The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
Man's power, his charm, for woman is far more than that of sex. It is
the all-inclusive vital force of human life--of real social
development. She has hung around him as devotedly as the cripple tags
the athlete. When women have their own field of legitimate social
activity, they retain their admiration for really noble manhood, but
the "anybody, Good Lord!" petition is lost forever. A hint is perhaps
suggested here, as to the world-old charm for women, of the priest and
soldier. Both are forms of very wide social service--detached,
impersonal, giving up life to the good of the whole--infinitely removed
from the close clinging shadow of the house!
In our immediate time the progress of industry has cut the lady off
from even her embroidery. Man, alert and inventive, follows her few
remaining industries relentlessly, and grabs them from her, away from
the house, into the mill and shop where they belong. But she, with ever
idler hands, must stay behind. He will furnish her with everything her
heart can wish--but she must stay right where she is and swallow it.
_"Lady Love! Lady Love! wilt thou be mine?
Thou shalt neither wash dishes, nor yet feed the swine!
But sit on a cushion and sew a gold seam
And feed upon strawberries, sugar, and cream!"_
This amiable programme, so exquisitely ludicrous, when offered to the
world's most inherently industrious worker, becomes as exquisitely
cruel when applied. The physical energies of the mother--an enormous
fund--denied natural expression in bodily exertion, work morbidly in
manifold disease. The social energies, boundless, resistless, with
which she is brought more in contact every year, denied natural
expression in world-service, work morbidly inside the painfully
inadequate limits of the house.
Here we have the simple explanation of that unreasonable excess which
characterises the lady of the house. The amount of wealth this amiable
prisoner can consume in fanciful caprices is practically unlimited. Her
clothing and ornament is a study in itself. Start any crazy fad or
fashion in this field, and off goes the flood of self-indulgence, the
craving for "expression," absurdity topping extravagance. There is
nothing to check it save the collapse of the source of supplies.
A modern "captain of industry" has a brain so socially developed as to
require for its proper area of expression an enormous range of social
service. He gets it. He develops great systems of transportation,
elaborate processes of manufacture, complex legislation or financial
manoeuvres. Without reference to his purpose, to the money he may
acquire, or the relative good or evil of his methods, the point to be
noted is that he is exercising his full personal capacity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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