The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
Still, in the home we do find the nursery of all the lines of family
affection, parental, filial, fraternal, and these are good. Hearts able
to love ten could more easily take in twenty; the love of one's own
parents spread to our present care for the aged; the power of loving
grew, and, as soon as it overstepped the limits of the home, it grew
more rapidly. We have learned to love our neighbours--if not as
ourselves, at least, better than strangers. We have learned to love our
fellow-citizens, fellow-craftsmen, fellow-countrymen. To-day the first
thrills of international good-will are stealing across the world--and
we are extending our sympathy even to the animals.
All this beautiful growth of love began at home; but the influence of
the home, as it now exists upon the growth, is not so wholly
gratifying. The love that we call human, the love of one another, the
love Christ teaches us, is extra-domestic. We are not told, "Inasmuch
as you have done it to your own families you have done it unto me." We
are not exhorted to an ever-increasing intensity of devotion to our own
blood-relations.
Both the teaching of our religion and the tendency of social progress
call for a larger love, and the home, in its position of arrested
development, primitive industry, and crippled womanhood, tends rather
to check that growth than to help it. The man's love for his family
finds expression in his labour for other people--he serves society, and
society provides for him and his dear ones; so good will spreads and
knits; comradeship and fellow-feeling appear, friendship brings its
pure height of affection; this is the natural line of development in
the great social virtue, love.
But the woman, still expressing her love for her family in direct
personal service, misses all that. The primitive father, to feed the
child, went forth himself and killed some rabbit--and the primitive
mother cooked it: love, in grade A. The modern father, to feed his
child, takes his thousandth part in some complex industry, and receives
his thousand-fold share of the complex products of others' industry,
and so provides for the child far more richly than could the savage:
love, in grade Z. But the modern mother--if we can call her so by
courtesy--to feed her child still does nothing but cook for it, still
loves in grade A; and the effect of that persistence of grade A is to
retard the development of grade Z. Mother-love is the fountain of all
our human affection; but mother-love, _as limited by the home_,
does not have the range and efficacy proper to our time. The home, as
at present maintained, checks the growth of love.
As to Truth. This is a distinctly modern virtue. It comes in slowly,
following power and freedom. The weak lie, a small beast hides; the
lion does not hide. The slave lies--and the courtier; the king does not
lie--he does not need to.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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