There is some similar arrest in the development of the social consciousness; else our cities would not sit gnawing and tearing at themselves, indifferent to dirt, disease, or vice, and enjoying only physical comfort. If any operation should give sudden new light to this long-clouded civic brain, we might feel the same horror of the years behind us, but not the same hopelessness--society is immortal.
It is here suggested that one check to the social development proper to our time is the pressure of the rudimentary home. We are quite willing to admit that a home life we consider wrong, as the Chinese or Turkish, can paralyse a nation. We have even come to see that the position of women is a good gauge of progress. Is it so hard, then, to admit at least a possibility that the position of our women, the nature of our homes, may have some important influence upon our social growth? There is no demand that we destroy the home, any more than that we destroy the women, _but we must change their relative position_.
The brain is the medium of social contact, the plane of human development. The savage is incapable of large relation because his mental area is not big enough; he is not used to such extensive combinations. Where the brain is accustomed only to incessant consideration of its own private interests, and to direct personal service of those interests, it is thereby prevented from developing the capacity for seeing the public interests, and for indirect collective service of those interests. The habit, continuous and unrelieved, of thinking in a small circuit checks the power to think in a large circuit.
This arrested brain development, this savage limitation to the personal, and mainly to the physical, is what we have so rigidly enforced upon women. The primitive home to the primitive mind is sufficient; but the progress of the mind requires a commensurate progress of the home--and has not had it. Owing to our peculiar and unnatural division of life-area, half the race has been free to move on, and so has accomplished much for all of us; but the other half, being confined to the same position it occupied in the infancy of society, has been denied that freedom and that progress. Owing again to the inexorable reunion of these divided halves in each child, physical heredity does what it can to bridge the gulf, the ever-widening gulf; pouring into the stationary woman some share of the modern abilities of social man; and also forcing upon the moving man some share of the primitive disabilities of the domestic woman. We thus have a strange and painful condition of life.