The Foundations of Personality [132]
him to single life. Or he may be an unconventional non-believer in the home and marriage, though these are really rare. The drinker, the roue, the wanderer, the selfish, the nonconventional, the soarer, the restless, the inefficient and the misogynist all make poor husbands and fathers and find the home a burden too crippling to be borne. One of the outstanding figures of the past is the domestic woman, yearning for a home, assiduously and constantly devoted to it, her husband and her numerous children. Fancy likes to linger on this old-fashioned housewife, arising in the early morning and from that time until her bedtime content to bake, cook, wash, dust, clean, sew, nurse and teach; imagining no other career possible or proper for her sex; leading a life of self- sacrifice, toil and devotion. Poet, novelist, artist, and clergyman have immortalized her, and men for the most part cherish this type as their mother and dream of it as the ideal wife. Perhaps (and probably) this woman rebelled in her heart against her drudgery and dreamed of better things; perhaps she regretted the quickly past youth and dreaded the frequent child-bearing. Whether she did or not, the appearance of a strongly non-domestic type is part of the history of the latter nineteenth century and the early twentieth. The non-domestic women are, like their male prototypes, of many kinds, and it would be idle to enumerate them. There is the kind of woman that "has a career," using this term neither sarcastically nor flatteringly. The successful artist of whatever sort--painter, musician, actress--has usually been quite spoiled for domesticity by the reward of money and adulation given her. Nowhere is the lack of proportion of our society so well demonstrated as in the hysterical praise given to this kind of woman, and naturally she cannot consent to the subordination and seclusion of the home. Then there is the young business woman, efficient, independent, proud of her place in the bustle and stir of trade. She is quite willing to marry and often makes an admirable mother and wife, but sometimes she finds the menial character of housework, its monotony and dependence too much for her. The feminist aglow with equality and imbued with too vivid a feeling of sex antagonism may marry and bear children, but she rarely becomes a fireside companion of the type the average man idealizes. Then the vain, the frivolous, the sexually uncontrolled,--these too make poor choice for him who has set his heart on a wife who will cook his meals, darn his stockings and care for the children. To be non-domestic is a privilege or a right we cannot deny to women, nor is there condemnation in the term,--it is merely a summary characterization. Though to remain single is to be freer than to be married and domestic, yet the race will always have far more domestic characters. These alone will bear children, and from them the racial characters will flow rather than from the exceptional and deviate types, unless the home disappears in the form of some other method of raising children. After all, the home is a costly, inefficient method of family life unless it has advantages for childhood. This it decidedly has, though we have bad homes aplenty and foolish ones galore. Yet there is for the child a care, and more important, an immersion in love and tender feeling, possible in no other way. We should lose the sacred principles of motherhood and fatherhood, the only example of consistent and unrewarded love, if the home disappeared. The only real altruism of any continuous and widespread type is there found. It is the promise and the possibility of our race that we see in the living parents. We know that unselfishness exists when we think of them, and the idealist who dreams of a world set free from greed and struggle merely enlarges the ideal home. But we must be realistic, as well as idealistic. A silent or noisy struggle goes on in the home between the old and the new, between a rising and a receding generation. An orthodox old generation looks askance on an heretical new generation;