Charlotte Perkins Gilman

“ Justice is wholly social in its nature—extra-domestic—even anti-domestic. Just men may seek to do justly in their homes, but it is hard work. Intense, personal feeling, close ties of blood, are inimical to the exercise of justice. Do we expect the judge upon the bench to do justice, dispassionate, unswerving, on his own child—his own wife—in the dock? If he does, we hail him as more than mortal. Do we expect a common man—not a judge with all the training and experience of his place, but a plain man—to do justice to his own wife and his own child in the constant intimacy of the home? ”

“ The woman's love of beauty finds its freest expression along lines of personal decorations, and there, as in the decoration of the house, we see the same crippling influence.
She loves beautiful textures, velvet, satin, and silk, soft muslin and sheer lawn; she loves the delicate fantasy of lace, the alluring richness of fur; she loves the colour and sparkle of gems, the splendour of burnished metal, and, in her savage crudity of taste, she slaps together any and every combination of these things and wears them happily. ”

“ Home and its beauty, home and its comfort, home and its refreshment to tired nerves, its inspiration to worn hearts, this is in no danger of loss or change; but the home which is so far from beautiful, so wearing to the nerves and dulling to the heart, the home life that means care and labour and disappointment, the quiet, unnoticed whirlpool that sucks down youth and beauty and enthusiasm, man's long labour and woman's longer love—this we may gladly change and safely lose. ”

“ All the reward he asks is her love and faith, her sweet companionship.
May we look, then, in homes of this class for an ideal influence on man? Consecrating his life to the business of not only feeding and clothing, but profusely decorating and amusing a useless woman,—does this have an elevating effect on him? When he thinks of how charming she will look in the costly fur, the lace, the jewels, how she will enjoy the new home, the new carriage, the new furniture; of her fresh and ceaseless delight in her "social functions"—does his heart leap within him? ”

“ In this sense a beehive is as much a home as any human dwelling place—even more, perhaps. The snow hut of the Eskimo, the tent of hides that covers the American savage, the rock-bound fastness of the cave-dweller—these are homes as truly as the costliest modern mansion. The burrow of the prairie dog is a home, a fox's earth is a home, a bird's nest is a home, and the shelter of the little "seahorse" is a home. Wherever the mother feeds and guards her little ones,—more especially if the father helps her,—there is, for the time being, home. ”

“ As to eating at home, so dear a habit, so old a habit, old enough to share with every beast that drags her prey into her lair, that she and her little ones may gnaw in safety; this remains strongly in evidence, and will for some time yet. But while it reigns unshaken in our minds let us follow, open-eyed, the great human distinction of eating together. To share one's food, to call guest and friend to the banquet, is not a custom of any animal save those close allies in social organisation, the ants and their compeers. ”

“ She whose condition of arrested development makes her unquestioningly submit to the distortion, constriction, weight, and profusion of fashion in clothing for her own body, is not likely to show much sense in dressing a child. Beautiful fabrics, rich textures, expensive adornments, she heaps upon it. She wishes it to look pretty, according to her barbaric taste; and she disfigures the grave, sweet beauty of a baby face, the lovely moving curves of the little body, with heavy masses of stiff cloth, starched frippery, and huge, nodding, gaily decorated hats that would please an Ashantee warrior. ”

“ Beauty—beauty of sky and sea, of flower and shell, of all true works of art—has nothing to do with sex.
When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those who have beautified the world for us; on the immortal marbles and mosaics, vessels of gold and glass, on building and carving and modelling and painting; the enduring beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great record of world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a woman's hand. ”

“ We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury and extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health, of the defrauded home, the withering family life, the black shadows beyond that; but there are others we do not see. Large among these is our loneliness. The machinery of domestic entertainment is paradoxically in our way. We are for ever and for ever flocking together, being brought together, arranging to meet people, to be met by people, to have other people meet each other, and meanwhile life passes and we have not met. ”

“ The schoolhouse represents a larger love, a higher function, a farther development for humanity. Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!
Closely allied to our sense of home-sanctity and sprung from the same root, is our veneration for the old; either people or things; the "home of our ancestors" being if anything more sacred than our own, and the pot or plate or fiddle-back chair acquiring imputed sanctity by the simple flux of time. What time has to do with sanctity is not at first clear. ”

“ First, that of average capacity. Just consider what any human business would be in which there was no faintest possibility of choice, of exceptional ability, of division of labor. What would shoes be like if every man made his own, if the shoemaker had never come to his development? What would houses be like if every man made his own? Or hats, or books, or waggons? To confine any industry to the level of a universal average is to strangle it in its cradle. And there, for ever, lie the industries of the housewife. What every man does alone for himself, no man can ever do well—or woman either. ”

“ Social progress rests on the smooth development of personal character, the happy fulfilment of special function. The home, in its ceaseless and inexorable demands, stops this great process of specialisation in women, and checks it cruelly in men. A man's best service to society lies in his conscientious performance of the work he is best fitted for. But the service of the home demands that he do the work he is best paid for. Man after man, under this benumbing, strangling pressure, is diverted from his true path in social service, and condemned to "imprisonment with hard labour for life." ”

“ We have a general conviction that all our virtues as well as charity begin at home; that the ethical progress of man is a steady stream flowing out of the home, and as far as we compare one virtue with another, we assume the domestic virtues to be the best.
In half the race we ask nothing but the domestic virtues; in the other half we look for something further; but consider such civic and social virtues as appear to be offshoots of the domestic. We call the home "the cradle of all the virtues," and never imagine for a moment that it can cradle anything else—in the line of ethics. ”

“ 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?
The standard of honour in the home is not that of "an officer and a gentleman." ”

“ No transportation, that at once; no roads—why roads if all men stayed at home? No education—even the child must leave home to go to school; no art, save the squaw-art of personal decoration of one's own handmade things. No travel, of course, and so no growth of any human ties, no widespread knowledge, love, and peace. In short, no human life at all—if men, all men, had always stayed at home. ”

“ The ceaseless, anxious strain to do what only an experienced nurse and teacher can do, is an injury to the real uses of motherhood.
Why do we dread having children, as many of our much-extolled mothers so keenly do? Partly the physical risk and suffering, which are not necessary to a normal woman,—and more the ensuing care, labour, and anxiety,—and oh,—"the responsibility!" The more modern the mother is, the more fit for a higher plane of execution, the more unfit she is for the lower plane, the old primitive plane of home-teaching. ”

“ For millions and millions of years it has been reborn in each generation and maintained by the same ceaseless pressure. The furry babies of the forest grow to consciousness in nests of leaves, in a warm stillness where they are safe and comfortable, where mother is—and mother is heaven and earth to the baby. Our lightly spoken phrase "What is home without a mother?" covers the deepest truth; there would never have been any home without her. ”

“ To the child who longs to grow up and be free; to the restless, rebelling boy; to the girl who marries all too hastily as a means of escape; to the man who puts his neck in the collar and pulls while life lasts to meet the unceasing demands of his little sanctuary; and to the woman—the thousands upon thousands of women, who work while life lasts to serve that sanctuary by night and day—to all these it may not be unwelcome to suggest that the home need be neither a prison, a workhouse, nor a consuming fire. ”

“ The extension of the family from a temporary reproductive group to a permanent social group is another human addition to the home idea. To have lived in one hole all his infancy makes that hole familiar and dear to the little fox. To have lived in one nest all his life makes that nest more familiar and more dear to the rook. But to have lived in one house for generations, to have "the home of my ancestors" loom upon one's growing consciousness—this is to enlarge enormously our sense of the dignity and value of the term. ”

“ Then study real beauty in the home—any home—all homes. There are women in our farm-houses—women who painfully strive to produce beauty in many forms; crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck together, made of wax; made—of all awful things—of the hair of the dead! Here are traces of a woman's hand beyond dispute, but is it beauty? Through the hands of women, with their delighted approval, pours the stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture, fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration, fashion in clothing. ”

“ Is it not time that the home be freed from these industries so palpably out of place? That the expense of living be decreased by two-thirds and the productive labour increased by nine-twentieths? That our women cease to be an almost universal class of house-servants; plus a small class of parasitic idlers and greedy consumers of wealth? That the preparation of food be raised from its present condition of inadequacy, injury, and waste to such a professional and scientific position that we may learn to spare from our street corners both the drug-store and the saloon? ”

“ To us, who have for so many unbroken generations been wholly bound to the home, who honestly believe that its service and maintenance constitute the whole duty of men and women, the picture of a world in which home and its affairs takes but a small part of life's attention gives rather a blank outlook. What else are we to do! What else to love—what else to serve eternally! What else to revere, to worship! How shall we occupy the hands of man if but a tithe of his labour supports him in comfort ”

“ Men are too busy doing other things, too blinded by their scorn for "women's work." Women are too busy doing these things to think about them at all; or if they think, stung by the pain of pressing inconvenience, they only think personally, they only feel it for themselves, each one blindly buried in her own home, like the crafty ostrich with his head in the sand. ”

“ The ideal home shines clear and bright, at the end of the day's work. Peace and happiness, relief from all effort and anxiety, the calm replenishment of food and sleep, the most delightful companionship. In some cases it gives all this in fact. In many, many others the man has to descend in coming home—to come down to it instead of up. In it is a whole new field of cares, worries, and labours. The primitive machinery of the place, so imperfectly managed by the inexpert average woman, jars rudely on his specialised consciousness. The children are his pride and joy—that is as it should be. ”

“ Because of her wealth of power and patience it does not occur to her to make things easier for herself. The fatal inertia of home industries lies in their maternal basis. The work is only done for the family—the family is satisfied—what remains? There is no other ambition, no other incentive, no other reward. Where the horizon of duty and aspiration closes down with one's immediate blood relations, there is no room for growth.
All that has pushed and pulled reluctant man up the long path of social evolution has not touched the home-bound woman. ”