Golden mean

The Golden mean appears as the moral horizon of a housewife whose existence is confined to usefulness. In this passage, the ideal of moderation is not a freely chosen virtue: it is the consequence of a life organized around maintaining a home, with little access to the open future in which daring, freedom, and invention become possible.

Meaning in Context

The passage links the Golden mean to the housewife’s daily work of producing and preserving food, clothing, and shelter. These are necessary means, but they remain intermediaries between animal life and free existence. Because the housewife is valued chiefly for being useful to her family, usefulness becomes the standard through which she apprehends both her own worth and the wider world. The text calls this her “Aristotelian morality of the golden mean, of mediocrity”: an ethic in which moderation marks not chosen balance but the limits imposed on a life.

Utility and Confinement

The argument turns on a contrast between means and ends. A person unable to satisfy themselves with an inessential role may elevate its means into absolute values; for the housewife, utility consequently reigns above truth, beauty, and freedom. Her work demands the monotonous repetition of maintaining necessities, and she is occupied without being able to direct her life toward a goal of her own. The resulting outlook is described as cautious and practical, but the passage explains it through dependence rather than treating it as an inherent feminine character.

The image of a woman shut in a kitchen or boudoir makes the argument spatial. A restricted horizon produces restricted expectations; the text rejects the accusation that women lack daring or grandeur when their freedom to act has been curtailed. Its image of wings cut off before a woman is blamed for not flying makes the Golden mean part of a broader critique: a condition created by confinement is misread as a personal moral or intellectual deficiency.

Social Consequences

The same restriction helps explain why a woman may be confined to her self and home and then criticized for narcissism, vanity, or selfishness. The passage argues that she has been denied concrete communication and solidarity beyond her family, while the household remains the only familiar sphere in which she can exercise a precarious sovereignty. The domestic ethic of usefulness and moderation thus belongs to a social arrangement that narrows both action and connection—not to an unchanging nature.

The passage also distinguishes a woman’s capacities from the opportunities made available to her. When engaged in an undertaking worthy of a human being, she can be as active, effective, silent, and ascetic as a man. The Golden mean’s significance lies in that contrast: what appears to be a settled feminine morality is shown instead as an adaptation to a life deprived of wider purposes and an open future.