The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
As to physical health and comfort and beauty: Ask your Health Board,
your sanitary engineer, how the laws of health are observed in the
average home--even of the fairly well-to-do, even of the fairly
educated. Learn what we may of art and science, the art of living, the
science of living is not yet known to us. We build for ourselves
elaborate structures in which to live, following architectural
traditions, social traditions, domestic traditions, quite regardless of
the laws of life for the creature concerned.
This home is the home of a live animal, a large animal, bigger than a
sheep--about as big as a fallow deer. The comfort and health of this
animal we seek to insure by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of
cloth and then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with cloth
and paper and occasionally "aired" by opening windows. We feed the
animal in the box, bringing into it large and varied supplies of food,
and cooking them there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant
upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and smell of our own
preferred food-processes, yet holding it essential that they shall all
be carried on in the same box with the animal to be fed; we proceed to
enlarge the box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed doors
these offensive details (which we would not do without for the world),
and to introduce into the box still other animals of different grades
to perform the offensive processes.
You thus find in a first-class modern home peculiar warring conditions,
in the adjustment of which health and comfort are by no means assured.
The more advanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find
complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential
disease, involved in the integral--supposedly integral--processes of
the place. The more lining and stuffing there are, the more waste
matter fills the air and settles continually as dust; the more
elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a
healthy animal to live in; the more labour required, the greater the
wear and tear on both the heads of the family.
The conditions of health in a representative modern home are by no
means what we are capable of compassing.
We consider "antiseptic cleanliness" as belonging only to hospitals,
and are content to spend our daily, and nightly, lives in conditions of
septic dirt.
An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic feet of air in an hour.
How many homes provide such an amount, fresh, either by day or night?
Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to wrong conditions in
shop and office, to chances of the crowd, or to special drug habits.
Diseases of women and children must be studied at home, where they take
rise. The present conditions of the home as to health and comfort are
not satisfactory.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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