The Home, (New York: McClure, Philips & Co., 1903), pages 97-102, 315.
The initial purpose of the home is the care of children. The initial purpose of motherhood is the care of children. How are the duties of the mother compatible with the duties of the housewife? How can child-culture, as a branch of human progress, rise to any degree of proficiency in this swarming heap of rudimentary trades?
Nothing is asked--here--as to how the housewife, doing all these things together her life long, can herself find time for culture and development; or how can she catch any glimmer of civic duty or public service beyond this towering pile of domestic duty and household service. The particular point herein advanced is that the conditions of home industry as such forever limit the growth of the industry so practised; forever limit the growth of the persons so practising them; and also tend to limit the growth of the society which is content to leave any of its essential functions in this distorted state.
Our efforts to “lift the standard of household industry” ignore the laws of industry. We seek by talking and writing, by poetising and sermonising, and playing on every tender sentiment and devout aspiration, to convince the housewife that there is something particularly exalted and beautiful, as well as useful, in her occupation. This shows our deep-rooted error of sex-distinction in industry. We consider the work of the woman in the house as essentially feminine, and fail to see that, as work, it is exactly like any other kind of human activity, having the same limitations and the same possibilities. . . .
The home, in its arbitrary position of arrested development, does not properly fulfill its own essential functions--much less promote the social ones. Among the splendid activities of our age it lingers on, inert and blind, like a clam in a horse-race.
It hinders, by keeping woman a social idiot, by keeping the modern child under the tutelage of the primeval mother, by keeping the social conscience of the man crippled and stultified in the clinging grip of the domestic conscience of the woman. It hinders by its enormous expense; making the physical details of daily life a heavy burden to mankind; whereas, in our age of civilisation, they should have been long since reduced to a minor incident.
“Women Bachelors in New York,” Scribner’s Magazine (November 1896), pages 626-36
New York and perhaps city women in general, when they are suddenly called upon to earn their livings, are much more independent about it, and more original in their methods than women in smaller place, where womanly pursuits, as they are called, follow more closely prescribed lines. The New York woman has more knowledge of the world, and she knows that one can do pretty much what one pleases, if it is done with a certain dash, élan, carrying-all-before-it air. When she comes to work for her living she profits by this knowledge. Instead of becoming a governess or a teacher of music, she tries to get hold of something original that will excite interest. When she has found it she holds it up, as it were, on a blazoned banner, inscribed with this legend, “I have not a penny to my name, and I’m going to work.” She accepts the situation with the greatest good-humor and makes herself more acceptable to the old set by relating her discouragements, trials, and mistakes so comically that she is better company than before. If her story is not bad enough she embroiders it to the proper point of attractiveness. . . .
In the measure that women are determining their own lives, they want their own homes. The desire is entirely reasonable. The woman who is occupied with daily work needs greater freedom of movement, more isolation, more personal comforts, and the exemption, moreover, from being agreeable at all times and places. She wants to be able to shut her doors against the world, and not to be confined within four walls herself; and she wants to open her doors when it pleases her, and to exercise the rites of hospitality unquestioned. In fact, she wants many things that cannot be had except in her own home. It is an interesting fact in natural history that women in their first breathing-spell should revert to constructing homes as their natural background, to which is added the male realization that the home is the proper stimulus to achievement.
The first woman bachelor establishment in this city was in 1881, coexistent with the first woman’s apartment-house in London. With a gay fillip of the finger at consequences, it was set up in the most expensive part of town. It was easy to argue that it would be a material saving in car-fares, city rent being merely one of the incentives to hard work; in any case, in a fashionable area poverty glorified by gilded Japanese cottons and unframed etchings might well be endured. So novel an undertaking did not fail to excite attention. . . . To turn the necessity of earning a living into a co-operative lark was a new and captivating idea. Thus was the enterprise mistakenly regarded. It was, in fact, the serious effort on the part of four women to find some way of living in which, at the least expense, the greatest comfort and independence could be obtained, and the social instincts gratified. . . .
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