all our sympathy and regard are due to the struggling wives among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the plain people, and whom he so loved and trusted; for the lives of these women are often led on the lonely heights of quiet, self-sacrificing heroism.

¶Just as the happiest and most honorable and most useful task that can be set any man is to earn enough for the support of his wife and family, for the bringing up and starting in life of his children, so the most important, the most honorable and desirable task which can be set any woman is to be a good and wise mother in a home marked by self-respect and mutual forbearance, by willingness to perform duty, and by refusal to sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails effort and self-sacrifice.

¶Of course there are exceptional men and exceptional women who can do and ought to do more than this, who can lead and ought to lead great careers of outside usefulness in addition to—not as a substitute for—their home work; but I am not speaking of exceptions; I am speaking of the primary duties. I am speaking of the average citizens, the average men and women who make up the Nation.

¶No mother has an easy time, and most mothers have very hard times; and yet what true mother would barter her experience of joy and sorrow in exchange for a life of cold selfishness, which insists upon perpetual amusement and the avoidance of care, and which often finds its fit dwelling place in some flat designed to furnish with the least possible expenditure of effort the maximum of comfort and of luxury, but in which there is literally no place for children?