The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
When sidewalks were narrow and streets foul, great was the jostling,
keen the resentment--"You take the wall of me, sir!" Where all is
broad, clean, safe, no such hot feeling exists. We do not truly prefer
to be always sharply looking out for ourselves; it is much more
interesting to look out for each other; but this method of handicapping
each man with his own affairs, in such needless weight, keeps up a
selfishness which true civilisation tends steadily to eliminate. Social
instincts in social conditions are as natural as animal instincts in
animal conditions.
Starving, shipwrecked sailors, robbed of all social advantages, are
reduced sometimes even to cannibalism. Polite people at a banquet show
no hint of such fierce, relentless greed. Relieved of the necessity for
spending our whole time taking care of ourselves, we shall deliciously
launch forward into the much larger pleasure of taking care of one
another. Relieved of the ceaseless, instant pressure of purely physical
needs, we shall be able to put forth the true demands of human life at
last. The mind, no longer penned in its weary treadmill of private
affairs, will spread into its legitimate area--public affairs. We shall
be able to see a greater number of things at once, and care about them.
That larger-mindedness will be an immediate result; for we have already
far more capacity than we use.
We have developed the modern civilised mind, the social mind, through
the world's work; but we bury it, enslave it, stultify it, in the
home's work. A new power--a new sense of range--freedom, growth, as of
a great stream flowing freely; plenty of force to work with, plenty of
room to work in--this is what will follow as we learn to properly
relate the home to the rest of life.
Once the mind rises, free, outside those old enclosing, crushing walls,
it will see life with different eyes. Our common good will appear to us
as naturally as our private good does now. At present the average mind
does not seem able to grasp a great general fact, be it for good or
evil.
To make a man appreciate the proposed advantage, realise the impending
or existing evil, we must "bring it home to him," make him feel it
"where he lives." When his home does not occupy most of his mind, tax
his strength, reduce his range of interest and affection, he can see
the big things more easily. When he "lives" in the whole city--_i.e._,
thinks about it, cares about it, works for it, loves it--then he will
promptly feel anything that affects it in any part. This common love
and care are just as possible to human beings as love and care for
one's own young are possible to the beasts. It is possible; it is
natural; it is a great and increasing joy; but its development is
checked by a system which requires all our love and care for our own,
and even then does not properly provide for them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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