Someone says that the world’s progress doesn’t concern her off in her little corner—that she has her work to do and that’s all there is to it. Well, perhaps it doesn’t in one way of speaking, but her life is both less happy and less useful than if she let the world’s progress concern her a little. She says it wouldn’t help her any in making biscuit or sweeping the floor if she did know some of the stories of history, how the revolution in Russia is getting on, about the great writers and painters, about anything outside her work. Well, it wouldn’t—in a way. The biscuits wouldn’t be any better nor the floor any cleaner. But any one that isn’t half-witted can learn to sweep a floor or even to bake biscuits. You are, or ought to be, more than a cook and a housemaid. You are a home-maker, and though good biscuits and clean floors are very necessary things in any house, they are not enough to make a home out of it. In a true home there must be mental and moral, as well as physical, comfort. You are still something more. You are a woman and a free human being. You have your duties to other people, as everyone has, but, like everyone, you have a duty to yourself. You were given a brain and a soul, as well as a body. You can easily see the need of feeding your body: the need of feeding your brain and soul are equally necessary. Why were they given to you? To starve?
No pen, however powerful, no voice, however eloquent, can present in the full force of its true colors the value of intellectual and moral development to the housewife, the woman, the home-maker. Religion is not a subject for our Department. The matter of creed is for each one to settle for herself. But in those questions of ethics and social morals that arise in any household and generally have, after all, their foundation in religion, and in all those questions of intellectual living and growth, this Department of ours does have its field and its purpose.
Why? Because, as I said, a home, a real home, has its moral and intellectual sides as well as its material side. Because even its material side, the everyday round of duties, cannot be made what it should be unless brain and soul are made fit to direct the body. Because as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters we are responsible for the members of our family, and for ourselves as human souls. It is not enough to bring a child into the world and then feed it, wash it, dress it, give it a place to sleep, and one day say to it: “We have raised you. Go forth and make your living.” Of course not. We all know that, though goodness knows there are plenty of people who don’t do even that much. It is not enough to furnish a clean, warm house and three meals a day to the bodies of your husband, parents, brothers or sisters. They could get that much at a boarding-house or hotel. They, and you, must have moral and mental food, baths, clothes and beds as well as physical ones—a home—not merely a house. We cannot give what we don’t have. To furnish these things to them we must first get them ourselves.
Then we should give heed to moral and intellectual living and growth because it is our duty. There is another reason—because it is for our own happiness and pleasure.
It was once my privilege to go over a thousand or two letters from people who, after becoming members of a great and good system of education by correspondence, had written in the fullness of their hearts to tell how it had made their lives brighter and happier and to thank the school, not as much for the knowledge they had acquired from their reading and study at home, but for the great pleasure and joy the having of this knowledge had brought them—for the new intellectual, social and moral life that had come to them with it. The letters came from all over the English-speaking world, but I was most struck by the fact that a large part of them came from housewives. The following is a fair sample of hundreds from farmers’ wives, laborers’ wives, clerks’ wives, business-mens’ wives:
“Life has been a new thing to me since I took up your course. My housework used to be an awful drudgery—a never-ending grind. Now it is easy and I do it better, for my mind has something outside to think about and be interested in.”
The wording wasn’t alike in any two, but, in every one of the hundreds written, there was the same idea—“something outside to think about and be interested in.” This was the note sounded in nearly every one of all the letters from men and women both. Some were women living many miles from the nearest neighbor, some were bed-ridden invalids, some factory girls, some servants, a few fashionable “society women,” some of the men, lonely sheep-herders on the Western plains, some naval officers, some this, some that, but one and all gave thanks from grateful hearts for a lift out of the rut of daily drudgery, for a broader horizon, for greater usefulness. I cried over some of those letters. They came straight from the heart if ever anything did.
That was the voice of experience, not the voice of theory. What they could do, we can do. We are not going to have any study courses or any lessons to learn. There will be nothing any of us has to do. But I believe each of us is going to think things over, talk it over and then make herself some spare moments, if she hasn’t some already, and set to work to make life a better thing for herself and those dear to her by getting “something outside to think about.”
How am I going to bring this about? Oh, I am not going to do it—we are! I have no idea of going into any house and saying, “Do that this way, and do this that way.” All of us are going to help by making suggestions, by giving experiences, by offering interesting bits of information. It is for you to decide which of these you can use. The thing to be desired above all others is that each of us may learn to think for herself. Many think for themselves very keenly already—perhaps more keenly than I do—and these are the very ones that can help the rest of us most; but we can all think better, if we all think together.