The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
The farmer has assistance in his business. He shares in the accumulated
experience of many farmers, before him and about him. There are
valuable experiments being made in his behalf by the Bureau of
Agriculture. He has trade papers to bring him the fruits of the world's
progress in this line. Agriculture is one of the world's great
functions, and has made magnificent progress. But humaniculture has no
Bureau, no Secretary, no Experiment Stations; unless we count the
recent experiments in boric-acid diet. The most valuable livestock on
earth are casually fed by the haphazard efforts of any and every kind
of ignorant woman; hired servants or married servants, as the case may
be; dull, shortsighted, overworked women, far too busy in "doing the
cooking" ever to study the science of feeding humanity. No science
could ever make progress in such hands. Science must rest on broad
observation, on the widest generalisation and deduction, on careful
experiment and reconsideration.
This is forever impossible at home. Until the food laboratory entirely
supersedes the kitchen there can be no growth. Many of us, struggling
to sit fast between two stools, seeing the imperative need of
scientific feeding for humanity, yet blindly clinging to the separate
wife-mother-cook functionary, exhort "the woman" to study all this
matter, and cheerfully to devote her life to scientifically feeding her
beloved family.
"The woman"--that is, a woman, any woman, every woman, and that means
the deadly Average, the hopelessly Isolated, the handicapped Maternal,
with the Lack of Specialisation, the Confusion of other Trades, and the
Lack of Incentive. Not until "The woman" in "the home" can everywhere
manifest a high degree of skill as a doctor, as an architect, as a
barber, as anything, can she manifest that high degree as a cook.
Cooking is an art; cooking is a science; cooking is a handicraft;
cooking is a business. None of these can ever grow without following
the laws of all industrial progress--specialisation, contact and
exchange, legitimate competition, and the stimulus of large
world-incentives. When we have these we shall be able to improve our
kind of animal as much as we do other kinds. We cannot arbitrarily by
breeding, but we can by nutrition and education--to an unknown extent.
Nutrition, properly adjusted, nutrition for the human animal, has
hardly been thought of by the home cook. The inexorable limit of our
Home-cooking is the Home.
VIII
DOMESTIC ART
One of the undying efforts of our lives, of the lives of half the
world, is "to make home beautiful." We love beauty, we love home, we
naturally wish to combine the two. The rich spare no expense, the
æsthetic no care and pains, in this continuous attempt; and the "home"
papers, or "home departments" in other papers, teem with instruction on
the subject for the eager, but untutored many.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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