Explore "The Yule Log and the Democrat" by G.K. Chesterton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A blasting sneer has stricken me from time to time, to the effect that I believe in the Fireside Woman. For that matter, in the present season, I believe very much in the Fireside Man. But the very word selected for this withering insinuation shows the shallowness of the philosophy which prompts it. Surely there could not be a more stunted stupidity than the suggestion that a thing must be mild and monotonous because it has to do with fire. Why should the woman be tame because she is nearest to the wildest thing in the world? It is much more absurd to say it is prosaic to live by the fireside, than to say it is prosaic to live upon the edge of a precipice. It is tenable that some people would be prosaic anywhere; but it is not the fault of the precipice.
It would sound paradoxical even in a fairy-tale to say that a princess was always yawning with ennui because she was introduced to a golden griffin or a crimson dragon; and in the round of daily fact, fire is about the nearest thing to a dragon that we know. Those who cannot get a fairy-tale out of the fire will not get it out of anything else. It may be affirmed, with fair certainty, that the people who talk most scornfully about the Fireside Woman do not get it at all, and do not wish her to get it at all. Herein lies all the absurdity of the alternatives to domesticity paraded by our progressive friends.