Part 170 (2/2)
THE NUN IN THE KITCHEN
When you gaze upon a row of large, beautiful houses; those ”residences”
to which the citizen ”points with pride;” those ”homes” which form our ideal of life's fulfillment; bear this in mind:
For every one of those proud, s.p.a.cious mansions must exist somewhere one or more huts or hovels or crowded city tenements.
Why? To furnish from the daughters of the poor the servants necessary to maintain such a domicile. So long as each woman performed with her own hands the labors of the home; there were physical limits to the size and splendor of that building.
The Palace has its slaves, the Castle its serfs, and the capacious mansions of today owe their splendor--yes, their very existence--to the nun in the kitchen.
”Why nun?” you will ask. Because in entering our service she is required to be poor, chaste and submissive; she gives up home and family; hers is a consecrated life--consecrated to the physical comfort of our families.
We expect our servants to be women as a matter of course: are not women made to serve? As a matter of fact, they are. That is, they are made to serve children, but we make them serve men. And since a married woman must serve her own husband exclusively, we must have unmarried women to serve other women's husbands! Hence the demand for maid service; hence the constant--though futile--effort to prevent our maids from marrying; and hence--this we have hitherto utterly overlooked--the continuous inadequacy of that service.
Thus an endless procession of incompetent young people--necessarily incompetent--is forever pa.s.sing in and out of our back doors; and our domestic life--its health and happiness--is built upon these s.h.i.+fting sands!
When slaves were owned we had a secure foundation, such as it was; but the present servant is not held by a chain or collar, and as she flits through the kitchen--either slowly or swiftly--the mistress of the mansion is drawn upon, in varying degree, to be a stop-gap.
The family and the home are far too important to our happiness to be left at the mercy of such a fleeting crowd of errant damosels.
Affection and obedience they may give--or may not--but competence does not come to ignorant youth. We need, to keep the world well fed and really clean, skilled, specialized, experienced, well-paid workers; and it is none of our business whether they are married or single.
LETTERS FROM SUBSCRIBERS
Being wholly unable to respond individually to the kind and helpful letters, I wish here to personally thank each friend for his or her really important contributions to the establishment of this magazine.
It is the rich response which gives a.s.surance that the work is worth doing, and that it reaches those for whom it is written.
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN.
COMMENT AND REVIEW
THE CENTURY OF THE CHILD
This is the well chosen t.i.tle for one of the most important books of this Twentieth Century, written by Ellen Key, that great Swedish woman who so intensely loves ”the child,” a book which has set all Europe thinking, has revolutionized the att.i.tude of mind of thousands of young women, and filled thousands of old ones with vain remorse.
In Germany a very considerable movement among girls of the upper cla.s.ses, involving a new att.i.tude towards marriage and maternity, has resulted from this one work.
I take a special, personal interest in it because my ”Woman and Economics” was held to represent the opposite pole of thought regarding women from that of this book.
What is Miss Key's position?
She holds that ”the child” is the most important of personages, that life should all be bent to its service, that the woman's one, all-inclusive purpose is the right bearing and rearing of children. She shows how painfully inadequate is our present provision for child culture, how unprepared is the average mother, how unsuitable the atmosphere of the average home and also of the average school; and makes searching comment on our methods of teaching--especially in teaching religion.
<script>