The home: its work and influence

That harmony, peace, and love which we attribute to home life is not as common as our fond belief would maintain. The husband, as we have seen, finds his chief base outside, and bears up with greater or less success against the demands and anxieties of the home. The wife, more closely bound, breaks down in health with increasing frequency. The effect of home life on women seems to be more injurious in proportion to their social development. Our so-called "society" is one outlet, though not a healthful one, through which the woman seeks to find recreation, change, and stimulus to enable her to bear up against a too continuous home life.

The young man at home is almost a negligible factor – he does not stay in it any more than he can help. The young woman at home finds her growing individuality an increasing disadvantage, and many times makes a too hasty marriage because she is not happy at home – in order to have "a home of her own," where she still piously believes all will be well.

The child at home has no knowledge of any other and better environment wherewith to compare this. He accepts his home as the unavoidable base of all things – he cannot think of life with a different home. But the eagerness with which he hails any proposition that takes him out of it, his passionate hunger for change, for novelty; the fever which most boys have for "running away"; the eager, intense interest in stories of anything and everything as far removed from home life as possible; the dreary ennui of the child who is punished by being kept at home – or who has to stay there continuously for any reason – standing at the window which can give sight of the world outside and longing for something to happen – all this goes to indicate that home life does not satisfy the child. There was a time when it did, when it satisfied every member of the family; but that was under far more primitive conditions.

The home has not developed in the same ratio as its occupants. The people of to-day are not content in the homes of a thousand years before yesterday. Our present home conditions are being changed – very gradually, owing to the stiffness of the material, but are slowly changing before our eyes. As a matter of fact, we are ready – more than ready – for the homes of the future; as a matter of feeling, we are clinging with all our might to the homes of the past; and, in their present conditions, our homes are not by any means those centres of rest, peace, and satisfaction we are so religiously taught to think them.

Suppose for an instant that they were. Suppose the trouble, the weariness, the danger and evils of outside life were all laid aside the moment we entered the home. There all was well. No financial trouble. No industrial trouble. No physical trouble. No mental trouble. No moral trouble. Just a place where everything ran on wheels; and where the world-worn soul could count on peace and refreshment.

Vain supposition! Whatever the financial troubles of the world, the place where they are felt most is in the home. Here is where the money is spent, and most wastefully misspent as we shall see later. Here is where there is never enough, where the demand continually exceeds the supply.

As to industrial trouble, the labour question is a large one everywhere. The introduction of machinery has brought its train of needless disadvantages as well as its essential advantages. There are dishonesty and inefficiency to meet and cope with. But compare the conversation of a hundred business men with that of a hundred housekeeping women, and learn respect for the magnitude of the industrial troubles of the home.

For physical troubles, as we have before indicated, the home is no relief. We struggle to enforce laws improving the physical conditions of the coal mine and the factory, but these laws find their utmost difficulty of application in the "sweatshops," the place where work is done at home. There is no law to improve the sanitary condition of the kitchen, to compel the admission of oxygen to the bedroom. In the home every law of health may be disregarded with impunity. We strive by building regulations and Boards of Health to make some improvement, but the conditions of home life, as now existing, are no guarantee of safety from physical troubles.

As to the mental and moral – the whole field of psychical error and difficulty – the home is the place where we suffer most. The struggles and falls of the soul, our most intimate sins, the keenest pain we know – the home is the arena for these in large measure. Tender virtues grow there, too – deep and abiding love, generous devotion, patient endurance – faithfulness and care; but for one home that shows us these is another where dominant injustice, selfishness, unthinking cruelty, impatience, grossest rudeness, a callous disregard for the oft-trodden feelings of others is found instead. No wide acquaintance with present homes can fail to note these things in every shade of growth. Home is a place where people live, people good and bad, great and small, wise and unwise. The home does not make the bad good, the small great, or the foolish wise. Many a man who has to be decent in his social life is domineering and selfish at home. Many a woman who has to be considerate and polite in her social life, such as it is, is exacting and greedy at home, and cruel as only the weak and ignorant can be. Now if the home was what produced the virtues we commonly attribute to it, then all homes, of all times and peoples, would have the same effect.

The American man holds pre-eminence as sacrificed to the home; the American woman as being most petted and indulged therein. In England we find the man more the centre of indulgence, in Germany still more so – and the women subsidiary to his use and pleasure.

How can "the home" be credited with such opposite results? If, as is commonly assumed, the home has any unfailing general effect, we must be able to point out that effect in the homes of Russia, China, France, and Egypt. If we find the homes of the nations differ we must look for the cause in the national institutions – not the domestic.

That our well-loved homes are as good as they are is due to our race progress; to our religion, our education, our general social advance. When a peasant family from Hungary comes to America, they establish a Hungarian home. As they become Americanised the home changes and improves. The credit is not due to the home, but to the country. Meanwhile the home does have certain definite effects upon our life; due to its own nature, and acting upon us in every time and place.

These we shall analyse and follow in studying the effects of the home upon society in a later chapter. In this observation of present conditions we should note merely how our average home life now stands. And we may plainly see these things; a general condition of unrest and more or less dissatisfaction. A tendency to ever-growing expense, which threatens the very existence of the home and is forcing many into boarding houses. An increasing difficulty in the industrial processes – a difficulty so great that the lives of our women are embittered and shortened by it, and the periods of anxiety and ill-adjustment are longer than those of satisfactory service. An improvement in sanitary conditions so far as public measures can reach the home, but a wide field of disease owing to wrong habits of clothing, eating, and breathing. A rudimentary custom of child-culture only beginning to show signs of progress; and a degree of unhappiness to which the divorce and criminal courts, as well as insane asylums and graveyards, bear crushing testimony.

With conditions of home life as far from our cherished ideal as these, is it not time for us bravely to face the problem, and study home life with a view to its improvement? Not "to abolish the home," as is wildly feared by those who dare not discuss it. A pretty testimony this to their real honour and belief! Is the home so light a thing as to be blown away by a breath of criticism? Are we so loosely attached to our homes as to give them up when some defects are pointed out? Is it not a confession of the discord and pain we so stoutly deny, that we are not willing to pour light into this dark place and see what ails it?

There is no cause for fear. So long as life lasts we shall have homes; but we need not always have the same kind.

Our present home is injured by the rigidly enforced maintenance of long-outgrown conditions. We may free ourselves, if we will, from every one of those injurious, old conditions, and still retain all that is good and beautiful and right in the home.

V

THE HOME AS A WORKSHOP

I. The Housewife

All industry began at home.

All industry was begun by women.

Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation, during that long period of slowly changing savagery which antedates our really human life, whatever work was done on earth was done by the woman in the home. From that time to this we have travelled far, spread wide, grown broad and high; and our line of progress is the line of industrial evolution.

Where the patient and laborious squaw once carried on her back the slaughtered game for her own family, now wind and steam and lightning distribute our provisions around the world. Where she once erected a rude shelter of boughs or hides for her own family, now mason and carpenter, steel and iron worker, joiner, lather, plasterer, glazier, plumber, locksmith, painter, and decorator combine to house the world. Where she chewed and scraped the hides, wove bark and grasses, made garments, made baskets, made pottery, made all that was made for her own family, save the weapons of slaughter, now the thousand manufactures of a million mills supply our complex needs and pleasures. Where she tamed and herded a few beasts for her own family, now from ranchman to packer move the innumerable flocks and herds of the great plains; where she ploughed with a stick and reaped with a knife, for her own family, now gathered miles of corn cross continent and ocean to feed all nations. Where she prepared the food and reared the child for her own family – what! Has the world stopped? Is history a dream? Is social progress mere imagination? —there she is yet! Back of history, at the bottom of civilisation, untouched by a thousand whirling centuries, the primitive woman, in the primitive home, still toils at her primitive tasks.

All industries began at home, there is no doubt of that. All other industries have left home long ago. Why have these stayed? All other industries have grown. Why have not these?

What conditions, social and economic, what shadowy survival of oldest superstitions, what iron weight of custom, law, religion, can be adduced in explanation of such a paradox as this? Talk of Siberian mammoths handed down in ice, like some crystallised fruit of earliest ages! What are they compared with this antediluvian relic! By what art, what charm, what miracle, has the twentieth century preserved alive the prehistoric squaw!

This is a phenomenon well worth our study, a subject teeming with interest, one that concerns every human being most closely – most vitally. Sociology is beginning to teach us something of the processes by which man has moved up and on to his present grade, and may move farther. Among those processes none is clearer, simpler, easier to understand, than industrial evolution. Its laws are identical with those of physical evolution, a progression from the less to the greater, from the simple to the complex, a constant adaptation of means to ends, a tendency to minimise effort and maximise efficiency. The solitary savage applies his personal energy to his personal needs. The social group applies its collective energy to its collective needs. The savage works by himself, for himself; the civilised man works in elaborate inter-dependence with many, for many. By the division of labour and its increasing specialisation we vastly multiply skill and power; by the application of machinery we multiply the output; by the development of business methods we reduce expense and increase results; the whole line of growth is the same as that which makes a man more efficient in action than his weight in shell-fish. He is more highly organised and specialised. So is modern industry.