Introduction
When we examine our ideas carefully, it is surprising how few of them are as new as we are inclined to think. Take the current trend away from the "nuclear" family and the advocacy by many people of various forms of communal living. Communes, of course, have been with us throughout recorded history, and it seems extremely probable that the first cavemen practiced exactly such a form of living. Shedding even more light on the longevity of the idea, however, is a book called The Home, Its Work and Influence by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This important work has recently been reissued by the University of Illinois Press -but it was originally published in 1903.
Charlotte Gilman was a poet, wit, and radical social critic. Of her work, William L. O'Neill has said, "Of all the great feminist writers, she made the finest analysis of the relation between domesticity and women's rights, perhaps the most troubling question for liberated women and sympathetic men today.... Her analysis of the house as workshop, of its effects on children and adults, and of the home's negative social consequences are superb. Most of this remains as true of our time as it was of hers."
Indeed, most of Ms. (she deserves the title, even if it hadn't been invented in her time) Gilman's book sounds as if it had been written in 1972. She raised serious questions about the privacy and sanctity of the traditional home, as well as its value as a place to raise children and its social and economic usefulness.
Writing at the turn of the century, Ms. Gilman advocated a "kitchenless" home with centralized facilities for meals, child care, and cleaning. She stressed that the home has not developed in proportion to our other institutions. Among other things, she said, "Our domestic economy is the most wasteful department of life... 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."
Gilman made a brilliant expose of "domestic mythology" and argued in favor of doing away with the idea of privacy in the home, especially for children. She discussed the "myths" of the sanctity of the home, of women creating beauty in the home, and of the maternal instinct itself. According to her, mothers' instincts are often inadequate, so that the care and feeding of children was "still at a disgraceful level." Throughout her work, she was most concerned with women. She found the female sex to be isolated and confined, wasting tithe and energy in the "undeveloped household industry" and with lives spent "pitifully behind in the march of events."
Modern as Charlotte Gilman's thinking was, we are in constant need of fresh and current reappraisals of this problem. And in The Disciplined Daughter, author Kipp Cameron demonstrates that such reappraisals can be made as validly in fiction as they can in nonfiction.
The Disciplined Daughter is the story of two homes-two radically different kinds of homes. It is also the story of Jodie Hamilton, a young girl on the verge of awakening womanhood, who sees those homes from the best possible vantage point. Jodie is utterly feminine, and her reactions are distinctly female. In the end, as in all worthwhile fiction, she makes her own judgment, but along the way the reader has been given enough evidence to be able to decide whether he agrees with that judgment or not.
In the beginning, Jodie is shown as the product of an upbringing in a strictly traditional home. She has been happy there in spite of the rigidly old-fashioned atmosphere old-fashioned rigidity of her parents' beliefs. A crisis develops, however, when Jodie is disciplined and punished for a "crime" she did not commit-a crime, indeed, of which she was almost the helpless victim. She flees to the only person who can help her, who happens to be her Uncle Dick, her father's much younger and thoroughly liberated brother. Dick has, in fact, been written off by the rest of the family as a hippie, and the life Jodie enters into with him is very much like life in a small commune. It is primitive and crude in many ways, without any of the comforts and luxuries Jodie has been accustomed to. But here, at least, she expects to find justice and peace after having been treated so unjustly.
Mr. Cameron paints a vivid picture of the contrasts between these two homes and convincingly portrays Jodie's reactions to them. From a life of total repression, for instance, Jodie enters one of unlimited sensuality. It goes almost without saying that it is difficult to adjust, but some sort of adjustment is essential. The adjustment Jodie makes at the stunning climax is an unexpected compromise in which she takes the best from two worlds and adds something uniquely individual of her own. It makes for a highly entertaining story, and one that will give the reader a good deal to think about.
-The Publishers Chatsworth, Cal. September, 1972