The home: its work and influenceGilman, Charlotte Perkins
General
The home: its work and influence
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
Home
Right here is the point of departure from the legitimate to the
illegitimate; from what is natural, true, and wholly good to this
avenue of diseased growth. As we reach out more and more for a wider
range of contact--a chance of more varied association--we should leave
the home and find what we seek in its own place: the general functions
of human life, the whole wide field of human activity. In school, in
college, the growing soul finds at once possibilities of contact
impossible at home.
True association is impossible without common action. We do not sit
voiceless and motionless, shaking hands with each other's souls. True
and long-established friends and lovers may do this for a season.
"Silence is the test of friendship," someone has said; but friendship
and love require something more than this for birth and maintenance.
The "ties" of love and friendship are found in the common memories and
common hopes, the things we have done, do, and will do, for and with
each other.
The home is for the family, and at most, a few "familiar" friends. The
wider range of friendship, actual and potential, that the human soul of
to-day requires, is not possible at home. See the broad graded list of
a man's school friends and college friends, classmates, and fellows in
club and society, associates in games and sports, business friends of
all degrees, friends and associates in politics; he has an enormous
range of social contact, from every grade of which he gets some good,
and, out of the whole, some personal friends he likes to have come
freely to his home.
Contrast with this the woman's scale--the average woman, she whose
"sphere" is wholly in the home. By nature--that is, by human
nature--she has the same need and capacity for large association. Being
pruned down to a few main branches, confined almost wholly to the basic
lines of attachment known equally to the savage, she pours a passionate
intensity of feeling into her narrow range. The life-long give-and-take
with a friend of whose private life one knows nothing is impossible to
her. She must monopolise, being herself monopolised from birth.
This intensity of feeling, finally worn down by the rebuff it must
needs meet, gives place in the life of the woman who is able to
"entertain," to the "dear five hundred friends" of that sterile
atmosphere. It is no longer the free reaching out of the individual
toward those who mean help and strength, breadth and change and
progress, rest and relaxation. In the varied life of the world we are
brought in contact with many kinds of people, in different lines of
work, and are drawn to those who belong to us. In the monotonous life
of "society" we are brought in contact with the same kind of people, or
people whose life effort is to appear the same--all continually engaged
in doing the same thing. If any new idea jars the monotony, off rushes
the whole crowd after it--bicycle, golf, or ping-pong--till they have
made it monotonous, too.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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