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Page 22
This tendency to be so sure of integrity of purpose as to be
unsympathetic and hardened to the means by which it is accomplished, is
perhaps nowhere so obvious as in the household itself. It nowhere
operates as so constant a force as in the minds of the women who in all
the perplexity of industrial transition are striving to administer
domestic affairs. The ethics held by them are for the most part the
individual and family codes, untouched by the larger social conceptions.
These women, rightly confident of their household and family integrity
and holding to their own code of morals, fail to see the household in
its social aspect. Possibly no relation has been so slow to respond to
the social ethics which we are now considering, as that between the
household employer and the household employee, or, as it is still
sometimes called, that between mistress and servant.
This persistence of the individual code in relation to the household may
be partly accounted for by the fact that orderly life and, in a sense,
civilization itself, grew from the concentration of interest in one
place, and that moral feeling first became centred in a limited number
of persons. From the familiar proposition that the home began because
the mother was obliged to stay in one spot in order to cherish the
child, we can see a foundation for the belief that if women are much
away from home, the home itself will be destroyed and all ethical
progress endangered.
We have further been told that the earliest dances and social gatherings
were most questionable in their purposes, and that it was, therefore,
the good and virtuous women who first stayed at home, until gradually
the two--the woman who stayed at home and the woman who guarded her
virtue--became synonymous. A code of ethics was thus developed in regard
to woman's conduct, and her duties were logically and carefully limited
to her own family circle. When it became impossible to adequately
minister to the needs of this circle without the help of many people who
did not strictly belong to the family, although they were part of the
household, they were added as aids merely for supplying these needs.
When women were the brewers and bakers, the fullers, dyers, spinners,
and weavers, the soap and candle makers, they administered large
industries, but solely from the family point of view. Only a few hundred
years ago, woman had complete control of the manufacturing of many
commodities which now figure so largely in commerce, and it is evident
that she let the manufacturing of these commodities go into the hands of
men, as soon as organization and a larger conception of their production
were required. She felt no responsibility for their management when they
were taken from the home to the factory, for deeper than her instinct to
manufacture food and clothing for her family was her instinct to stay
with them, and by isolation and care to guard them from evil.
She had become convinced that a woman's duty extended only to her own
family, and that the world outside had no claim upon her. The British
matron ordered her maidens aright, when they were spinning under her own
roof, but she felt no compunction of conscience when the morals and
health of young girls were endangered in the overcrowded and insanitary
factories. The code of family ethics was established in her mind so
firmly that it excluded any notion of social effort.
It is quite possible to accept this explanation of the origin of morals,
and to believe that the preservation of the home is at the foundation of
all that is best in civilization, without at the same time insisting
that the separate preparation and serving of food is an inherent part of
the structure and sanctity of the home, or that those who minister to
one household shall minister to that exclusively. But to make this
distinction seems difficult, and almost invariably the sense of
obligation to the family becomes confused with a certain sort of
domestic management. The moral issue involved in one has become
inextricably combined with the industrial difficulty involved in the
other, and it is at this point that so many perplexed housekeepers,
through the confusion of the two problems, take a difficult and
untenable position.
There are economic as well as ethical reasons for this survival of a
simpler code. The wife of a workingman still has a distinct economic
value to her husband. She cooks, cleans, washes, and mends--services for
which, before his marriage, he paid ready money. The wife of the
successful business or professional man does not do this. He continues
to pay for his cooking, house service, and washing. The mending,
however, is still largely performed by his wife; indeed, the stockings
are pathetically retained and their darning given an exaggerated
importance, as if women instinctively felt that these mended stockings
were the last remnant of the entire household industry, of which they
were formerly mistresses. But one industry, the cooking and serving of
foods to her own family, woman has never relinquished. It has,
therefore, never been organized, either by men or women, and is in an
undeveloped state. Each employer of household labor views it solely
from the family standpoint. The ethics prevailing in regard to it are
distinctly personal and unsocial, and result in the unique isolation of
the household employee.
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