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Page 48
[56] See _Woman and Economics_, by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, Boston:
Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; and the writings of H.G. WELLS.
This question has been discussed in the chapter on industry, and it will
be considered again in the following chapter. Meantime there can be no
doubt that love is reticent so far as the outside world is concerned;
and domesticity must always demand a large measure of privacy. It still
remains to be proved that this can be secured, in the absence of a
private kitchen, nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to need the
personal care and constant love of mothers, and women seem to need a
long period of loving and caring for a family to round out a deeply
significant life.
To summarize this chapter we may say that the realization of romantic
love, under conditions of domesticity, is necessary for men and women,
and for the well-being of the race. Our present marriage system is
defective, and needs to be corrected through the creation of a eugenic
conscience. It should be taken out of the hands of the church and made
more difficult by the state. Women's property rights should be defined
and safeguarded, and men and women should never live together when they
are repugnant to each other.
X
Family Life as a Vocation
The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the
real significance of their lives while they are still living. Life's
values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily. If not
nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one
can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and
significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis
philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which
the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers
us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure,
which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed
from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always
held before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own justification.
We have maintained throughout this volume that complete
self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and
women, when either lives alone. On every side of their natures they are
complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family
composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of
their love. "There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it." It
is in this unit, under the stress of sexual passion and maternal love,
that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin.
Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to
the home as their source.
But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the
antagonistic interests of men and women. There can be no real rivalry
between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between
man and woman. The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the
incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life.
And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when
two trade one must lose. The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer
and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate in it
rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we
call men and women. In agreement, association and co�peration lies
strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and
competition lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid
and fickle.
In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for
men and women alike. The political life was the family life; each family
was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family
maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity. But,
because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments
of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted.
Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have
seen, to define and secure all our later institutions until it has
become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and
industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed
to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost
always considered from the point of view of national and industrial
efficiencies.
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