The non-domestic women are, like their male prototypes, of many
kinds, and it would be idle to enumerate them. There is the kind
of woman that "has a career," using this term neither
sarcastically nor flatteringly. The successful artist of whatever
sort--painter, musician, actress--has usually been quite spoiled
for domesticity by the reward of money and adulation given her.
Nowhere is the lack of proportion of our society so well
demonstrated as in the hysterical praise given to this kind of
woman, and naturally she cannot consent to the subordination and
seclusion of the home. Then there is the young business woman,
efficient, independent, proud of her place in the bustle and stir
of trade. She is quite willing to marry and often makes an
admirable mother and wife, but sometimes she finds the menial
character of housework, its monotony and dependence too much for
her. The feminist aglow with equality and imbued with too vivid a
feeling of sex antagonism may marry and bear children, but she
rarely becomes a fireside companion of the type the average man
idealizes. Then the vain, the frivolous, the sexually
uncontrolled,--these too make poor choice for him who has set his
heart on a wife who will cook his meals, darn his stockings and
care for the children. To be non-domestic is a privilege or a
right we cannot deny to women, nor is there condemnation in the
term,--it is merely a summary characterization.
Though to remain single is to be freer than to be married and
domestic, yet the race will always have far more domestic
characters. These alone will bear children, and from them the
racial characters will flow rather than from the exceptional and
deviate types, unless the home disappears in the form of some
other method of raising children. After all, the home is a
costly, inefficient method of family life unless it has
advantages for childhood. This it decidedly has, though we have
bad homes aplenty and foolish ones galore. Yet there is for the
child a care, and more important, an immersion in love and tender
feeling, possible in no other way. We should lose the sacred
principles of motherhood and fatherhood, the only example of
consistent and unrewarded love, if the home disappeared. The only
real altruism of any continuous and widespread type is there
found. It is the promise and the possibility of our race that we
see in the living parents. We know that unselfishness exists when
we think of them, and the idealist who dreams of a world set free
from greed and struggle merely enlarges the ideal home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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