The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and mother does not
ensure right nourishment--that we have shown at length; but it does
ensure that every human soul thus provided for shall give far too much
thought to what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be clothed.
The yielding up of a woman's life to the service of these physical
needs of mankind does not develop self-control, nor its noble line of
ensuing virtues--temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endurance.
See the child growing up under this disproportionate attention; fussy,
critical, capricious, always thinking of what he wants and how he wants
it. The more his mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he
knows no better than to help himself to the offered life. See the
husband, criticising the coffee and the steak; or so enjoying and
praising them that the happy wife eagerly spends more hours in
preparing more dishes that John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate
atmosphere. All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it is a
hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly maintains a degree of
personal devotion to one's appetites which would disappear under a
system of living suited to our age.
Self-control is developed by true home life; by true family love.
Family, love, unmodified by social relation, gives also the family
feud; the unconscionably narrow pride of the clansman; the home life of
the first century, arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us
its constant contribution of first-century ethics.
As to honour--that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive ethical sense;
applied so rigidly to this, so little to that; showing so variously;
"business honour," "military honour," "professional honour," "the
honour of a gentleman"--what is the standard of honour in the home?
The only "honour" asked of the woman is chastity; quite a special
sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in any great degree of the man.
If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate sharply in its
preferred exponent. But apart from that virtue, what sense of honour do
we find in the home-bound woman? Is it to keep her word inflexibly? A
woman's privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the weaker?
Would that some dream of this high grace could stand between the angry
woman and the defenceless child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn
eavesdropping, to regard the letter of another person as inviolate?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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