The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909 1910)

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

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"O I don't insist!" I cried. "I don't want to cook--I want to draw!
But I thought--Lois said--How she has misunderstood you!"

"It is not true, always, my dear," said he, "that the way to a man's
heart is through his stomach; at least it's not the only way. Lois
doesn't know everything, she is young yet! And perhaps for my sake you
can give it up. Can you sweet?"

Could I? Could I? Was there ever a man like this?

WHOLESALE HYPNOTISM

We are beginning to see some glimmering of new truth concerning the art
of suggestion.

Here is some one with a strong will who imposes upon you a definite
idea--"This napkin is a peach; a luscious, ripe peach," insists the
hypnotizer; and the hypnotized bites at the napkin with every appearance
of delight.

It is said that those once thoroughly hypnotized, surrendering their own
observation and judgement and submitting absolutely to the ideas
impressed upon their minds by others, become thereafter less able to
think and act for themselves, and more and more open to suggestion.

We begin to see this of the individual mind, but we have not yet seen
its application to the race mind.

Suggestion is a force acting upon us all, as is well known to the
politician and the advertiser, but it acts most strongly upon the weak
and those unaccustomed to using their own minds, as is completely shown
in children.

It is the susceptibility to suggestion which makes children so easily
swayed by the influence of their companions; so ready to follow the
leader who says "let's play" this or that: nearly all join in, and a
group of children used to such leadership will stand about rather
helplessly if deprived of it.

It is that extreme susceptibility which makes the church say "Give us
the first five years of a child's life, and he will never outgrow our
influence!" Children, of all people, are most open to the power of
suggestion.

Now observe the cumulative action of this power, applied to the youth of
humanity, and in each generation further applied to each individual
youth. Certain ideas first grasped in ages of dark savagery, or even
previous to that, and then believed to be of supreme importance, were
forcibly impressed upon the minds of children, all children, generation
after generation. To select one simple instance, observe the use of the
fear-motive in controlling the young.

Among animals there are two main modifiers of conduct, desire and fear.
They act either to gratify a desire or to avoid a danger.

The young animal does not know his dangers, and it is imperative that he
should know them. In those higher species where parental education is
developed, the mother shows her young what things are good for it, and
teaches it the terror necessary. The little bird or beast must squat
and be still, must stay in the cave or lie hid in the grass; lest the
fox, hawk, lion, or whatever enemy is to be dreaded should pounce upon
it. And this pre-human method of culture has come down to its through
long lines of savages with their real and fancied bugaboos to terrorize
the young; through ancient and modern races; through the warrior mothers
and nurses using "Napoleon" or "The Black Douglas" as the impending
danger, to the same primitive, ignorant custom to-day--"The Goberlins
'll git yer, if you don't watch out"!

The "pain economy" and "fear economy" of the beast and savage are long
left behind, but we preserve and artificially enforce the fear
instinct--by suggestion. We hypnotize our children generation after
generation, with disciplinary dread, and rely so wholly upon it to
enforce good behavior that our citizens see no preventive of crime
except fear of punishment.

Similarly we impress on the helplessly receptive minds of our children,
whose earliest years are passed under the influence of uneducated
house-servants, the ancient, foolish prejudices and misconceptions of
our dark past. If the expanding mind of the little child could be
surrounded by the influences of our highest culture, instead of our
lowest; and above all things be taught to _use its own power_--to
observe, deduce, and act accordingly, and be carefully shielded from the
cumulative force of age-old falsehood and folly, we should have a set of
people who would look at life with new eyes. We could see things as
they are, and judge for ourselves what conduct was needed, whereas now
we see things as we have been taught they are; and believe, because we
have been told so, that we cannot alter conditions.

It is not lack of mental capacity which blinds us; not lack of power
which chains us; but we are hypnotized--and have been for a thousand
thousand years--with carefully invented lies.

"You can't alter human nature." Who says so? _Is it true?_ Is there
no difference between the nature of the modern American and the nature
of a Fiji Islander? Do they respond alike under the same conditions?
Are their impulses and governing tendencies the same?

Human nature has altered from its dim beginnings, under the action of
changed conditions, just as dog-nature has altered from fierce wolf and
slinking jackal to the dear loved companion of mankind.

There are some properties common to all natures; some common to each
race and species; some common to special strains and families; but of
all "natures" human nature, the broadest, most complex, most recent, is
_most easily_ alterable.

Let that sink in. Be hypnotized the other way for awhile!

You Can Alter Human Nature!

We are naturally displeased with human nature as we see it about us. It
so inert--so subservient--so incredibly dull.

Put yourself in the place of a bright youngster, two hundred years
hence, looking back at these suffering times. Suppose he is studying
"ancient history," and has been given pictures and books describing the
life of our day. "But _why_ did they live so?" he will ask. "Weren't
they people like us? Couldn't they see--hear--feel? Hadn't they arms
and hands and brains? Here's this--this--what do you call it?
'Overcrowding in cities.' What made them overcrowd?" Then the
professor will have to explain. "It was their belief that governed
them. They believed that economic laws necessitated all that kind of
thing. Everybody believed it."

"But how _could_ they believe it? They had intelligence; look at the
things they invented, the scientific discoveries they made, the big
businesses they managed! What _made_ them believe it?" And unless the
professor understands the peculiar effect of race-hypnotism he will be
pushed for an answer.

What indeed makes us believe that so many human beings have to remain
inferior to so few; that this kind of animal cannot be improved and
elevated like any other kind? What makes us believe that because one
man is inferior to another, therefore the other must take advantage of
him? What makes us believe that while the wide earth responds
submissively to our modifying hand; while we master arts and sciences,
develop industries, probe mysteries, achieve marvels; we are, and must
ourselves remain a set of helpless, changeless undesirables?

"But," the professor will say to the child, "they _felt_ thus and so,
you see." "Felt!" that sturdy son of the future will say, "Didn't they
know that feeling could be changed as easy as anything?"

It will be hard indeed, when human nature is altered a little more, to
make it patient with the besotted conviction of unalterableness that
paralyzes it now.

A baby's opening mind should be placed among the most beautiful and
rational conditions, specially arranged for easy observation and
deduction. It should be surrounded by persons of the best wisdom now
ours; and whatever it may lack of what we do not yet know to be true, it
should be religiously guarded from what we do know to be false.

Every college should have its course in Humaniculture, and the most
earnest minds should be at work to steadily raise the standard of that
new science.

New concepts, broad and beautiful, should be implanted in each young
mind; this mighty power of suggestion being used by the highest, to lift
us up, instead of by the lowest, to keep us down.

What a simple process! What a blessed change! At present the child
mind is entrusted to the most ignorant, and taught the oldest lies.
Soon we shall entrust it only to the most wise and teach it the newest
truths.

[Untitled]

Sit up and think!
The life in you is Life--unlimited!
You rose--you'll sink--
But Life goes on--that isn't dead.

THE KITCHEN FLY

The ills that flesh is heir to are not all entailed.

We used to think that diseases were special afflictions sent by God, to
be borne with meek endurance. Now we have learned that some of them
grow in us like plants in a garden, that some we give to one another as
presents, and some we keep as pets.

Many little go-betweens we have discovered, with legs and wings, who
operate as continual mischief-makers, and among these at last looms
large and deadly, that most widespread and intimate of pests--the Common
Fly.

The House Fly is his most familiar name, but that should be changed. He
is not of his own nature a parlor fly, nor a library fly, nor a bedroom
fly; an attic fly nor a hall and stair fly; but he is _par excellence_
the Kitchen Fly.

Flies are not perennial bloomers. They have to be born--hatched from
eggs, and the resultant larva have to have a Congenial Medium to be born
in. The careful mother fly does not leave her little flock on a
mahogany center table. Flies have to eat; they eat all the things we
do, and many that we don't!

There are two main nurseries for the Common Fly in all our cities, yes,
and in our country homes as well--the Stable and the Kitchen.

Unless stables are kept with the most absolute cleanliness flies are
bred there.

Unless kitchens are kept in the most absolute cleanliness flies are bred
there--or therefrom! Moreover the smell of hot food draws flies from
afar; a kitchen even though spotless and screened is a constant bait for
flies.

I was once visiting in a fine clean summer camp in the Adirondacks,
where friends in combination did the work. In the main room of this
place was a wide long window--one great picture, framing the purple
hills. It was a good deal of work to clean that window, and we took
turns at it. One day this window was laboriously polished inside and
out by an earnest gentleman of high ideals. Then--in the kitchen--some
one cooked a cabbage. Forthwith that front-room window was black with
flies--big, bumping, buzzing, blue-bottle flies. To slay them was a
carnage--and they were carried out by the dustpanful.

In the country, by screening every window and door, by constant watch
upon each article of food to keep it covered, one may keep one's own
flies bumping vainly on the outside of one's own house--except when
people go in and out, and the ever-ready buzzer darts in before the
swing-door shuts.

But in the city, where a million homes maintain their million
fly-baiting kitchens, and each kitchen maintains its garbage pail, the
problem becomes more serious.

Let us face this fact. In the residence part of a city the kitchen is
almost the only source of dirt.

The kitchen-stove furnishes its quota of coal-dust, coal-gas and coal
ashes. But for the kitchen a heating plant could warm many blocks of
houses, and keep that source of dirt at a minimum, thus clearing our
streets of the ash-can and ash-cart nuisances.

The kitchen is wholly responsible for the garbage pail; each area or
alley gate offering for inspection and infection its unsavory
receptacle; and beyond that, the kitchen is in large measure responsible
for the stable. In the quiet streets where people live, the horses
which defile those streets, which break the quiet, wear the pavement,
and wring the hearts of lovers of animals, are almost all kitchen
horses.

At early dawn the milkman's horse--many milkmen's horses. Then the
baker's horse--many bakers' horses. Then the iceman's horse, the
fishman's horse, the market man's horse, the vegetable man's horse, the
grocer's horse, the confectioner's horse; with, of course, the ashman's
horse, the garbage man's horse, and the coal man's horse. All these
horses and their various stables, help to maintain the breeding of
flies; and the kitchen maintains them.

Nobody ever liked flies. The rigorous housewife has long pursued them
with waving towel and flapping paper; dark plates of fly poison are set
on high places where the children can only occasionally get it; and the
dreadful "tanglefoot" hangs here and there, agonizing our ears with the
frantic buzzing of its slow-dying victims.

The housewife objected to the fly because he made work for her,
speckling all things offensively; and the house-husband objected to him
because he walked on his face, or his bald spot, and woke him from
needed slumber.

Also no one likes flies floating dankly in the soup, disguised as
currants, or sacrificing their legs to the butter. But these distastes
are as nothing to the new Terror of the Fly. He is now seen to be a
purveyor of disease--we might say _the_ purveyor of disease.

The cat and the dog, the rat and the mouse and their small parasites are
responsible for some diseases. The deadly Anopheles only brings
malaria, even the Stegonyia has but one fever in his gift, albeit a
yellow one; but Musca Domestica deposits on our food, on our clothing,
on our pillows, on our very faces, according to the N. Y. Medical
Journal, the germs of "tuberculosis, leprosy, cholera, summer diarrhea
of children, plague, carbuncle, yaws, tapeworm, swine-plague and typhoid
fever."

Now that is a nice beast to have in the house! And more especially that
is a nice beast to breed in the house, to maintain, feed, shelter, and
encourage.

When shall we be willing to face the simple fact that the preparation of
food is not a suitable process for the home?

The vegetarian will say that if we eliminate meat all will be well; let
him read again my tale of the Cabbage and the Bluebottle. But meat is
unquestionably the worst of our food supply as far as flies are
concerned. The fly delights in the voluminous cow, even while alive;
thrives in her stable, makes free with her milk, and follows her from
steak to soup with ceaseless interest. If we had no meat, no fish, no
milk, no cheese, no butter, no eggs, we should reduce our bait a little;
but there would still remain plenty of fly provender, and also the
horses to bring it to our myriad doors.

Why not keep the food and leave out the fly?

Let us for once fairly face the possibility of a home without a kitchen.

Look at it--a real house, in no way different from any other house in
front. But it does differ in the back--for it has no back! Its back is
another front, just as pretty, just as dignified, just as _clean._
There is a dining-room in this house, cool, sweet, well-screened from
passing, vagrant winged things, but that is all; no kitchen, no
kitchen-sink, no raw meat coming in and garbage going out, no grease, no
smell of frying.

But how shall we get our food into our dining-rooms?

It will be delivered, cooked, in shining aluminium receptacles hot and
steaming, cold and fresh--all this _has been done._ And it and its
dishes, will go away again, tight-closed, leaving you to brush up the
crumbs and fold the tablecloth. If you want your own elaborate sets of
china enough to wash dishes, that is quite permissible, a butler's
pantry will take care of that.

There is no more reason why a civilized family should cook its own food
in its own kitchen than kill its own pig in its own backyard.

Then rises the pathetic cry about not liking it. Of course some people
won't like it. Some people never like any new way of doing things.
Food habits are proverbially hard to change.

But I can tell you who will like it--that is the woman who is tired of
planning meals, tired of ordering meals, tired of managing servants, or
tired--deadly tired--of her own cooking.

And one generation of children, growIng up in kitchenless homes, eating
food that is prepared by trained experts and not by "greenhorns," used
to science and art in the food supply instead of affection and
ignorance--they will like it.

We like what we are used to, and if we have been used to it for a
thousand years we like it more intensely. But that proves nothing at
all except that we are used to it. It does not prove the thing is good
for us--nor that we can not get used to something better and like that,
in course of time, just as devotedly. One would think, observing the
attitude of most of us toward any proposed change, that so far we had
never changed at all.

But with all history behind us; with that long, long flight of little
steps we took so many centuries to climb, and then, closer, the swiftly
heightening large steps we have been taking in these later years ever
more swiftly; what then accounts for our always clinging so desperately
to the one behind, and resisting so furiously being forced up one more!

It is like the old story of the liberal-minded Grandma and the
combination suit. She visited her daughter in New York, resolved to
keep up with Progress.

They took her to hear Ignatius Donnelly with his Baconian theory;
Ingersoll hammering at Moses, and Jenness-Miller with her Reformed
Clothes for Women.

Then the old lady broke away and returned to her rural home. "They took
away my Shakespeare, and they took away my God," said she; "but when
they took away my chemise I couldn't stand it."

We have seen the home robbed and depleted as years have passed; with
struggle and objection, no doubt, but inevitably shrinking. Out went
the shears and the carders, out went the dye tub and the
spinning-wheels; big wool wheel, little flax wheel, all gone. Out went
the clattering loom; out went the quilting-frame, the candle-mould, the
little mallet to break up the tall blue-papered "sugar loaves."

Some of us have seen all these. In long remote places they are still to
be found. In the neighborhood of Chicago's Hull House was found a woman
to whom the spinning-wheel was a wonderful modern invention! She spun
with a spindle--like Clotho.

Now why do reasoning people, seeing all this behind them, so dread and
resist the next step before them--the eliminating of the kitchen? Shall
we never learn, that as a means of feeding the world it is not a
success? It does not bring health and happiness. Every competent woman
is not a competent cook and never will be; any more than every man is a
competent carpenter. The preparation of food is too important a task to
be left to a private servant--whether hired or married.

There are reasons, many, and good, why the kitchen must go; reasons of
health, of economy, of happiness; but this last reason is a good
accelerator--the Horror of the Fly.

Here he is by millions and millions: Here She is, by trillions. Their
hairy feet, their whiskered probosces, slop and paddle in every foul and
nauseous thing. They sit twiddling their paws on the pauper's sickbed;
and then twiddle those same paws on our warm chocolate-cake.

And every home that keeps a kitchen, with its attendant stables, helps
to maintain and disseminate this scourge of humanity, this universal
purveyor of infectious disease--The Kitchen Fly.

ALAS!

Have those in monstrous hats no glimmering dream
Of the high beauty of the human head,
House of the brain: seat of the sentient soul;
Haloed for sainthood; crowned for royalty;
Bright-ringed with roses, wreathed with noble bays,
Most beautifully bound with shining hair.

Alas for the soft glory they have lost!
Alas for the Ashantee wigs they wear!
Nor plait nor coil nor ringlet, but a mass
Of shorn dead hair from poorer women's heads.
Of bulging wire and hard, stiff, glittering bands.
A heap no loving hand would long to touch.

This body is the glory of the world;
The head the body's crown; but we on this
Plant like a fool's-cap these preposterous forms.
Alas for women's folly; and alas
For man, who likes his women to be fools,
And carefully has bred them to this end.

HER PETS

She saw the pleasant living creatures; bright birds, scattering music in
the air, fish like darting lights in the dark water; beasts with soft
eyes and softer fur. Therefore to her house she brought them, in chains
and cages and glaring jails of glass she kept them, prisoners and exiles
all.

Out of the plenteous, pure water, freshened by free air, darkened by
shadowing leaves and hidden ledges; away from pleasant chase of food
desired; come the gold-red fish she loves; come to foul airless water,
scant and warm, where they gasp faintly to and fro, in dim distress;
come to the stale monotonous food that falls to them inert; come with
their lidless eyes to the round high-placed globe of glass, set in a
window in the sun, reflecting and refracting the fierce light from every
side;--even as the Carthaginians tortured their prisoners she tortures
the gold-red fish she loves.

Out of the billowing green boughs of the forest, the endless oceans of
bright air, the refreshing rain, the winds that lift and rush and fill
with wild rejoicing; out of the whispering darkness of deep leaves, the
wide sweet light of sunlit hill and valley; away from pleasant chase of
food desired; come the yellow song birds which she loves; come over land
and sea in small tight wicker cells; come to prisons of gilded wires
scarce larger; come to the smothering house air, the dull constant
dreary walls, the sick heat, the smell of coal gas and the smoke of oil;
to such stale monotonous food as falls to them inert; to hop and hop and
hop, to sing madly to no end, and dream of flight,--to this come the
birds she loves.

Out of his long wild past; lifted to be assistant in the chase, house
guardian, brother shepherd; comes the friend of man to be the pet of
woman. Down, down, he sinks; no shepherd, no hunter, no guardian now;
far from the pleasant chase of food desired; only a pet, her pet.
Dwarfed, distorted, feeble; a snub-nosed monsterling; ears cropped, tail
cut, hair shaved in ludicrous patches; collared and chained; basketed,
blanketed, braceleted, _dressed,_--O last and utter ignominy!--stuffed
on unnatural food till he waddles grossly, panting and diseased; so
comes the dog she loves.

Of bird and beast and fish, her pets, what sacrifice is asked? They
must first lose freedom, the essential joy of every life; fresh air,
fresh water, the daily need of every life. They must lose the search
and chase of natural food, the major occupation of every animal,
deprived of which they are deprived of function; nerve, muscle,
brain,--all must deteriorate, disused. They must lose the joy of long
adaptation to environment; no few generations in houses can overcome the
longings bred in countless ages for sky and river, forest and plain and
hill.

They must lose--and has the mother of the world no pity?--the free use
of nature's overwhelming instincts, they must be denied the strongest
desire of life. The sorrowful mother of drowned kittens mourns under
the caressing hand that robbed her; the tumbling puppies are gone and
their mother finds no comfort, the little hen bird frets over a
scattered thread or feather, vainly striving to build a useless nest;
the little yellow-feathered lover shrills his heart out for the mate he
never sees.

The piercing clamor of bachelorhood enforced makes our nights hideous
with voices of sufferers free on roof and fence, or chained in yard and
kennel; and even--exquisite outrage! we surgically prepare for their
high position the pets we love.

Men, too, have pets, sometimes; men who are invalids, prisoners,
dwellers in lonely cabins; but not free human beings, working gladly in
a free human world.

WHAT DIANTHA DID

CHAPTER X

UNION HOUSE.

"We are weak!" said the Sticks, and men broke them;
"We are weak!" said the Threads, and were torn;
Till new thoughts came and they spoke them;
Till the Fagot and the Rope were born.

For the Fagot men find is resistant,
And they anchor on the Rope's taut length;
Even grasshoppers combined,
Are a force, the farmers find--
In union there is strength.

Ross Warden endured his grocery business; strove with it, toiled at it,
concentrated his scientific mind on alien tasks of financial calculation
and practical psychology, but he liked it no better. He had no interest
in business, no desire to make money, no skill in salesmanship.

But there were five mouths at home; sweet affectionate feminine mouths
no doubt, but requiring food. Also two in the kitchen, wider, and
requiring more food. And there were five backs at home to be covered,
to use the absurd metaphor--as if all one needed for clothing was a four
foot patch. The amount and quality of the covering was an unceasing
surprise to Ross, and he did not do justice to the fact that his
womenfolk really saved a good deal by doing their own sewing.

In his heart he longed always to be free of the whole hated load of
tradesmanship. Continually his thoughts went back to the hope of
selling out the business and buying a ranch.