Today, in ever-growing light, with microscope and telescope and Röntgen ray, we are learning the true reverence that follows knowledge, and outgrowing that which rests on ignorance.

The savage reveres a thing because he cannot understand it – we revere because we can understand.

The ancient sacred must be covered up; to honour king or god you must shut your eyes, hide your face, fall prostrate.

The modern sacred must be shown and known of all, and honoured by understanding and observance.

Let not our sense of sanctity shrink so sensitively from the searcher; if the home is really sacred, it can bear the light. So now for these "sacred processes of reproduction." (Protest. "We did not say 'reproduction,' we said 'maternity!'") And what is maternity but one of nature's processes of reproduction? Maternity and paternity and the sweet conscious duties and pleasures of human child-rearing are only more sacred than reproduction by fission, by parthenogenesis, by any other primitive device, because they are later in the course of evolution, so higher in the true measure of growth; and for that very reason education, the social function of child-rearing, is higher than maternity; later, more developed, more valuable, and so more sacred. Maternity is common to all animals – but we do not hold it sacred, in them. We have stultified motherhood most brutally in two of our main food products – milk and eggs – exploiting this function remorselessly to our own appetites.

In humanity, in some places and classes we do hold it sacred, however. Why? "Because it is the highest, sweetest, best thing we know!" will be eagerly answered. Is it – really? Is it better than Liberty, better than Justice, better than Art, Government, Science, Industry, Religion? How can that function which is common to savage, barbarian, peasant, to all kinds and classes, low and high, be nobler, sweeter, better, than those late-come, hard-won, slowly developed processes which make men greater, wiser, kinder, stronger from age to age?

The "sacred duties of maternity" reproduce the race, but they do nothing to improve it.

Is it not more sacred to teach right conduct for instance, as a true preacher does, than to feed one's own child as does the squaw? Grant that both are sacred – that all right processes are sacred – is not the relative sanctity up and out along the line of man's improvement?

Do we hold a wigwam more sacred than a beast's lair and less sacred than a modern home? If so, why? Do we hold an intelligent, capable mother more sacred than an ignorant, feeble one? Where are the limits and tendencies of these emotions?

The main basis of this home-sanctity idea is simply the historic record of our ancient religion of ancestor-worship. The home was once used as a church, as it yet is in China; and the odour of sanctity hangs round it still. The other basis is the equally old custom of sex-seclusion – the harem idea. This gives the feeling of mystery and "tabu," of "the forbidden" – a place shut and darkened – wholly private. A good, clean, healthy, modern home, with free people living and loving in it, is no more sacred than a schoolhouse. The schoolhouse represents a larger love, a higher function, a farther development for humanity. Let us revere, let us worship, but erect and open-eyed, the highest, not the lowest; the future, not the past!

Closely allied to our sense of home-sanctity and sprung from the same root, is our veneration for the old; either people or things; the "home of our ancestors" being if anything more sacred than our own, and the pot or plate or fiddle-back chair acquiring imputed sanctity by the simple flux of time. What time has to do with sanctity is not at first clear. Perhaps it is our natural respect for endurance. This thing has lasted, therefore it must be good; the longer it lasts the better it must be, let us revere it!

If this is a legitimate principle, let us hold pilgrimages to the primordial rocks, they have lasted longer than anything else, except sea water. Let us frankly worship the sun – or the still remoter dog-star. Let us revere the gar-fish above the shad – the hedgehog more than the cow – the tapir beyond the horse – they are all earlier types and yet endure!

Still more practically let us turn our veneration to the tools, vehicles, and implements which preceded ours – the arrow-head above the bullet, the bone-needle above the sewing machine, the hour-glass above the clock!

There is no genuine reason for this attitude. It is merely a race habit, handed down to us from very remote times and founded on the misconceptions of the ignorant early mind. The scientific attitude of mind is veneration of all the laws of nature, or works of God, as you choose to call them. If we must choose and distinguish, respecting this more than that, let us at least distinguish on right lines. The claim of any material object upon our respect is the degree of its use and beauty. A weak, clumsy, crooked tool acquires no sanctity from the handling of a dozen grandfathers; a good, strong, accurate one is as worthy of respect if made to-day. It is quite possible to the mind of man to worship idols, but it is not good for him.

A great English artist is said to have scorned visiting the United States of America as "a country where there were no castles." We might have showed him the work of the mound-builders, or the bones of the Triceratops, they are older yet. It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards. We are pushed forward by the social forces, reluctant and stumbling, our faces over our shoulders, clutching at every relic of the past as we are forced along; still adoring whatever is behind us. We insist upon worshipping "the God of our fathers." Why not the God of our children? Does eternity only stretch one way?

Another devoutly believed domestic myth is that of the "economy" of the home.

The man is to earn, and the woman to save, to expend judiciously, to administer the products of labour to the best advantage. We honestly suppose that our method of providing for human wants by our system of domestic economy is the cheapest possible; that it would cost more to live in any other way. The economic dependence of women upon men, with all its deadly consequences, is defended because of our conviction that her labour in the home is as productive as his out of it; that the marriage is a partnership in which, if she does not contribute in cash, she does in labour, care, and saving.

It is with a real sense of pain that one remorselessly punctures this beautiful bubble. When plain financial facts appear, when economic laws are explained, then it is shown that our "domestic economy" is the most wasteful department of life. The subject is taken up in detail in the chapter on home industries; here the mere statement is made, that the domestic system of feeding, clothing, and cleaning humanity costs more time, more strength, and more money than it could cost in any other way except absolute individual isolation. The most effort and the least result are found where each individual does all things for himself. The least effort and the most result are found in the largest specialisation and exchange.

The little industrial group of the home – from two to five or ten – is very near the bottom of the line of economic progress. It costs men more money, women more work, both more time and strength than need be by more than half. A method of living that wastes half the time and strength of the world is not economical.

Somewhat along this line of popular belief comes that pretty fiction about "the traces of a woman's hand." It is a minor myth, but very dear to us. We imagine that a woman – any woman – just because she is a woman, has an artistic touch, an æsthetic sense, by means of which she can cure ugliness as kings were supposed to cure scrofula, by the laying on of hands. We find this feelingly alluded to in fiction where some lonely miner, coming to his uncared-for cabin, discovers a flower pot, a birdcage and a tidy, and delightedly proclaims – "A woman has been here." He thinks it is beautiful because it is feminine – a sexuo-æsthetic confusion common to all animals.

The beauty-sense, as appealed to by sex-distinctions, is a strange field of study. The varied forms of crests, combs, wattles, callosities of blue and crimson, and the like, with which one sex attracts the other, are interesting to follow; but they do not appeal to the cultivated sense of beauty. Beauty – beauty of sky and sea, of flower and shell, of all true works of art – has nothing to do with sex.

When you turn admiring eyes on the work of those who have beautified the world for us; on the immortal marbles and mosaics, vessels of gold and glass, on building and carving and modelling and painting; the enduring beauty of the rugs and shawls of India, the rich embroideries of Japan, you do not find in the great record of world-beauty such conspicuous traces of a woman's hand.

Then study real beauty in the home – any home – all homes. There are women in our farm-houses – women who painfully strive to produce beauty in many forms; crocheted, knitted, crazy-quilted, sewed together, stuck together, made of wax; made – of all awful things – of the hair of the dead! Here are traces of a woman's hand beyond dispute, but is it beauty? Through the hands of women, with their delighted approval, pours the stream of fashion without check. Fashion in furniture, fashion in china and glass, fashion in decoration, fashion in clothing. What miracle does "a woman's hand" work on this varying flood of change?

The woman is as pleased with black horsehair as with magenta reps; she is equally contented with "anti-macassars" as with sofa-cushions, if these things are fashionable. Her "old Canton" is relegated to the garret when "French China" of unbroken white comes in; and then brought down again in triumph when the modern goes out and the antique comes in again.

She puts upon her body without criticism or objection every excess, distortion, discord, and contradiction that can be sewed together. The æsthetic sense of woman has never interfered with her acceptance of ugliness, if ugliness were the fashion. The very hair of her head goes up and down, in and out, backwards and forwards under the sway of fashion, with no hint of harmony with the face it frames or the head it was meant to honour. In her house or on her person "the traces of a woman's hand" may speak loud of sex, and so please her opposite; but there is no assurance of beauty in the result. This sweet tradition is but another of our domestic myths.

Among them all, most prominent of all, is one so general and so devoutly accepted as to call for most thorough exposure. This is our beloved dogma of "the maternal instinct." The mother, by virtue of being a mother, is supposed to know just what is right for her children. We honestly believe, men and women both, that in motherhood inheres the power rightly to care for childhood.

This is a nature-myth, far older than humanity. We base the theory on observation of the lower animals. We watch the birds and beasts and insects, and see that the mother does all for the young; and as she has no instruction and no assistance, yet achieves her ends, we attribute her success to the maternal instinct.

What is an instinct? It is an inherited habit. It is an automatic action of the nervous system, developed in surviving species of many generations of repetition; and performing most intricate feats.

There is an insect which prepares for its young to eat a carefully paralysed caterpillar. This ingenious mother lays her eggs in a neatly arranged hole, then stings a caterpillar, so accurately as to deprive him of motion but not of life, and seals up the hole over eggs and fresh meat in full swing of the maternal instinct. A cruelly inquiring observer took out the helpless caterpillar as soon as he was put in; but the instinct-guided mother sealed up the hole just as happily. She had done the trick, as her instinct prompted, and there was no allowance for scientific observers in that prompting. She had no intelligence, only instinct. You may observe mother instinct at its height in a fond hen sitting on china eggs – instinct, but no brains.

We, being animals, do retain some rudiments of the animal instincts; but only rudiments. The whole course of civilisation has tended to develop in us a conscious intelligence, the value of which to the human race is far greater than instinct. Instinct can only be efficient in directing actions which are unvaryingly repeated by each individual for each occasion. It is that repetition which creates the instinct. When the environment of an animal changes he has to use something more than instinct, or he becomes ex-tinct!

The human environment is in continual flux, and changes more and more quickly as social evolution progresses. No personal conditions are so general and unvarying with us as to have time to develop an instinct; the only true ones for our race are the social instincts – and maternity is not a social process.

Education is a social process, the very highest. To collect the essentials of human progress and supply them to the young, so that each generation may improve more rapidly, that is education. The animals have no parallel to this. The education of the animal young by the animal mother tends only to maintain life, not to improve it. The education of a child, and by education is meant every influence which reaches it, from birth to maturity, is a far more subtle and elaborate process.

The health and growth of the body, the right processes of mental development, the ethical influences which shape character – these are large and serious cares, for which our surviving driblets of instinct make no provision. If there were an instinct inherent in human mothers sufficient to care rightly for their children, then all human mothers would care rightly for their children.

Do they?

What percentage of our human young live to grow up? About fifty per cent. What percentage are healthy? We do not even expect them to be healthy. So used are we to "infantile diseases" that our idea of a mother's duty is to nurse sick children, not to raise well ones! What percentage of our children grow up properly proportioned, athletic and vigorous? Ask the army surgeon who turns down the majority of applicants for military service. What percentage of our children grow up with strong, harmonious characters, wise and good? Ask the great army of teachers and preachers who are trying for ever and ever to somewhat improve the adult humanity which is turned out upon the world from the care of its innumerable mothers and their instincts.

Our eyes grow moist with emotion as we speak of our mothers – our own mothers – and what they have done for us. Our voices thrill and tremble with pathos and veneration as we speak of "the mothers of great men – " mother of Abraham Lincoln! Mother of George Washington! and so on. Had Wilkes Booth no mother? Was Benedict Arnold an orphan?

Who, in the name of all common sense, raises our huge and growing crop of idiots, imbeciles, cripples, defectives, and degenerates, the vicious and the criminal; as well as all the vast mass of slow-minded, prejudiced, ordinary people who clog the wheels of progress? Are the mothers to be credited with all that is good and the fathers with all that is bad?

That we are what we are is due to these two factors, mothers and fathers.

Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our social environment is what modifies heredity and develops human character. The kind of country we live in, the system of government, of religion, of education, of business, of ordinary social customs and convention, this is what develops mankind, this is given by our fathers.

What does maternal instinct contribute to this sum of influences? Has maternal instinct even evolved any method of feeding, dressing, teaching, disciplining, educating children which commands attention, not to say respect? It has not.

The mothers of each nation, governed only by this rudimentary instinct, repeat from generation to generation the mistakes of their more ignorant ancestors; like a dog turning around three times before he lies down on the carpet, because his thousand-remove progenitors turned round in the grass!

That the care and education of children have developed at all is due to the intelligent efforts of doctors, nurses, teachers, and such few parents as chose to exercise their human brains instead of their brute instincts.

That the care and education of children are still at the disgraceful level generally existent is due to our leaving these noble functions to the unquestioned dominance of a force which, even among animals, is not infallible, and which, in our stage of socialisation, is practically worthless.

Of all the myths which befog the popular mind, of all false worship which prevents us from recognising the truth, this matriolatry is one most dangerous. Blindly we bow to the word "mother" – worshipping the recreative processes of nature as did forgotten nations of old time in their great phallic religions.

The processes of nature are to be studied, not worshipped; the laws of nature find best reverence in our intelligent understanding and observance, not in obsequious adoration. When the human mother shows that she understands her splendid function by developing a free, strong, healthy body; by selecting a vigorous and noble mate; by studying the needs of childhood, and meeting them with proficient services, her own or that of others better fitted; by presenting to the world a race of children who do not die in infancy, who are not preyed upon by "preventable diseases," who grow up straight, strong, intelligent, free-minded, and right-intentioned; then we shall have some reason to honour motherhood, and it will be brain-work and soul-work that we honour. Intelligence, study, experience, science, love that has more than a physical basis – human motherhood – not the uncertain rudiments of a brute instinct!

IV
PRESENT CONDITIONS

The difference between our current idea of the home to-day, and its real conditions, is easily seen. That is, it is easily seen if we are able temporarily to resist the pressure of inherited traditions, and use our individual brain power for a little while. We must remember, in attempting to look fairly, to see clearly, that a concept is a much stronger stimulus to the brain than a fact.

A fact, reaching the brain through any sensory nerve, is but an impression; and if a previous impression to the contrary exists, especially if that contrary impression has existed, untouched, for many generations, the fact has but a poor chance of acceptance. "What!" cries the astonished beholder of some new phenomenon. "Can I believe my eyes!" and he does not believe his eyes, preferring to believe the stock in trade of his previous ideas. It takes proof, much proof, glaring, positive, persistent, to convince us that what we have long thought to be so is not so. "A preconceived idea" is what we call this immoveable lump in the brain, and if the preconceived idea is deeply imbedded, knit, and rooted as an "underlying conviction," and has so existed for a very long time, then a bombardment of most undeniable facts bounds off it without effect.

Our ideas of the home are, as we have seen, among the very deepest in the brain; and to reach down into those old foundation feelings, to disentangle the false from the true, to show that the true home does not involve this group of outgrown rudiments is difficult indeed. Yet, if we will but use that wonderful power of thought which even the most prejudiced can exercise for a while, it is easy to see what are the real conditions of the average home to-day. By "average" is not meant an average of numbers. The world still has its millions of savage inhabitants who do not represent to-day, but anthropologic yesterdays, long past.

Even in our own nation, our ill-distributed social advance leaves us a vast majority of population who do not represent to-day, but a historic yesterday. The home that is really of to-day is the home of the people of to-day, those people who are abreast of the thought, the work, the movement of our times. The real conditions of the present-day home are to be studied here; not in the tepee of the Sioux, the clay-built walls of the Pueblo, the cabin of the "Georgia cracker," or mountaineer of Tennessee; or even in the thousand farm-houses which still repeat so nearly the status of an earlier time.

The growth and change of the home may be traced through all these forms, in every stage of mechanical, industrial, economic, artistic, and psychic development; but the stage we need to study is that we are now in, those homes which are pushed farthest in the forefront of the stream of progress. An average home of to-day, in this sense, is one of good social position, wherein the husband has sufficient means and the wife sufficient education to keep step with the march of events; one which we should proudly point out to a foreign visitor as "a typical American home."

Now, how does this home really stand under dispassionate observation?

The ideal which instantly obtrudes itself is this: A beautiful, comfortable house meeting all physical needs; a happy family, profoundly enjoying each other's society; a father, devotedly spending his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain this little heaven; a mother, completely wrapped up in her children and devotedly spending her life in their service, working miracles of advantage to them in so doing; children, happy in the home and growing up beautifully under its benign influence – everybody healthy, happy, and satisfied with the whole thing.

This ideal is what we are asked to lay aside temporarily; and in its place to bring our minds to bear on the palpable facts in the case. Readers of a specially accurate turn of mind may perhaps be interested enough to jot down on paper their own definite observations of, say, a dozen homes they know best.

One thing may be said here in defence of our general ignorance on this subject: the actual conditions of home life are studiously concealed from casual observation. Our knowledge of each other's homes is obtained principally by "calling" and the more elaborate forms of social entertainments.

The caller only reaches the specially prepared parlour or reception room; the more intimate friends sometimes the bedroom or even nursery, if they are at the time what we call "presentable"; and it is part of our convention, our age-long habit of mind, to accept this partial and prepared view as a picture of the home life. It is not.

To know any home really, you must live in it, "winter and summer" it, know its cellar as well as parlour, its daily habits as well as its company manners. So we have to push into the background not only the large, generally beautiful home ideal, smiling conventionally like a big bronze Buddha; but also that little pocket ideal which we are obliged to use constantly to keep up the proper mental attitude.

We are not used to looking squarely, open-eyed and critical, at any home, so "sacred" is the place to us. Now, having laid aside both the general ideal and the pocket ideal, what do we see?

As to physical health and comfort and beauty: Ask your Health Board, your sanitary engineer, how the laws of health are observed in the average home – even of the fairly well-to-do, even of the fairly educated. Learn what we may of art and science, the art of living, the science of living is not yet known to us. We build for ourselves elaborate structures in which to live, following architectural traditions, social traditions, domestic traditions, quite regardless of the laws of life for the creature concerned.

This home is the home of a live animal, a large animal, bigger than a sheep – about as big as a fallow deer. The comfort and health of this animal we seek to insure by first wrapping it in many thicknesses of cloth and then shutting it up in a big box, carefully lined with cloth and paper and occasionally "aired" by opening windows. We feed the animal in the box, bringing into it large and varied supplies of food, and cooking them there. Growing dissatisfied with the mess resultant upon this process, disliking the sight and sound and smell of our own preferred food-processes, yet holding it essential that they shall all be carried on in the same box with the animal to be fed; we proceed to enlarge the box into many varied chambers, to shut off by closed doors these offensive details (which we would not do without for the world), and to introduce into the box still other animals of different grades to perform the offensive processes.

You thus find in a first-class modern home peculiar warring conditions, in the adjustment of which health and comfort are by no means assured. The more advanced the home and its inhabitants, the more we find complexity and difficulty, with elements of discomfort and potential disease, involved in the integral – supposedly integral – processes of the place. The more lining and stuffing there are, the more waste matter fills the air and settles continually as dust; the more elaborate the home, the more labour is required to keep it fit for a healthy animal to live in; the more labour required, the greater the wear and tear on both the heads of the family.

The conditions of health in a representative modern home are by no means what we are capable of compassing.

We consider "antiseptic cleanliness" as belonging only to hospitals, and are content to spend our daily, and nightly, lives in conditions of septic dirt.

An adult human being consumes six hundred cubic feet of air in an hour. How many homes provide such an amount, fresh, either by day or night?

Diseases of men may be attributed to exposure, to wrong conditions in shop and office, to chances of the crowd, or to special drug habits. Diseases of women and children must be studied at home, where they take rise. The present conditions of the home as to health and comfort are not satisfactory.

As to beauty: we have not much general knowledge of beauty, either in instinct or training; yet, even with such as we have, how ill satisfied it is in the average home. The outside of the house is not beautiful; the inside is not beautiful; the decorations and furnishings are not beautiful. The home, by itself, in its age-long traditionalism, does not allow of growth in these lines; nor do its physical limitations permit of it. But as education progresses and money accumulates we hire "art-decorators" and try to creep along the line of advance.

A true natural legitimate home beauty is rare indeed. We may be perfectly comfortable among our things, and even admire them; people of any race or age do that; but that sense of "a beautiful home" is but part of the complex ideal, not a fact recognised by those who love and study beauty and art. We do not find our common "interiors" dear to the soul of the painter. So we may observe that in general the home does not meet the demands of the physical nature, for simple animal health and comfort; nor of the psychical for true beauty.

Now for our happy family. Let it be carefully borne in mind that no question is raised as to the happiness of husband and wife; or of parent and child in their essential relation; but of their happiness as affected by the home.

The effect of the home, as it now is, upon marriage is a vitally interesting study. Two people, happily mated, sympathetic physically and mentally, having many common interests and aspirations, proceed after marrying to enter upon the business of "keeping house," or "home-making." This business is not marriage, it is not parentage, it is not child-culture. It is the running of the commissary and dormitory departments of life, with elaborate lavatory processes.

The man is now called upon to pay, and pay heavily, for the maintenance of this group of activities; the woman to work, either personally, by deputy, or both, in its performance.

Then follows one of the most conspicuous of conditions in our present home: the friction and waste of its supposedly integral processes. The man does spend his life in obtaining the wherewithal to maintain – not a "little heaven," but a bunch of ill-assorted trades, wherein everything costs more than it ought to cost, and nothing is done as it should be done – on a business basis.

How many men simply hand out a proper sum of money for "living expenses," and then live, serene and steady, on that outlay?

Home expenses are large, uncertain, inexplicable. In some families an exceptional "manager," provided with a suitable "allowance," does keep the thing in comparatively smooth running order, at considerable cost to herself; but in most families the simple daily processes of "housekeeping" are a constant source of annoyance, friction, waste, and loss. Housekeeping, as a business, is not instructively successful. As the structure of the home is not what we so readily took for granted in our easily fitting ideals, so the functions of the home are not, either. We are really struggling and fussing along, trying to live smoothly, healthfully, peacefully; studying all manner of "new thought" to keep us "poised," pining for a "simpler life"; and yet all spending our strength and patience on the endless effort to "keep house," to "make a home" – to live comfortably in a way which is not comfortable; and when this continuous effort produces utter exhaustion, we have to go away from home for a rest! Think of that, seriously.

The father is so mercilessly overwhelmed in furnishing the amount of money needed to maintain a home that he scarce knows what a home is. Time, time to sit happily down with his family, or to go happily out with his family, this is denied to the patient toiler on whose shoulders this ancient structure rests. The mother is so overwhelmed in her performance or supervision of all the inner workings of the place that she, too, has scant time for the real joys of family life.