The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
This arrested brain development, this savage limitation to the
personal, and mainly to the physical, is what we have so rigidly
enforced upon women. The primitive home to the primitive mind is
sufficient; but the progress of the mind requires a commensurate
progress of the home--and has not had it. Owing to our peculiar and
unnatural division of life-area, half the race has been free to move
on, and so has accomplished much for all of us; but the other half,
being confined to the same position it occupied in the infancy of
society, has been denied that freedom and that progress. Owing again to
the inexorable reunion of these divided halves in each child, physical
heredity does what it can to bridge the gulf, the ever-widening gulf;
pouring into the stationary woman some share of the modern abilities of
social man; and also forcing upon the moving man some share of the
primitive disabilities of the domestic woman. We thus have a strange
and painful condition of life.
Social progress, attained wholly by the male, gives to the
unprogressive woman unrest, discontent, disease. The more society
advances, the less she can endure her ancient restrictions. Hence
arises much evil and more unhappiness. Domestic inertia, maintained by
the woman, gives to the progressive man a tremendous undertow of
private selfishness and short-sightedness. Hence more evil, far more;
for the social processes are the most important; and a deeper
unhappiness too; for the shame of the social traitor, the helplessness
of the home-bound man who knows his larger duty but cannot meet it, is
a higher plane of suffering than hers, and also adds to hers
continually.
All this evil and distress is due not at all to the blessed influence
of the true home, suited to our time, but to the anything but blessed
influence of a home suited to the Stone Age--or perhaps the Bronze! It
is not in the least necessary. The change we require does not involve
the loss of one essential good and lovely thing. It does not injure
womanhood, but improves it. It does not injure childhood, but improves
it. It does not injure manhood, but improves that too.
What is the proposed change? It is the recognition of a new order of
duties, a new scale of virtues; or rather it is the practical adoption
of that order long since established by the facts of business, the
science of government, and by all great religions. Our own religion in
especial, the most progressive, the most social, gives no sanction
whatever to our own archaic cult of home-worship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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