The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
"But the nurse does not love it!" we wildly protest. What if she does
not? Cannot the mother love it _while the nurse takes care of it_?
This is the whole position in a nutshell. Nothing is going to prevent
the mother from loving her children in one deep, ceaseless river of
calm affection, with such maternal transports as may arise from time to
time in addition; but nothing ought to prevent the child's being
properly taken care of while the love is going on. The mother is not
ashamed to depend on the doctor if the child is ill, on the specialist
if the child is defective, on the teacher when the child is in school.
Why should she so passionately refuse to depend on equally skilled
assistance for the first five years of her babies' lives--those years
when iron statistics remorselessly expose her incapacity?
The home that is coming will not try to be a workshop, a nursery, or a
school. The child that is coming will find a more comfortable home than
he ever had before, and something else besides--a place for babies to
be happy in, and grow up in, without shrieks of pain. The mother that
is coming, a much more intelligent person than she has ever been
before, will recognise that this ceaseless procession of little ones
requires some practical provision for its best development, other than
what is possible in the passing invasion of the home. "How a baby does
tyrannise over the household!" we complain, vaguely recognising that
the good of the baby requires something different from the natural home
habits of adults. We shall finally learn to make a home for the babies
too.
This involves great changes in both our idea of home, and our material
provision for it. Why not? Growth is change, and there is need of
growth here. Slowly, gradually, by successive experiments, we shall
find out how to meet new demands; and these experiments are now being
made, in all the living centres of population.
XVII
RESULTS
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