The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

C >> Charlotte Perkins Gilman >> The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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NURSERY-MINDEDNESS

Where do we get our first training in the field of common behavior, our
earliest and strongest impressions of ethics?

In the nursery, in the early environment of the little child, in the
daily influences that affect the opening mind; or, to put it in a phrase
hallowed by poetic imagery, "at our mother's knee." We are accustomed
to think highly of these early influences. Almost any man will say that
his mother taught him what was right--it was his own evil nature that
drove him wrong. So believing, we perpetuate these influences unchanged
from age to age, and it is small wonder we think human nature to be
inherently perverse if it continues to show such poor results from such
good education.

Suppose for a moment we take down one more old idol, and look into his
record, examining the environment of the little child as dispassionately
as we would examine the environment of a college student.

The child is born into an atmosphere of personality, which is essential,
and reared continuously in that atmosphere, which is not so essential.
Owing to these early impressions; so deep and ineffaceable, he grows to
look at human life with a huge "I," and an almost as large "My Family,"
in his immediate foreground; so out of drawing as to throw the whole
world into false perspective, seen as a generality, dim, confused and
distant.

In this atmosphere of unbroken personality, he repeats continually the
mistakes of the early savage, the animistic tendency we should as a race
have long since outgrown. The family with the male head was the great
hotbed of early religions.

In this primitive group, unchecked by any higher authority of king or
governor, arose ancestor-worship--that unnatural religion which erases
the laws of life and bids the chicken feed the hen--or rather the
rooster. No matriarchal cult would have made that mistake. The
patriarch owned his women, owned his children, owned all the property;
he gave and took away at his pleasure. Therefore, looming vast in
unchecked pride, he erected sacrificial religions all his own, demanding
sons to perform sacred rites in his honor; and grew so inflated with
superiority that he thanked his patriarchal God and Father every day
that he was not born a woman.

This Personality has cast its shadow across heaven. It has deified its
own traits and worships them. Through blind and selfish eyes it has
mis-seen and misrepresented God, and forced dark dogmas on its children,
age after age. Each child of us, though really born to the broad light
of a democratic age, is reared in the patriarchate. Each child of us
sees the father, dispenser of benefits, arbiter and ruler of the family;
and, so reared, each child of us repeats from generation to generation
the mistakes of personality.

The basic law of the patriarchal system was obedience, and is yet. The
child's first ethical lesson is in the verb "to obey." Not with any
convincing instance of right or wrong, though life bristles with them,
but as the duty of submission. He is not taught to observe, to relate,
to make his inference, to act, and to note results. He is taught that
his one duty is not to think, observe, or experiment, but to do what he
is told.

This is a convenient habit for those in authority; but not conducive to
any true development of the ethical sense. We are turned out into a
world of cause and effect, with no knowledge, no experience, no guide
whatever, but the painfully acquired habit of doing what some one else
tells us. We are not taught to study right and wrong conduct, to
understand it, to see the wisdom of the one and the folly of the other.

The child's first notion of "being good" is either sheer inaction or
prompt submission. What we call "a good baby" is one who does
absolutely nothing. Here we have an explanation of the amazing inertia
of people in general; of the smug immobility of those shining lights
"the best people." We all have been taught--rigorously taught in our
infancy--that to "keep quiet" was a virtue; and we keep quiet through
life. This is one clear instance of our nursery-mindedness.

We are reared in a black and white world: sharp wrong,--to do almost
anything amusing, and particularly and most of all, To Disobey; sharp
right,--to do nothing whatever, and particularly and best of all, To
Obey. We come out into a world that is all colors of the rainbow in
every shade and blending, where the things people tell us to do are
mostly wrong, and to do right requires the most strenuous and
independent activity. Greatly are we hindered in the work of life
to-day by our mis-taught infancy.

In the narrow round of family life, the inevitable repetitions, the
natural ruts of usage, the child has forced upon him the conservatism he
should have every help to out-grow. Habit uncriticized and unresisted;
convention an unquestioned good; these are the rules of the little
world. How he hates it! How he longs for something different--for
something to happen! The world is full of differences and happenings,
but he is helpless to meet them--he has been only trained in narrow
routine.

The oldest status in life, that of serving woman, is about him in his
infancy. That mother should do for him is right and natural, but why
should his mother be waiting on these other persons? Why is she the
house-servant as well as the mother? If she is but a fashionable person
in gay attire, he still has about him women servants. He cannot think
as yet, but he accepts from daily contact this serving womanhood as
natural and right, grows up to demand it in his household and to rear
his children in its shadow; and so perpetuate from age to age the
patriarchal error.

Then deep into this infant soul sinks the iron weight of what we call
Discipline. We women, having small knowledge of child-nature or
world-nature, never studying nature at all, but each girl-mother handed
on from nursery to nursery, a child teaching children, we undertake to
introduce the new soul to life!

We show him, as "life," the nursery, kitchen and parlor group in which
we live. We try to teach him the behavior required by these
surroundings. Two of the heaviest crosses to both the child and mother
lie in his bi- and tri-daily difficulties with clothing, and prolonged
initiation to the sacred mysteries of the table. We seek, as best we
may, to bend the new soul visiting this world to a correct fulfilment of
the polite functions of our domestic shrine; and we succeed unhappily
well. We rear a world of people who put manners before morals,
conventions before principles, conformity before initiative. Sorely do
we strive with the new soul, to choke questionings and crush its
resistance.

"Why?" says the child, "Why?" protesting with might and main against the
mummery into which he is being forced.

"Because Mother says so!" is the reason given. "Because you must obey!"
is the duty given; and to enforce the command comes punishment.

Punishment is a pitiful invention arbitrarily inserted in place of
consequence. Its power is in giving pain. Its appeal is to terror.
We, immovable and besotted in our ancient sanctuaries, deliberately give
pain to little children, deliberately arouse in them that curse of old
savagery, blind fear. To compel behavior which we cannot explain even
to ourselves, to force the new wine of their young lives into the old
bottles of our traditional habits, we keep alive in the little child an
attitude of mind the whole world should seek to outgrow and forget
forever.

The ethics of the nursery does not give us laws to be learned and
understood; relations of cause and effect for instructive practice;
matters of general use and welfare not to know and practice which argues
a foolish ignorance. It gives command purely arbitrary and
disconnected; their profit is not visible to the child; and their
penalties, while painfully conspicuous, bear no real relation to
offences.

Besides being arbitrary and disconnected, the penalties we give our
children have this alarming weakness--they are wholly contingent upon
discovery. No whipped child is too young to learn that his whipping did
not follow on the act--unless his mother knew he did it. Thus with
elaborate care, with trouble to ourselves and anguish to the child, we
develop in him the attitude of mind with which our criminals, big and
little, face the world--it is not what you do that matters--it is being
found out. This is not the position of the thinking being--it is
nursery-mindedness.

Pain and terror we teach our babies, and also shame. The child is pure,
innocent, natural. One of the first efforts of nursery culture is to
smear that white page with our self-made foulness. We labor
conscientiously and with patience, to teach our babies shame. We
degrade the human body, we befoul the habits of nature, we desecrate
life, teaching evil and foolish falsehood to our defenceless little
children. The "sex-taboos" of darkest savagery, the decencies and
indecencies of primitive convention, we have preserved throughout the
ages in our guarded temple of ancient idols, and in that atmosphere we
rear the child.

The heaviest drag on progress is the persistence of race-habits and
traditions, once natural and useful, but long since outgrown. The main
stronghold of this body of tradition is in that uneducated, undeveloped,
unorganized, lingering rudiment of earlier social forms--the
woman-servant group of primitive industries, in which our children grow.

We have cried out against the crushing restriction of old religions;
and, going farther, have seen that these religions have their strongest
hold on the woman and the child. It is here suggested that it is not
the religion that keeps down the woman and renews its grip on each new
generation of children, but that it is the degraded status of the woman
and her influence on the child which made possible such religions in the
first instance, and which accounts for their astonishing persistence in
modern times.

In the atmosphere of the nursery each child re-learns continually the
mental habits of a remote and lowly past. His sense of duty is a
personal one, it is obligation; and justified when we attempt to justify
it by the beneficent services of the parent. This parental religion
naturally pictures God as a parent--a father of course, and people as
his children. We, as his children, are to love and serve and glorify
him, and he to take care of us, parentally.

Coming out into the world of which he has been taught nothing, the young
man finds no corroboration whatever for this theory. He does not see
the alleged grounds of the religious views given him, and so he drops
his religion altogether.

If he had early been shown God in a thousand beautiful common instances,
as ever-present, unescapable, and beneficent Law--the sure, sound
constant force of life, then he would find the same God still visibly at
work in the world of love and labor, and not lose his religion by
outgrowing his nursery.

Instead of personal gratitude for personal service as a cause for good
behavior, he should be shown that his parents and teachers serve him and
other children because so best is the human race improved; and that he,
and the other children, owe their life's service to the same great body,
to the human race. This ideal would need neither patching nor
enlargement, but would last unbroken through life.

Our nursery-bred consciences suffer personally for personal sins, with
morbid keenness, but are stone blocks of indifference to the collective
sins which are the major evils of life to-day. A man may pointed out to
us as a wholesale malefactor, a dealer in bad meat, a poisoner of the
public mind through a degraded press, an extortioner, liar, doer of
uncounted evil; we reply that he is a "moral man"--that his personal
relations are excellent; and, if one continues to complain, we say,
"What has he done to you?"

Personality is the limit of our moral sense, the steady check to growth
in ethical understanding, as it is in economics, and in art. The normal
growth of the human soul to-day is into a wide, fluent, general relation
with mankind; and a deeper more satisfying and _workable_ conception of
God than we ever knew before. In our nursery-mindedness we face the
problems of civic morality, catching visible offenders and shutting them
in a closet, sending them supperless to bed, hurting and depriving them
in various ways, as blindly, stupidly and unprofitably as a woman spanks
her child.

Children reared in a democratic, scientific, broadly educative
atmosphere, would grow up able to see the absurdity of our primitive
institutions--but such an atmosphere does not originate in and cannot be
brought into the nursery.

As an inevitable reaction from nursery-government, the child finds
joyous relief in sheer riot and self-will. The behavior of our boys in
college shows well their previous uneducated and ill-educated condition.
The persistence of "hazing" among twentieth century persons old enough
to go to school, shows the weakness of nursery culture. This is a
custom prevalent among low savage races, known as "initiation by
torture." Its reason--if it ever had any--was to outdo nature's
cruelest and most wasteful methods, and to prepare for a life of
struggle and pain by a worse experience to begin with. About the age of
puberty, when body and mind are both sensitive, this pleasant rite took
place. Those who survived it, habituated to cruelty and unreason, were
thereby fitted to live cruel and unreasonable lives--and did so.

Race-customs, as old as this, die hard. They have to be understood,
condemned, opposed, and educated out of us. Our small children get no
such education. They, as a class, get no influence tending to uplift
and develop their sociological status. Clever and "well-trained" they
may be; well-loved and well--at least, expensively-dressed. But as soon
as they escape the nursery bounds, out pops the primeval savage,
unrestrained. These young students, with their revolting practices,
ought to know that they are in the social stage with cannibalism,
voudooism, fetich-worship; and to be hot with shame at their condition.
It is the race's babyhood,--a drooling, fumbling, infantile
folly--manifested almost to adult age. That it endures is due to our
nursery-mindedness.

About the little child should cluster and concentrate the noblest forces
of our latest days, our highest wisdom and deepest experience, our most
subtle skill. Such wisdom, skill and experience do not exist in the
average young woman, albeit a mother; still less in her low-class,
ignorant serving-maids. A wider, deeper love would desire better
environment for the child, more foresight and more power would provide
it. But our love, though intense, is narrow and largely childish--the
mother has not long left the influence of her own nursery; and neither
wisdom nor power grew there. Some day our women will see this. They
will understand at last what womanhood is for, and the power and glory
of civilized motherhood. They will see that the educative influences of
the first few years are pre-eminently important, and prepare for them as
assiduously as they prepare to give a college education to older
children.

The baby is a new human soul, learning Life. He should have about him
from the first, Truth and Order, with a sequence of impressions which
great minds have labored to prepare. He should have his mother's love,
his father's care, his brother's and sister's society; his home's
seclusion; and he should also have from his earliest days, a place to
share with many other children, and the love and care and service of
such guides and teachers as are most fit to help the growing of the
world.

We have gone far indeed in those things we learn after we leave home.
In our trades and professions, our arts and sciences, in the broad
avenues of the world's life, we have made great progress--albeit
hampered always to some extent by our nursery-mindedness.

But in our own personal relations we are stagnant, hide-bound, inert.
Our littleness, our morbidness, our self-consciousness, our narrowness,
our short-sightedness, our oppressive, insistent, omnipresent
personality--all these still crush us down. Bumptious with a good
child's complacency, grieving with a bad child's remorse, indifferent
and rebellious as ill-trained children are, we live unawakened among
social laws. We enjoy when we can; we suffer much--and needlessly; but
we seem incapable of taking hold of our large world-questions and
settling them.

It is only an apparent limitation. We are quite capable were we but
taught so. What hinders us is Nursery-Mindedness.

A VILLAGE OF FOOLS

There was a certain village, a little village on a little stream; and
the inhabitants thereof were Fools.

By profession they were tillers of the soil; and they kept beasts,
beasts of burden, and beasts to furnish meat. They lived upon the
products of their tillage, and upon the beasts, and upon fish from the
stream.

The Wise said, "This is a good village. There is land to furnish food,
and beasts in plenty, and a good stream flowing steadily from the
tree-clothed hills. These people should prosper well."

They did not know that the people of the village were Fools; Utter
Fools. Observe now their Foolishness! They cut down the trees of the
hills to make their fires withal; many and great fires, without stint or
hindrance; and presently there was no more any forest upon the hills to
cover them. Then the moist breath of the cloud-building forest was
dried away; and the thick wet sponge about the roots of the forest was
dried away; and the snow slid down the hills as it slides down steep
roof gables; and the rain ran down the narrow valleys as it runs down
gutter pipes; and the village was swept by floods in flood time, and lay
parched and thirsty in the dry season. And the people of the village
called the flood an Act of God, and they called the drought an Act of
God; for they were Fools.

Their fields they tilled continuously, for they needs must eat;
gathering from the good ground year after year, and generation after
generation, till the ground became sour and stale, and was bad ground
and bore no fruit.

"Surely," said the Wise, "they will gather from the stables of their
beasts and from the village that which shall enrich their soil and make
it bear fruit again."

They did not know that the people of the Village were Fools.

Thus did they with their beasts. They kept them thick in their village;
draught animals and burden-bearers; and from the defiled streets arose a
Plague of Flies, and tormented the people, so that they fell sick of
divers diseases. And they themselves crowded together ever more
thickly, till all the village became unsavory and unfit for human
habitation. Then they arose, wagging their heads sagaciously; and with
vast labor and expense they gathered together from their stables and
their habitations all that which should enrich the soil and produce
fruit again; and they poured it carefully into the stream. Now this was
the stream from which they drank; and when they drank their diluted
diseases they fell sick anew, and many died.

Also the fish fed upon this filth, and they also absorbed diseases; and
the people fed upon the fish which had fed upon the filth, and again
fell sick, and many died.

And those who died they carefully wrapped up in many coverings and laid
in the ground--them and their diseases with them--that the seeds thereof
might be fostered eternally, and continually came forth anew.

But the Wise burned their dead in clean fire, cherishing their memories
in their hearts, but not their slowly deteriorating remains in the dark
earth. And the wise kept their forests as a wild garden, planting as
well as reaping; having wood therefrom at need, and always the green
beauty and the cool shade, the moist winds and carpet of held water over
the hill slopes.

Their streams were pure and steady, tree shadowed and grass bordered
from end to end; for a tree beareth food as well as a field, and is
planted in a moment and the young tree cometh up as the old tree dieth.

And their fields they fed continually, so that they bore more rather
than less from year to year, and they prospered and did not die of
hand-made diseases.

But they knew not their own wisdom, for these things it seemed to them
that even Fools might see, and do accordingly.

Neither did the Fools know their own foolishness.

WHAT DIANTHA DID

CHAPTER VI.

THE CYNOSURE.

It's a singular thing that the commonest place
Is the hardest to properly fill;
That the labor imposed on a full half the race
Is so seldom performed with good will--
To say nothing of knowledge or skill!

What we ask of all women, we stare at in one,
And tribute of wonderment bring;
If this task of the million is once fitly done
We all hold our hands up and sing!
It's really a singular thing!

Isabel Porne was a cautious woman, and made no acclaim over her new
acquisition until its value was proven. Her husband also bided his
time; and when congratulated on his improved appearance and air of
contentment, merely vouchsafed that his wife had a new girl who could
cook.

To himself he boasted that he had a new wife who could love--so cheerful
and gay grew Mrs. Porne in the changed atmosphere of her home.

"It is remarkable, Edgar," she said, dilating repeatedly on the peculiar
quality of their good fortune. "It's not only good cooking, and good
waiting, and a clean house--cleaner than I ever saw one before; and it's
not only the quietness, and regularity and economy--why the bills have
gone down more than a third!"

"Yes--even I noticed that," he agreed.

"But what I enjoy the most is the _atmosphere,_" she continued. "When I
have to do the work, the house is a perfect nightmare to me!" She
leaned forward from her low stool, her elbows on her knees, her chin in
her hands, and regarded him intently.

"Edgar! You know I love you. And I love my baby--I'm no unfeeling
monster! But I can tell you frankly that if I'd had any idea of what
housework was like I'd never have given up architecture to try it."

"Lucky for me you hadn't!" said he fondly. "I know it's been hard for
you, little girl. I never meant that you should give up
architecture--that's a business a woman could carry on at home I
thought, the designing part anyway. There's your 'drawing-room' and all
your things--"

"Yes," she said, with reminiscent bitterness, "there they are--and there
they might have stayed, untouched--if Miss Bell hadn't come!"

"Makes you call her "Miss Bell" all the time, does she?"

Mrs. Porne laughed. "Yes. I hated it at first, but she asked if I
could give her any real reason why the cook should be called by her
first name more than the seamstress or governess. I tried to say that
it was shorter, but she smiled and said that in this case it was
longer!--Her name is Diantha--I've seen it on letters. And it is one
syllable longer. Anyhow I've got used to Miss Bell now."

"She gets letters often?"

"Yes--very often--from Topolaya where she came from. I'm afraid she's
engaged." Mrs. Porne sighed ruefully.

"I don't doubt it!" said Mr. Porne. "That would account for her six
months' arrangement! Well, my dear--make hay while the sun shines!"

"I do!" she boasted. "Whole stacks! I've had a seamstress in, and got
all my clothes in order and the baby's. We've had lot of dinner-parties
and teas as you know--all my "social obligations" are cleared off!
We've had your mother for a visit, and mine's coming now--and I wasn't
afraid to have either of them! There's no fault to be found with my
housekeeping now! And there are two things better than that--yes,
three."

"The best thing is to see you look so young and handsome and happy
again," said her husband, with a kiss.

"Yes--that's one. Another is that now I feel so easy and lighthearted I
can love you and baby--as--as I _do!_ Only when I'm tired and
discouraged I can't put my hand on it somehow.

He nodded sympathetically. "I know, dear," he said. "I feel that way
myself--sometimes. What's the other?"

"Why that's best of aIl!" she cried triumphantly. "I can Work again!
When Baby's asleep I get hours at a time; and even when he's awake I've
fixed a place where he can play--and I can draw and plan--just as I used
to--_better_ than I used to!"

"And that is even more to you than loving?" he asked in a quiet
inquiring voice.

"It's more because it means _both!_" She leaned to him, glowing, "Don't
you see? First I had the work and loved it. Then you came--and I loved
you--better! Then Baby came and I loved him--best? I don't know--you
and baby are all one somehow."

There was a brief interim and then she drew back, blushing richly. "Now
stop--I want to explain. When the housework got to be such a
nightmare--and I looked forward to a whole lifetime of it and _no_
improvement; then I just _ached_ for my work--and couldn't do it! And
then--why sometimes dear, I just wanted to run away! Actually! From
_both_ of you!--you see, I spent five years studying--I was a _real_
architect--and it did hurt to see it go. And now--O now I've got It and
You too, darling! _And_ the Baby!--O I'm so happy!"