The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
Human advance calls for each man's best, for his special faculties, for
the work he loves best and can therefore do best and do most of. This
work is not always the kind that commands the greater wages; at least
the immediate wages he must have. The market will pay best for what it
wants, and what it wants is almost always what it is used to, and often
what is deadly bad for it. Having a family to support, in the most
wasteful possible way, multiplies a man's desire for money; but in no
way multiplies his ability, his social value.
Therefore the world is full of struggling men, putting in for one and
trying to take out for ten; and in this struggle seeking continually
for new ways to cater to the tastes of the multitude, and especially to
those of the rich; that they may obtain the wherewithal to support the
ten, or six, or simply the one; who though she be but one and not a
worker, is quite ready to consume more than any ten together! Social
advantage is ruthlessly sacrificed to private advantage in our life
to-day; not to necessary and legitimate private interests either; not
to the best service of the individual, but to false and scandalously
wasteful private interests; to the maintenance and perpetuation of
inferior people.
The position is this: the home, as now existing, costs three times what
is necessary to meet the same needs. It involves the further waste of
nearly half the world's labour. It does not fulfil its functions to the
best advantage, thus robbing us again. It maintains a low grade of
womanhood, overworked or lazy; it checks the social development of men
as well as women, and, most of all, of children. The man, in order to
meet this unnecessary expense, must cater to the existing market; and
the existing market is mainly this same home, with its crude tastes and
limitless appetites. Thus the man, to maintain his own woman in
idleness, or low-grade labour, must work three times as hard as is
needful, to meet the demands of similar women; the home-bound woman
clogging the whole world.
Change this order. Set the woman on her own feet, as a free,
intelligent, able human being, quite capable of putting into the world
more than she takes out, of being a producer as well as a consumer. Put
these poor antiquated "domestic industries" into the archives of past
history; and let efficient modern industries take their place, doing
far more work, far better work, far cheaper work in their stead.
With an enlightened system of feeding the world we shall have better
health--and wiser appetites. The more intelligent and broad-minded
woman will assuredly promote a more reasonable, healthful, beautiful,
and economical system of clothing, for her own body and that of the
child. The wiser and more progressive mother will at last recognise
child-culture as an art and science quite beyond the range of instinct,
and provide for the child such surroundings, such training, as shall
allow of a rapid and enormous advance in human character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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