Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“ A society is composed of the people who compose it, strange to say,—all of them; and, as they are, it is. The people must be steadily made better if the world is to move. The way to make people better is to have them born better. The way to have them born better is to make all possible improvement in the individual before parentage. That is why youth is holy and august: it is the fountain of human progress. Not only that "the child is father to the man," but the child is father to the state—and mother. ”

“ In the baby's first attempt to speak we amused ourselves mightily over his innocent handling of rude phrases,—overheard by chance or even taught him, that we might make merry over the guileless little mouth, uttering at our behest the words it did not understand. Then, a year or so older, when he says the same things, he is laboriously and painfully taught that what is proper for a parent to say to a child is not proper for a child to say to a parent. "Why?" puzzles the child. We can give no answer, except our large assumption that there is no respect due to youth. ”

“ They care enormously. They dislike certain persons always because of disagreeable physical contact in childhood. They wriggle down clumsily, all their clothes rubbed the wrong way, with tumbled hair and flushed, sulky faces from the warm "lap" of some large woman or bony, woolly-clothed man, who was holding them with one hand and variously assaulting them with the other, and rush off in helpless rage. No doubt they "get used to it," as do eels to skinning; but in this process of accustoming childhood to brutal discourtesy we lose much of the finest, most delicate development of human nature. ”

“ The care of children is certainly the duty of women. The best care of children means the best education. The woman who has not done her best to improve the educational advantages of her city, State and country,—of the world,—has not done her duty as a citizen or as a woman. And, as education comes through every impression received by the child, we must improve home and street and city and all the people, to make a clean, safe, beautiful world, in which our children may receive the unconscious schooling to which they have a right. ”

“ From the deeper biological standpoint, seeing the foremost wave of advancing humanity in each new generation, there is still less excuse for such contemptuous treatment. In the child is lodged the piled up progress of the centuries, and, as he shall live, is that progress hastened or retarded. Quite outside of the natural affection of the parent for the offspring stands this deep, human reverence for the latest and best specimen of its kind. Every child should represent a higher step in racial growth than its parents, and every parent should reverently recognise this. ”

“ The savage as an individual animal may be equal—in some ways superior—to the modern man; but, as a social constituent, he is like a grain of sand in a heap compared [20] to some exquisitely fitted part of an intricate machine,—a living machine, an organism. In this social relation man may grow and develope all his life; and that is why civilisation, socialisation, brings us useful and honourable age, while savagery knocks its old folk on the head. ”

“ But, with a healthy brain and will, a youth of fifteen, with the knowledge easily available at that age, should be not only able and willing, but gloriously eager for personal development. It is an age of soaring ambition; and that ambition, directed in lines of real improvement, is one of Nature's loveliest and strongest forces to lift mankind.
There is a splendid wealth of aspiration in youth, a pure and haughty desire for the very highest, which ought to be playing into the current of our racial life and lifting it higher and higher with each new generation. ”

“ The natural mother cares only for her own children. She loves and labours without knowledge, and what experience she gains by practising on her own children is buried [277] with her. The unnatural mother cares for Children,—all of them,—and knows that she can best serve her own by lifting the standard of child-culture for all.
We have urgent need of the unnatural mother,—the mother who has added a trained intellect to a warm heart; and, when we have enough of them, the rarest sound on earth will be that now so pitifully common,—the crying of a little child. ”

“ Also, the work of those who seek to educate our later youth, and of those who are forever pouring out their lives to lead the world a little higher, is rendered million-fold more difficult by this same gulf, this terrible line of cleavage which strikes so deep to the roots of life, and leaves our beautiful feelings and wise thoughts to mount sky-high in magnificent culture, while our action, which is life's real test, grovels slowly along, scarce moved by all our fine ideas. ”

“ What mother has taken any steps to prevent these accidents? Individually, each tries to protect her own, as does the animal or savage. [285] Collectively, they do nothing; yet it is the lack of this collective motherhood which makes our cities so unsafe for children. The idea that, if each takes care of her own, all will be cared for, is as false for women as it is for men. If each man took care of his own, and not of the others, we should have no soldiers, no policemen, no government, no society, only that social chaos called anarchy. ”

“ Must a home be shabby and bare? Or must the child be confined to his bed? Why not develope the home to its own perfection,—a place of beauty and comfort and peace,—and let the children have a home of their own for part of the day, wherein the order and beauty and comfort are child-size? The child could sleep under his mother's eye or ear, and gradually aspire to the adult table when he had learned how to be comfortable there, and not injure the comfort of others. He could soon have his own room if the family could afford it, and express his personality in its arrangement ”

“ The sweet confidence of a modern child, as compared to the alert suspicion of a baby savage, shows what ages of social safe-guarding have done. In the beautiful union of our civilised growth, even so far, we have made possible the Child; and it is for us still further to protect and develope this most exquisite social product,—this greatest social hope and power. Society's relation to the child is impersonal. It is not limited by parenthood. The parental relation is lower, more limited. Parentally, we care only for our own: socially, we care for all. ”

“ Imagine, again, a majority of men, each saying he was too busy teaching his children to go to a school meeting and plan for the education of them all! It is not a shifting of duty that is required,—to cease to take care of one's own in order to take care of others instead. So ingrained are our primitive habits, [288] so unable are we to conceive of anything but the one-woman method, that our only idea of change is a simple exchange of responsibility. It is not exchanging that is needed, but an enlarging, an embracing of the less in the greater. ”

“ The child does not owe the parent. Parental duty is not a loan. It is the never-ending gift of nature,—an unbroken, outpouring river of love and labour from the earliest beginnings of life. The child, while a child, has also some duty to the parent; but even there it is reflex, and based in last analysis on the child's advantage.
Meanwhile it is a poor parent who cannot win the affection and command the respect of the young creature growing up so [165] near, so that a beautiful relation shall be established between them for the rest of life. ”

“ Once we boldly enter the field of ethical study, and reduce its simple principles to a teachable basis,—when we make clear to ourselves and our children the legitimate reasons of right conduct,—the same intelligence and ambition which carry us on so far in other sciences will lift the standard of behaviour of our race, both in theory and practice. Meanwhile, with such knowledge and practice as we have to-day, let us see to it that we give to little children our best ethics by precept and example, with hopes that they may go on to higher levels. ”

“ If the mother is frankly and clearly unselfish in their daily intercourse, and then as frankly and clearly demands her own share of freedom and consideration, the child gets a fairer view of human rights than if he simply absorbs his mother as a natural victim. ”

“ Ask any conscientious mother or father why the new human being, fresh from God as they profess to believe, not yet tainted by sin or weakened by folly and mistake, serene in its mighty innocence and serious beyond measure, as its deep eyes look solemnly into life,—why this wonderful kind of humanity is to be treated like a court fool. What can the parent say? ”

“ When the wise, beneficent parental love of Human Society for its young really does its duty, tenderly removing obstructions from the path of all our little ones, we shall give to them those common human advantages without which they cannot grow to the happiness which is their right, the usefulness which is their duty. All parents who are able to do more for their children would be free to do so, as those who can afford private schools, or educate their little ones at home, are not compelled to send them to the public schools. ”

“ She loves and marries, led by the deepest force in organic life, but governed by a clear and conscious wisdom even here. If she has the misfortune to be attracted to a man diseased or immoral or defective, she will not accept him, for the sake of her children. But marry she will, for this is the law of life; and the exceptions go to extinction. This fair woman, vigorous and beautiful, with her well-trained body, clear mind, and tender spirit of mother-love waiting within her, would not go unloved. ”

“ We demand from the young respect because we are older, not because we deserve it. Respect is a thing which is extorted willy-nilly by those who deserve it, and which cannot be given at will. If a parent loses his temper and talks foolishly, how can a child respect this weakness? To demand respectful treatment shows one cannot command it; and, if it is not commanded, it cannot be had. Any false assumption is a block to progress. ”

“ It is social parentage, such as we have, which gives us the school as we have it. It is the weakness and irresponsibility of our social parentage which leaves the school as it is, and fails to push on to something far fuller and better. What thought, what care, what service, does the average mother give to other people's children? None. She does not imagine it to be her duty. She imagines that her duty lies only toward her own children, and that it is no faintest fault of hers if other children suffer. ”

“ The educational value of the mother seems not to be in proportion to her occupation as a house-servant, but the reverse. It would seem that our children grow in intelligence and good behaviour rather in spite of the domestic industries than because of them. Any mother who is awake to the limitless possibilities of child-culture, and who begins to work out some well-considered plan for its pursuance, knows the ceaseless interruptions of her efforts, and the peremptory monopolisation of her time, by the demands of household labour. ”

“ We have made enormous progress in brain development, and we manifest wide differences in brain power. But clearly discernible through all the progress and all the difference is this large fault in our mental machinery,—a peculiar discrepancy between the sum of our knowledge and the sum of our behaviour. Man being conscious and intelligent, it would seem that to teach him the desirability of a given course of action would be sufficient. That it is not sufficient, every mother, every teacher, every preacher, every discoverer, inventor, reformer, knows full well. ”

“ So soon as a child-house is built and education seen to begin in earliest babyhood, so soon as we begin to plan a beautiful and delicately adjusted environment for our children, in which line and colour and sound and touch are all made avenues of easy unconscious learning, we shall find that there is no sharp break between "home" and "school." In the baby-garden the baby will learn many things, and never know it. In the kindergarten the little child will learn many things, and never know it. ”

“ Seeing that progress is the law of nature, that the human race is under pressure of every force—conscious and unconscious—to go on, to improve, to grow better, and that we, as social beings, move forward through social improvement, the main weight of care seems to rest on society rather than the individual. It is astonishing to see how far this has gone already. Whereas once the beast father and mother were the only ones to protect or serve the young, now society does far [291] more for the child than the parents. The father does more than the mother, and that by means of his social relation. ”

“ We know something of ethics, and practise something, but treat the child as if he was a lower instead of a higher being. Surely, we can reduce our ethical knowledge into some simple and teachable shape, and take the same pains to teach this noblest, this most indispensable of sciences that we take to teach music or dancing. Physics is the [105] science of molecular relation,—how things work in relation to other things. Ethics is the science of social relation,—how people work in relation to other people. To the individual there is no ethics but of self-development and reproduction. ”

“ Sharp exception will, no doubt, be taken to the use of the word "servant" to designate the nine out of ten women who "do their own work." There is a difference, we freely admit. They do the same work in the same way, but they have different motives. They do it from a sense of duty, oft-times, instead of a desire for wages; for they get no wages. They do it simply because they have to, sometimes, feeling it to be merely a disagreeable necessity. They do it from a more direct self-interest than the servant, as well as from a greater self-sacrifice. ”