Great Britain -- Social conditions; Moral conditions; Social problems
But, while there seem to be such grave objections to the endowment of
motherhood that we do better to strengthen women in their individual
demand of justice, we must remember that the wife will have the
advantage of other changes in the home. Domestic service is becoming
more and more repugnant to girls, and some form of co-operative and
efficient housekeeping, with common servants and restaurant, will be
adopted. Some day a photograph of a twentieth-century suburb will
provoke a smile. Perhaps the museum of the future will set up models
of our establishments, just as we set up in our ethnographical
galleries models of a Kaffir or a Papuan household. Boys and girls
will gaze with admiring delight at the naïveté of the model: a
thousand brick boxes, separated by a thousand little gardens, with
three thousand little chimneys smoking, a thousand amateur cooks
perspiring over a thousand fires, and a thousand inefficient
servant-girls flirting with the servants of rival butchers and
dairymen. The common nursery will especially relieve the mother and
lower the death-rate. The State will one day have an interest in
seeing that each babe ushered into the world, at such pain and
sacrifice, becomes a useful citizen. If any mothers care to entrust
the child more fully to it, the State will find it profitable to
respond. These things can be arranged without more detriment to
parental affection than there is in the case of women--often women who
write beautiful things in defence of the old tradition--who have
nurses for the child and send it later to a distant school for the
greater part of the year.
Reforms of this kind will enormously relieve the home life and enable
even mothers to earn, if they wish, quite as much as the State would
ever be able to award them. The work will be better done, by trained
workers, at less cost. People do not reflect that this change has been
proceeding for centuries. Once the wife brewed the ale, and baked the
bread, and spun the linen: later she entrusted these things to experts
working for the community, and reserved for herself the making of
preserves, pickles, underclothing, and antimacassars: now these things
have gone to the expert, and the wife confines her amateur efforts to
scolding children and cooking refractory joints. She will be relieved
when it is all over, and we shall have no more of the "beautiful
doll" or the domestic drudge. The independent position and greater
leisure and broader interest in life will make her intellectual
activity more similar to that of man's.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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