The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
Self-interest drove men into military combination--where they learned
much. Family interest drove them into industrial activity, and even
allowed a low form of combination. But social interest is what leads us
all farthest and highest; the impulse to live, not for self-preservation
only, not for reproduction only, but for social progress. It should not
be hard to see that these apparently dissimilar and opposed interests
can only be harmonised by the dominance of the greatest. The man who
would strive for his own advantage at the expense of his family, we
call a brute. The man who strives for the advantage of his family at
the expense of his country--we should call a traitor! Yet this is the
common attitude of the citizen of to-day, and in this attitude he is
maintained and extolled by the home! The soldier who would seek to save
his own life to the injury of the army we promptly shoot. If he should
seek to save his home at the same risk, we should still dishonour and
punish him.
The army, very highly developed in a very low scheme of action, knows
that neither self nor family must stand for a moment against the public
service. Industry is not so well organised as warfare, and so our scale
of industrial virtues is not so high. We degrade and punish for
"conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman"; but we take no
cognisance of "conduct unbecoming a manufacturer and a gentleman,"
unless he is an open malefactor. Yet a manufacturer is a far higher and
more valuable social servant than a soldier of any grade. We do not yet
know the true order of importance in our social functions, nor their
distinctly organic nature.
With our proven capacity, why do we manifest so little progress in
industrial organisation and devotion? A student of prehuman evolution,
one familiar only with nature's long, slow, stumbling process of
developing by exclusion--like driving a flock of sheep by killing those
who went the wrong way--might answer the question in this manner: That
we have not been engaged in industrial processes long enough to develop
the desired qualities. This is usually considered the evolutionary
standpoint; and from it we are advised not to be impatient, and are
told that a few thousand years' more killing will do much for us.
But social evolution takes place on quite other grounds. We have added
education to heredity; mutual help to the cruel and wasteful processes
of elimination. The very essence of social relation is its transmission
of individual advance to the collective. Physical evolution acts only
through physical heredity; we have that in common with all animals; but
we have also social heredity, that great psychic current of transmitted
wisdom and emotion which immortalises the gains of the past and
generalises the gains of the present.
A system of free public education does more to develop the brains of a
people than many thousand years of "natural selection," and does not
prevent natural selection, either.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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