The Nervous Housewife Part 13

CHAPTER XIII

THE FUTURE OF WOMAN, THE HOME, AND MARRIAGE

No true sportsman ever prophesies. For the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the prophet. If he is right, he can brag the rest of his days of his seer-like vision. If he is wrong, no one takes the trouble to reproach or mock him.

Therefore I do not claim to be a prophet in discussing the future of woman, the home, and marriage. At any time just one invention may come along that will totally alter the face of things. Moreover we are now in the midst of great changes in industry, in social relations, in the largest matters of national and international nature. Men and women alike are involved in these changes, but it is impossible to judge the outcome. For history records many abortive reformations, many reactionary centuries and eras as well as successful reformations and progressive ages.

Whether or not it fits woman to be a housewife of the traditional kind, feminism is certain to develop further. Women will enter into more diverse occupations than ever before, they will enter politics, they will find their way to direct power and action. More and more those who work will be specialized and individualized--- the woman executive, the writer, the artist, the doctor, lawyer, architect, chemist, and sociologist--will resist the dictum "Woman's place is the Home." The woman of this group will either be forced into celibacy, or in ever-increasing numbers she will insist on some sort of arrangement whereby she can carry on her work. She will perhaps refuse to bear children and transform domesticity into an apartment hotel life, in which she and her husband eat breakfast and dinner together and spend the rest of the waking time separately, as two men might.

Such a development, while perhaps satisfying the ideas of progress of the feminist, will be bad eugenically. There will be a removal from the race of the value of these women, the intellectual members of their s.e.x. Whether the work this group of women do will equal the value of the children they might have had no one can say.

But after all, the number of women who will enter the professions and remain in them on the conditions above stated will be relatively small.

The main function of women will always be childbearing. If ever there comes a time when the drift will be away from this function, then a counter-movement will start up to sway women back into this sphere of their functions. Moreover, the bulk of women entering industry will enter it in the humbler occupations and they will in the main be willing enough to marry and bear children, even in the limited way. Yet since they enter marriage with a wider experience than ever before, the conditions of marriage and the home must change, even though gradually.

So on the whole we may look to an increasing individuality of woman, an increasing feeling of worth and dignity as an individual, an increasing reluctance to take up life as the traditional housewife. Rebellion against the monotony and the seclusive character of the home will increase rather than diminish, and it must be faced without prejudice and without any reliance on any authority, either of church or state, that will force women back to "womanly" ways of thinking, feeling or doing.

Sooner or later we shall have to accept legally what we now recognize as fact,--the restriction of childbearing. Whether we regard it as good or bad, the modern woman will not bear and nurse a large family. And the modern man, though he has his little joke about the modern family, is one with his wife in this matter. With husband and wife agreed there seems little to do but accept the situation.

That this condition of affairs is leaving the peopling of the world to the backward, the ignorant, and the careless is at present accepted by most authors. One has only to read the serious articles on this subject in the journals devoted to racial biology to realize how deeply important the matter is. Yet there may be some undue alarm felt, for contraceptive measures are becoming so prevalent in Europe, America, and Asia that all races will soon be on the same footing, and moreover all cla.s.ses in society except the feeble-minded are learning the procedures. The prolificness of the feeble-minded is indeed a menace, and society may find itself compelled to lower their fertility artificially.

What will probably happen is that the one, two, or three-child family will be born before the mother's thirty-fifth year, and she will then or before forty become free from the severest burdens of the housewife.

What will she do with her time; what will the better-to-do woman do?

Will she gradually give her energies to the community, or will she while away her time in the spurious culture that occupies so many club women to-day?

It is safe to say that women will enter far more largely than ever before into movements for the betterment of the race. Though their way of life may breed neurasthenia for some, it will have this great advantage,--the mother feeling will sweep into society, will enter politics, and social discussions. That we need that feeling no one will deny who has ever tried to enlist social energies for race betterment and failed while politicians stepped in for all the funds necessary even for some anti-social activities. We have too much legalism in our social structure and not near enough of the humanism that the socially minded mother can bring.

Is the increasing incidence of divorce a revolt against domesticity? To some extent yes, but where women obtain the divorce it is mainly a refusal to tolerate unfaithfulness, desertion, incompatibility of temperament. It does not mean that the family is threatened by divorce,--rather that the family is threatened by the conditions for which divorce is nowadays obtained and which were formerly not reasons for divorce. In many countries adultery on the part of the man, cruel and abusive treatment, chronic intoxication, and desertion were not grounds for divorce. These to-day are the grounds for divorce, and in the opinion of the writer they should invalidate a marriage. I would go even further and say that wherever there was concealed insanity or venereal disease the marriage should be annulled, as it is in some States.

Divorce will not then diminish, despite the campaign against it, until the conditions for which it is sought are removed. Until that time comes, to bind two people together who are manifestly unhappy simply encourages unfaithfulness and cruelty, and is itself a cruelty.

Whether we can devise a system where woman's individuality and humanness can have scope and yet find her willing to accept the roles of mother and homekeeper, is a serious question. It seems to me certain that woman will continue to demand her freedom, regardless of her status as wife and mother. She will continue to receive more and more general and special education, and she will continue to find the role of the traditional housewife more uncongenial. Out of that maladaptation and the discontent and rebellion will arise her neurosis.

In other words what we must seek to do--those of us who are not bound by tradition alone but who seek to modify inst.i.tutions to human beings rather than the reverse--is to find out what changes in the home and matrimonial conditions are necessary for the woman of to-day and to-morrow.

That there has been a huge migration to the cities in the last century is one of its outstanding peculiarities. This urban movement has meant the greater concentration of humans in a given area, and it is therefore directly responsible for the apartment house. That is to say, there has been a trend away from individual homes, completely segregated and individualized, to houses where at least part of the housework was eliminated, in a sense was cooperative. This cooperation is increasing; more and more houses have janitors, more and more houses furnish heat.

In the highest cla.s.s of apartment house the trend is toward permanent hotel life, with the exception that individual housekeeping is possible.

Because of the limited s.p.a.ce and the desire of the modern well-to-do woman to escape as much as possible from housekeeping, because of the smaller families (which idea has been fostered by landlords), the number of rooms and the size of the rooms have grown less. The kitchenette apartment is a new departure for those who can afford more room, for it is well known that the poor in the slums have long since lived in one or two rooms serving all purposes. The huge modern apartment house, the huge modern tenement house, are part first of the urban movement and second of that movement away from housekeeping which has been sketched in the Introduction.

The home has been praised as the nucleus of society, its center, its heart. Its virtues have been so unanimously extolled that one need but recite them. It is the embodiment of family, the soul of mother, father, and children. It is the place where morality and modesty are taught. In it arise the basic virtues of love of parents, love of children, love of brothers and sisters; sympathy is thus engendered; loyalty has here its source. The privacy of the home is a refuge from excitement and struggle and gives rest and peace to the weary battler with the world. It is a sanctuary where safety is to be sought, and this finds expression in the English proverb, "Every Englishman's home is his castle." It is a reward, a purpose in that men and women dream of their own home and are thrilled by the thought. Throughout its quiet runs the scarlet thread of its s.e.x life. Home is where love is legitimate and encouraged.

Yet the home has great faults; it is no more a divine inst.i.tution than anything else human is. Without at all detracting from its great, its indispensable virtues, let us, as realists, study its defects.

On the physical-economic side is the inefficiency and waste inseparable from individual housekeeping. Labor-saving machinery and devices are often too expensive for the individual home, and so small stoves do the cooking and the heating, each individual housewife or her helper washes by hand the dishes of each little group. Shopping is a matter for each woman, and necessitates numberless small shops; perhaps the biggest waste of time and energy lies here. The cooking is done according to the intelligence and knowledge of nutrition of each housewife, and housewives, like the rest of the world, range in intelligence from feeble-mindedness to genius, with a goodly number of the uninformed, unintelligent, and careless. Poets and novelists and the stage extol home cooking, but the doctors and diet.i.tians know there are as many kinds of home cooking as there are kinds of homekeepers. The laboratory and not the home has been the birthplace of the science of nutrition, and we have still many traditions regarding the merits of home cooking and feeding to break from.

Take as one minor example the gorging encouraged on Sunday and certain holidays. The housewife feels it her duty to slave in a kitchen all Sunday morning that an over-big meal may be eaten in half an hour by her family. She encourages gluttony by feeling that her standing as cook is directly proportional to the heartiness of her meal. Thanksgiving, Christmas,--the good cheer of gluttony is sentimentalized and hallowed into poetry and music. The table that groans under its good cheer has its sequence in the diners who groan without cheer.

While we might further dilate on the physical deficiencies and inefficiencies of the segregated home, there is a disadvantage of vaster importance. After all, inst.i.tutionalized cooking is rarely satisfactory, because it lacks the spirit of good home cooking, the desire to meet individual taste without profit. It lacks the ideal of service.

There are bad effects from the segregation and the privacy of the home, even of the good kind. For there are very many bad homes; those in which drunkenness, immorality, quarreling, selfishness, improvidence, brutality, and crime are taught by example. After all, we like to speak too much in generalities--the Home, Woman, Man, Labor, Capital, Mankind--forgetting there is no such thing as "the Home." There are homes of all kinds with every conceivable ideal of life and training and having only one thing in common,--that they are segregated social units, based usually on the family relations.h.i.+p. Montaigne very truly said approximately this: "He who generalizes says 'h.e.l.lo' to a crowd; he who _knows_ shakes hands with individuals."

In the first place the home (to show my inconsistency in regard to generalizing) is the place where prejudice is born, nourished, and grown to its fullest proportions. The child born and reared in a home is exposed to the contagion of whatever silliness and prejudice actuate the lives and dominate the thought and feeling of its parents. And the quirks and twists to which it is exposed affect its life either positively or negatively, for it either accepts their prejudices or develops counter-prejudices against them. To cite a familiar case; it is traditional that some of the children brought up overstrictly, overcarefully, throw off as soon as possible and as completely as possible conventional morals and manners. Such persons have simply overreacted to their training, revolted against the prejudice of their teaching by building counter-prejudices.

Further, the home fosters an anti-social feeling, or perhaps it would be kinder to say a non-social feeling. Your home-loving person comes in the course of time to that state of mind where little else is of importance; the home becomes the only place where his sympathies and his altruistic purposes find any real outlet. The capitalist of the stage (and of real life too) is one so devoted to his home and family that he decorates one and the other with the trophies of other homes. There is none so devoted to his home as the peasant, and there is no one so individualistic, so intent in his own prosperity. The home encourages an intense altruism, but usually a narrow one. The feeling of warmth and comfort of the hearth fire when a blizzard rages outside too often makes us forget the poor fellows in the blizzard.

Thus the home is the backbone of conservatism, which is good, but it becomes also the basis of reactionary feeling. It is the people that break away from home and home ties who do the great things.

When the home is quiet and harmonious it is the place where great virtues are developed. But when it is noisy and disharmonious, then its very seclusiveness, its segregation, lends to the quarrels the bitterness of civil war. The intensity of feeling aroused is proportional to the intimacy of the home and not to the importance of the thing quarreled about. Good manners and that sign and symbol of largeness of spirit, tolerance for the opinions of others, rarely are born in the home.

It is hardly realized how much quarreling, how much of intense emotional violence goes on in many homes. Its isolation and the absence of the restraining influence of formality and courtesy bring the wills of the family members into sharp conflict. Words are used that elsewhere would bring the severest physical answer, or bring about the most complete disruption of friendly relations. Love and anger, duty and self-interest bring about intense inner conflict in the home, and the struggle between the two generations, the rising and the receding, is here at its height.

That courtesy to each other might be taught the children, might be insisted on by the parents is my firm belief. Love and intimacy need not exclude form. Manners and morals are not exclusive of each other. If the marriage ceremony included the vow to be polite, it might leave out almost everything else. The home should be the place where tolerance, courtesy, and emotional control are taught both by precept and example.

Can the home be altered to bring in more of the social spirit and yet maintain its great virtues, its extraordinary attraction for the human heart? It's an old story that criticism, the pointing out of defect, is easy, while good suggestions are few and difficult to convert into programs for action. In medicine diagnosis is far ahead of treatment,--so in society at large.

Any plans that have for their end a sort of social barracks, with men and women and their children living in apartments, but eating and drinking in large groups, will meet the fiercest resistance from the sentiment of our times and cannot succeed, unless it is forced on us by some breakdown of the social structure. Nevertheless a larger cooperation, at least in the cities, will come. Buildings must be built so that a deal of individual labor disappears. Just as cooperative stores are springing up, so cooperative kitchens, community kitchens organized for service would be a great benefit. Especially for the poor, without servants, where the woman is frequently forced to neglect her own rest and the children's welfare because she must cook, would such a development be of great value. Unfortunately the few community kitchens now operating have in mind only the middle-cla.s.s housewife and not the housewife in most need,--the poor housewife. Here is a plan for real social service; cooking for the poor of the cities, scientific, nutritious, tasty, at cost. Much of the work of medicine would be eliminated with one stroke; much of racial degeneracy and misery would disappear in a generation.

That the home needs labor-saving devices in order that much of the disagreeable work may be eliminated is unquestioned. Inventive genius has only given a fragmentary attention to the problems of the housewife.

Most of the devices in use are far beyond the means of the poor and even the lower middle cla.s.s. Furthermore, though they save labor many of them do not save time. The tests by which the good household device ought to be judged are these:

First--Is it efficient?

Second--Is it labor saving?

Third--Is it time saving?

We need to break away from traditional cooking apparatus and traditional diet. The installation and use of fireless cookers, self-regulating ovens, is a first step. The discarding of most of the puddings, roasts, fancy dishes that take much time in the preparation and that keep the housewife in the kitchen would not only save the housewife but would also be of great benefit to her husband. The cult of hearty eating, which results in keeping a woman (mistress or maid) in the kitchen for three or more hours that a man may eat for twenty or thirty minutes is folly. The type of meal that either takes only a short time for preparation and devices which render the attention of the housewife unnecessary are ethical and healthy, both for the family and society.

The joys of the table are not to be despised, and only the dyspeptic or the ascetic hold them in contempt; but simplicity in eating is the very heart of the joy of the table.

Elaboration and gluttony are alike in this,--they increase the housework and decrease the well-being of the diner.

How to maintain the sweetness of the family spirit of the home and yet bring into it a wider social spirit, break down its isolated individualistic character, is a problem I do not pretend to be able to solve. Ancient nations emphasized the social-national aspect of life overmuch, as for example the Spartans; the modern home overemphasizes the family aspect. We must avoid extremes by clinging to the virtues and correcting the vices of the home.

Alarmists are constantly raising the cry that marriage is declining and that society is thereby threatened at its very heart. There is the pessimist who feels that the "irreligion" of to-day is responsible; there is the one who blames feminism; and there is the type that finds in Democracy and liberalism generally the cause of the receding old-fas.h.i.+oned morality. Divorce, late marriage, and child-restriction are the manifestations of this decadence, and the press, the pulpit, science, and the State all have taken notice of these modern phenomena, though with widely differing att.i.tudes.

That matrimony is changing cannot be questioned or denied. The main change is that woman is entering more and more as an equal partner whose rights the modern law recognizes as the ancient law did not. She is no longer to be cla.s.sed as exemplified by the famous words of Petruchio, when he claimed his wife, the erstwhile shrew, as his property in exactly the same sense as any domestic animal, linking the wife with the horse, the cow, the a.s.s, as the chattels of the man. The law agreed to this att.i.tude of the man, the Church supported it; woman, strangely enough, seemed to glory in it.

With the rise of woman into the status of a human being (a revolution not yet accomplished in entirety) the property relations.h.i.+p weakened but lingers very strongly as a tradition that molds the lives of husband and wife. Women are still held more rigidly to their duties as wives than men to their duties as husbands, and the will of the husband still rules in the major affairs of life, even though in a thousand details the wife rules. Theoretically every man willingly acknowledges the importance of his wife as mother and homekeeper, but practically he acts as if his work were the really important activity of the family. The obedience of the wife is still asked for by most of the religious ceremonies of the times. Two great opinions are therefore still struggling in the home and in society; one that matrimony implies the dependence and essential inferiority of woman, and the other that the man and woman are equal partners in the relations.h.i.+p. I fully realize that the advocate of the first opinion will deny that the inferiority of woman is at all implied in their standpoint. But it is an inferior who vows obedience, it is the inferior who loses legal rights, it is the inferior who yields to another the "heads.h.i.+p" of the home.

The struggle of these two opinions will have only one outcome, the complete victory of the modern belief that the s.e.xes are, all in all, equal, and that therefore marriage is a contract of equals. Meanwhile the struggling opinions, with the scene of conflict in every home, in every heart, cause disorder as all struggles do. When the victory is complete, then conduct will be definite and clear-cut, then the home will be reorganized in relation to the new belief, and then new problems will arise and be met. How conduct will be changed, what the new problems will be and how they will be met, I do not pretend to know.

Meanwhile there is this to say,--that marriage should be guarded so that the grossly unfit do not marry. A thorough physical examination is as necessary for matrimony as it is for civil service, and many of the horrors every generation of doctors has witnessed could be eliminated at once and for all time.

Further, if marriage is a desirable state, and on the whole it must be preferred to a single existence, surely so long as our code of morals remains unchanged, and so long as we believe the race must be perpetuated, then the too late marriage should be discouraged. The ideal age for women to enter matrimony is from twenty-two to twenty-five; the ideal age for men is from twenty-five to twenty-eight. It is not my province to deal at length with this subject, but I may state that I believe that continence beyond these ages becomes increasingly difficult, that immorality is encouraged, that adaptability becomes lessened, and that wiser selection of mates does _not_ occur. But how bring about early marriages in a time when the luxuries seem to have become necessities, and therefore the necessity of marriage is eyed more and more as an extravagance of the foolhardy? How bring about early marriage when women are earning pay almost equal to that of the men and are therefore more reluctant to enter matrimony unless at a high standard of living. The late marriage is an evil, but how it can be displaced by the early marriage under the present social scheme I do not see.

We have considered divorce before this. It is not an evil but a symptom of evil; not a disease in itself. It cannot be lessened or abolished unless we are willing to state that a man and a woman should live together as husband and wife, hating, despising, or fearing one another.

We cannot countenance brutality, unfaithfulness, or temperamental mismating. It is true that divorces are often obtained for trivial reasons, but usually the partners are not adapted to one another, according to modern ways of thinking and feeling. What is commonplace in one age is cruelty in the next, and this is a matter not of argument but of expectation and feeling.