The family and its members
by Anna Garlin Spencer · English · Gutenberg #20645 · 748,979 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The family and its members
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: The family and its members
Author: Anna Garlin Spencer
Release date: February 21, 2007 [eBook #20645]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20645
Credits: Produced by Jeannie Howse and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS ***
Produced by Jeannie Howse and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
* * * * *
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Transcriber's Note: |
| |
| Inconsistent hyphenation and unusual spelling in the |
| original document have been preserved. |
| |
| Bold text is marked with ='s, italicized text with _'s |
| |
| Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in this |
| text. For a complete list, please see the end of this |
| document. |
| |
+-----------------------------------------------------------+
* * * * *
LIPPINCOTT'S
FAMILY LIFE SERIES
EDITED BY
BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, PH.D.
TEACHERS COLLEGE. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS
By ANNA GARLIN SPENCER
LIPPINCOTT'S HOME MANUALS
Edited by BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, PH.D.
Teachers College, Columbia University
CLOTHING FOR WOMEN
By LAURA I. BALDT, A.M., Teachers College, Columbia University.
454 Pages, 7 Colored Plates, 202 Illustrations in Text.
SUCCESSFUL CANNING AND PRESERVING
By OLA POWELL, Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.C. 425
Pages, 5 Colored Plates, 174 Illustrations in Text. Third
Edition.
HOME AND COMMUNITY HYGIENE
By JEAN BROADHURST, Ph.D. 428 Pages, 1 Colored Plate, 118
Illustrations in Text.
THE BUSINESS OF THE HOUSEHOLD
By C.W. TABER, Author of _Taker's Dietetic Charts_, _Nurses'
Medical Dictionary_, etc. 438 Pages. Illustrated. Second Edition,
Revised.
HOUSEWIFERY
By L. RAY BALDERSTON, A.M., Teachers College, Columbia
University. 351 Pages. Colored Frontispiece and 175 Illustrations
in Text.
LAUNDERING
By LYDIA RAY BALDERSTON, A.M., Instructor in Housewifery and
Laundering, Teachers College, Columbia University. 152
Illustrations.
HOUSE AND HOME
By GRETA GREY, B.S., Director of Home Economics Department,
University of Wyoming. Illustrated.
MILLINERY (_In Preparation_)
By EVELYN SMITH TOBEY, B.S., Teachers College, Columbia
University
LIPPINCOTT'S FAMILY LIFE SERIES
Edited by BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, PH.D.
Teachers College, Columbia University
CLOTHING--CHOICE, CARE, COST
By MARY SCHENCK WOOLMAN, B.S. 290 Pages. Illustrated. Second
Edition.
SUCCESSFUL FAMILY LIFE, ON THE MODERATE INCOME
By MARY HINMAN ABEL. 263 Pages.
THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS
By ANNA GARLIN SPENCER, Special Lecturer in Social Science,
Teachers College, Columbia University.
LIPPINCOTT'S FAMILY LIFE SERIES
EDITED BY BENJAMIN R. ANDREWS, PH.D., TEACHERS
COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
THE FAMILY
AND ITS
MEMBERS
BY
ANNA GARLIN SPENCER
SPECIAL LECTURER IN SOCIAL SCIENCE, TEACHERS COLLEGE OF
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, FORMERLY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE
NEW YORK SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL WORK, SPECIAL LECTURER AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN AND HACKLEY PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY
AND ETHICS AT MEADVILLE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL; AUTHOR OF
WOMAN'S SHARE IN SOCIAL CULTURE
PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PRINTED AT THE WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS
BY J.B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.
TO THE MOTHERS AND FATHERS, IN
NUMBER BEYOND COUNT, WHOSE
COURAGE, LOVE AND FAITHFULNESS
CARRY ONWARD THE GENERATIONS
AND KEEP THE MAIN CURRENTS
OF LIFE STRONG AND WHOLESOME.
INTRODUCTION
=A Threefold Aim.=--This book is based upon three theses--namely,
first, that the monogamic, private, family is a priceless inheritance
from the past and should be preserved; second, that in order to
preserve it many of its inherited customs and mechanisms must be
modified to suit new social demands; and third, that present day
experimentation and idealistic effort already indicate certain
tendencies of change in the family order which promise needed
adjustment to ends of highest social value.
Many learned books have been written concerning the evolution of sex,
the history of matrimonial institutions and the development of the
family. This volume is not an attempted rival of any of these. The
work of Havelock Ellis, of Le Tourneau, of Otis T. Mason, of Geddes
and Thompson, and others building upon the foundations laid by the
great pioneers in the study of the family, constitute a sufficient
mine of historical information and scientific analysis and evaluation.
The studies and suggestions of Olive Schreiner, Mrs. Clews Parsons,
Mrs. Helen Bosanquet, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Key and others
indicate the tendency of modern inquiry into the just basis of the
family order. The work of Professors Howard, Giddings, Thomas, Boss,
Goodsell, Calhoun, Patten, Dealey, Cooley, Ellwood, Todd and others in
college fields, shows the importance of the family and the necessity
of giving all that concerns it the most serious attention.
This book aims to begin where many of these students leave off and to
turn specific attention to the problems of personal and ethical
decision which now face men and women who would make their own married
life and parenthood successful. The past experience of the race is
drawn upon only in so far as it seems to explain present conditions
and point the way to future social and personal achievements.
=Basic Principles Underlying All Socially Useful Changes.=--A
fundamental principle in democracy is the right and duty of every
human being to develop a strong, noble and distinctive individuality.
For such development it is necessary that a person be self-supporting,
free of despotic control by others, and able and willing to bear equal
part with every other human being in the social order to which he or
she belongs.
This implies that no human being should be wholly sacrificed in
personal development to the service or welfare of any other human
being, or group of human beings, either inside or outside the family
circle. On the other hand, after temporary excursions into an extreme
individualism that ordained a free-for-all competition in every walk
of life, society is now keenly alive to the need for control of
personal desire and individual activity within channels of social
usefulness. It is beginning to be clearly seen that society has a
right to demand from any person or class of persons that form of
community service which definitely inheres in the social function
which is assumed by, or which devolves upon, such person or class of
persons. In the old days of "status," when each and every person found
himself in a place set for him and from which he could not depart,
there was only the duty of being content and useful in the "sphere of
life to which he was called." In the new condition of "contract," in
which each and every person in a democratic community finds himself at
liberty to use all common opportunities in the interest of his own
achievement, there is the duty of choice along every avenue of purpose
and of activity. This gives the new double call to the intelligence
and conscience; the call to become the best personality one can make
of oneself and the call to serve the common life to ends of social
well-being.
=The Sense of Kind and the Sense of Difference.=--Doctor Giddings
declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural
number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to
common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and
responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or
coöperation, as well as in unlike or competitive activity; and
becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, coherent through a
dominating consciousness of kind while always sufficiently conscious
of difference to insure a measure of individual liberty." Democracy
tends to enlarge the area of those who, while conscious of kind that
unites, are also keen in desire to develop in liberty any natural
difference which can make their personality felt as distinctive or
powerful. The individual differences among women were wholly ignored
in the past. They were never in reality all alike, as they were
commonly thought to be. The usual designation of a subject class lumps
all together as if all were the same. It is the mark of emergence from
the mass to the class, and from the class to the individual, that more
and more defines differences between persons. Women have now, for the
first time in the civilization called Christian, arrived at a point in
which differences between members of their sex can claim social
recognition. They are, therefore, now called upon as never before to
balance by conscious effort the personal desire and the social claim.
The family, more than any other inherited institution, feels the
oscillations between the individual demand for personal achievement
and the response to the social need for large service within group
relationships which now, for the first time, stir in the consciousness
of average women.
=The Family as We Know It Is the Central Nursery of Character.=--The
inevitable outcome of the new freedom, education and economic
opportunity of women gives us the problem of the modern family. The
ideal of the democracy we are trying to achieve is higher personality
in all the mass of the people. The method of democracy so far as we
can see is education, perfected and universalized, by which all the
children of each generation may be developed physically, mentally,
morally, and vocationally to their utmost excellence and power. The
family, as we have inherited it, is so far the central nursery and
school in this development. So far in the history of the race or in
its present social manifestation no rival institution, even the formal
school, offers an adequate substitute for the family in this beginning
of the educative process. The intimate and vital care and nurture of
the individual life still depends for the mass of the people upon the
private, monogamic, family. This intimate and vital care of the
children of each generation has so far in human experience cost women
large expenditure of time and strength; so large expenditure that
personal achievement has been wholly and is even now largely
subordinated to the social service implied in home-making. The deepest
problems of the modern family inhere in the effort to adjust the new
freedom of women, and its new demands for individual development in
customary lines of vocational work, to the ancient family claim. New
adjustments are called for not only in the family itself but in all
the educational, political, economic, and social arrangements of life
to accommodate this new demand of women to be achieving persons
whether married or single. Women have entered, as newly emerging from
status to contract, into a man-made social organization, a man-made
school, a man-made industrial order, and a man-made state.
Achievement, individual and successful, means to most of them, as to
any newly enfranchised class, the type of distinctive activity and
accomplishment which their elder brothers have outlined. The
antithesis, therefore, which now works toward acute problems in the
minds of both men and women is between the sort of achievement which
men have sought after and attained, and the sort of social service
which the past conditions required of women. Slowly it is being
perceived that in the actual family service, as it is now aided by
social mechanisms surrounding the household, is place and economic
opportunity for high personal achievement by competent women. Still
more slowly is it being apprehended that in the new adjustments of
economic and professional life there is or may be opportunity for
married women and mothers to serve the family in high measure and also
attain outside some distinctive vocational pride and satisfaction of
craftsmanship. Most slowly of all is it being understood that the
future calls for such modification of specialization in outside work
that men and women alike may serve the generations in family devotion
to the sort of work fathers and mothers have to do and yet cherish
some personal and ideal vocational effort which may sweeten and enrich
their lives.
=Vital Changes in All the Basic Institutions of Society.=--There are
five basic institutions in modern social organization. They may be
named the family, the school, the church, the industrial order, and
the state. They have all come to us as parts of our social inheritance
from time too remote to reckon. They have mingled and intermingled
their tendencies of control and influence in varieties of social
functioning too numerous to mention. They are now emerging to
distinctness only to be engaged in new forms of interaction that make
the highest ideals of each and all seem fundamentally akin.
The main tendency of development in all these institutions is,
however, identical and one clearly perceived. It is the tendency from
status to contract, from fixed order to flexible adjustment, from
static to dynamic condition, already noted in regard to the family.
In the school we have moved and are now moving from an aristocracy of
command, by which ancient life was reproduced, to a democracy of
comradeship in which it is aimed to make each generation improve upon
its predecessor. In the church, as it has moved from the family ritual
at the domestic fireside to the self-chosen altar of each worshipper
in the world's cathedrals, the reactionaries have held on to "the
faith once delivered to the saints" and the progressive minds have
moved to some new prophecy of the truth and right; until to-day, as
Professor Coe well says, "the aim of the modern church is to give
education in the art of brotherhood," and to evoke "faith in a
fatherly God and in a human destiny that outreaches all the accidents
of our frailty." In the industrial order, still in the trial stage of
conflict between the fixed status of the "hand" and the "master" and
the contract of equal partners in a coöperative enterprise, the
movement is steadily toward the social requirement of equality,
justice, and good-will. In the state we have achieved mechanical
expression of complete democracy. We still lack, and in our own
country woefully lack, the "spirit within the wheels" that can move
with power toward an actual government by the people, for the people,
and truly of the people. Yet by fire and sword and through blood and
suffering the handwriting of equality, justice, and fraternity has
been set in our Constitutions and Bills of Right. What remains to be
done is the socializing of the political mechanisms. That means simply
that we shall learn to live our democracy and be no longer content to
merely write it in law. The difficulty now is not so much to get a
good statement of democratic right as to make it work effectively in
common action. This fact makes it of doubtful wisdom that men and
women so often concentrate effort on the eighteenth-century
doctrinaire position of appeal for Constitutional Amendments and
blanket state legislation as if of themselves these could secure
actual personal liberty and social welfare. The objection that some
forward-looking persons have to the demand of the "National Woman's
Party," so called, for a Federal Amendment that shall "abolish all sex
discriminations in law" is not that its principle is too radical, but
that its method is too antiquated.
The business of the present and the immediate future is to so adjust
the family life to "two heads" as to keep love and to balance duties.
The next job is to adjust the family order itself to a contract system
of industry that gives each member of the family a free and often a
separating access to daily work and to its return in wages or salary,
in such manner as to retain family unity and mutual aid while giving
freedom and opportunity for each of its members. The pressing
political duty is to use the new voters, the women recently
enfranchised, for needed emancipation from partisan and selfish
political despotism in the interest of effective choices for the
public good. The ever-growing demand of the school is for some
translation of freedom of self-development in terms of respect for
social order and in the spirit of social service. The family life, in
the United States, at least, stands not so much in need of manifestoes
of equality of rights between men and women as of delicate and
discriminating adjustments of that equality to the social demands upon
husbands and wives and upon fathers and mothers. This book aims to
suggest some of the changes in external customs and inherited ways of
living which may lead toward a firmer hold upon social idealism within
the family, as well as within all other inherited institutions, while
new bases of democratic freedom are being firmly installed.
=Coveted Uses of the Book.=--This volume is intended to meet the needs
of college and teacher-training school students; of university
extension classes; of study groups in Women's Clubs, Consumers'
Leagues, Leagues of Women Voters and Church Classes. It is also hoped
that it may form the basis for private study by groups within the
home.
The book is written with a poignant sense of the breaking up of old
social foundations in the agony and terror of the Great War. It is
sent forth with a keen understanding of the spirit of youth that
to-day challenges every inherited institution and ideal, even to the
bone and marrow of the church, the state, the industrial order, the
educative process, and even the family itself. It issues from an
abiding faith that "above all things Truth beareth away the victory"
and hence that no fearless inquiry can harm the essential values of
life. It confesses a clear trust in "the Spirit that led us hither and
is leading us onward." It would sound a call to hold all that has
dowered the race at the sources of life sacred and of worth. It would
echo all that bids us move onward to higher and better things.
The greatest ambition herein recorded is to serve as one who opens
doors of insight into the House of the Interpreter.
--THE AUTHOR.
JANUARY, 1923.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5
A Threefold Aim. Basic Principles Underlying All Socially
Useful Changes. The Sense of Kind and the Sense of Difference.
Vital Changes in All the Basic Institutions of Society.
Coveted Uses of This Book.
I. THE FAMILY 19
The Experience of the Past. New Ideals Affecting the Family.
The Headship of the Father. Is It Possible to Democratize the
Family? What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care? Modern Ideals
of Sex-relationship. Ellen Key and Her Gospel. What is Meant
by the Demand that Illegitimacy be Abolished? The Legitimation
of Children Born Out of Wedlock. Philanthropic Tendencies
Respect Legal Marriage. Illicit Unions of Men and Women in
Divergent Social Position. Shall We Return to Polygamy? All
Children Entitled to Best Development Possible. The Work of
the Children's Bureau. The Suggested Uniform Laws. Have
Unmarried Women a Social Right to Motherhood? Ellen Key's
Estimate of Motherhood. Monogamic Marriage Does Not Work
Inerrantly. New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support.
The Increasing Tendency of Women Toward Celibate Life. Women
Cannot be Forced Back to Compulsory Marriage. A Few Believe in
a Third Sex. Most Social Students Believe in Marriage. Dangers
of Extreme Specialization. Industrial Exploitation of Children
and Youth. Social Measures Needed to Prevent These Evils. The
Attack upon the Family by Reactionaries. The Prevalence of
Divorce. Old Institutions Need New Sanctions. The Monogamic
Family Justifies Itself by Social Usefulness. The Inherited
Family Order Demands New Social Adjustments. The Family as an
Aid to Spiritual Democracy. The Family the Nursery of
Personality. Life, Not Theory About Life, Teaches Us. The
Moral Elite in the Modern Family. Questions.
II. THE MOTHER 46
Antiquity of the Mother-instinct. Recognized Essentials in
Child-care. The Protective Function. Social Elements in Modern
Protection of Children. Women's Leadership in Social
Protection. The Provision of Food, Clothing and Shelter. The
Woman in Rural Life. Modern Demand for Standardization. The
Apartment House and the Family. New Uses of Electric Power.
Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate. The Mother's
Compensation for Personal Service. Early Drill in Personal
Habits. Early Practice in Talking, Walking, Obedience, and
Imitation. Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.
Women's Relation to More Formal Education. Women's Relation to
Educational Agencies. The Social Value of Parental Affection.
What Women Need Most. Questions.
III. THE FATHER 69
Historic Background of Fatherhood. Purchase and Capture of
Wives. The Patriarchal Family. The Three Chief Sources of
Influence. Ancient Military Training of Youth.
Ancestor-worship. The Double Standard of Morals. Basic Needs
for Equality of Human Rights. Special Protection of Women
Needed in Ancient Times. The Social Value of the Patriarchal
Family. The Responsibilities of the Ancient Father
Commensurate with His Power. Moral Qualities in Women
Developed by Masculine Selection. The Highest Ideal of
Fatherhood. Incomplete Adjustment to Equality of Rights in the
Family. The Marriage Question To-day the "Husband-problem."
Women Cannot Have All the New Freedom and Also All the Old
Privileges. New Social Advantages for Fathers. Questions.
IV. THE GRANDPARENTS 90
Relative Increase of the Aged in Modern Life. Savage Treatment
of the Aged. The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for
Aged Men. The Position of Chief-mother in the Ancient Family.
Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life. Old Women and the
Witchcraft Delusion. Older Women in Religious Vocations
Honored in Middle Ages. To-day Comparatively Few Really Old at
Seventy. Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families? Reasons
Why Husbands Desert Their Families. The Financial Provision
for Old Age. Needed Ways of Preparing for Old Age. Pension
Laws. Old age Home Insurance. To Prevent Premature Old Age.
Check Extreme Requirements for Youth in Labor. Need of
Experience in Many Fields of Work. Prepare Vocationally for
Old-age Needs. The Attitude of Mind Toward Old Age. The
Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World. Questions.
V. BROTHERS, SISTERS AND NEXT OF KIN 116
The Ancient Kinship Bond. Present Demands of Kinship. Special
Burden of Women in Family Obligation. Disadvantages of the
Only Child. Permanent Value of the Family Bond. Questions.
VI. FRIENDS AND THE CHOSEN ONE 124
The Power of Friendship. The Newly-wed and Old Friends. Some
Advantages in Choices of Marriage by the Elders. New Demands
for Social Control of Marriage Choices. The Young Should be
Helped to Make Wise Choices. The Revolt of Youth. The Wisdom
of the Ages Must be the Guide of Youth. Personal Choice in
Marriage Has Now Widest Range. The Value of the Church in
Social Life. Easy Divorce Does Not Lessen Marriage
Responsibility. New and Finer Marriage Unions. Questions.
VII. HUSBANDS AND WIVES 141
Not Fancied but Genuine Happiness in Marriage Now Demanded.
Social Restraints on Marriage Choices. Shall the Wife Take the
Husband's Name? Shall the Wife Take the Husband's Nationality?
Who Shall Choose the Domicile? Shall the Married Woman Earn
Outside the Home? Economic Considerations Involved. Is It Bad
Form to Earn After Marriage? Shall Parenthood be Chosen? Some
People Have a Right to Marry and Remain Childless. What is the
Just Financial Basis of the Household? What Shall be the
Accepted Standard of Living? The Need for Full and Mutual
Understanding Before Marriage. The Supreme Satisfactions of
Successful Marriage. Questions.
VIII. THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY 164
Conditions to be Secured for Every Child. The Need for Two
Parents. Equal Guardianship of Both Parents. Every Child
Should Have a Competent Mother. Every Child Should Have a
Competent Father. Economic Aspects of the Father's Competency.
The French Plan of Extra-wage. The Endowment of Mothers. Does
this Plan Make Too Little of Fathers? Just Limits to Number of
Children in Subsidized Families. The Right of a Child to be
Officially Counted. Every Child Should Have Social Protection.
Child-labor. Children Must be Protected in Recreation.
Standards of and Aids to Health. Health Boards Should Help All
Alike. Items of Work in Child Hygiene. The Educational Rights
of Children. The Use of Married Women as Teachers. Individual
Sharing in the Social Inheritance. Questions.
IX. THE FLOWER OF THE FAMILY 189
The Proportions of Genius to the Mediocre. Eugenics. Euthenics
and Eudemics. Only Men in Lists of Geniuses. Social Need to
Learn What Children Are. "Charting Parents." New "Observation
Records" for Children. What to Do with the Specially Gifted
Child. Genius Universal in Nature. Genius Its Own
School-master. Varieties of the Gifted. Questions.
X. THE CHILDREN THAT NEVER GROW UP 205
The Defective Children. Custodial Care of the Defective.
Heredity. Difficulties in Care of Morons. The Colony Plan.
Mental Hygiene. Special Rooms in Public Schools. Training the
Nervous System. Responsibility of Women in Marriage. The Call
for Preventive Work. Questions.
XI. PRODIGAL SONS AND DAUGHTERS 219
Who Should Hear Sermons on the Prodigal Son? Distinction
Between the Mentally Competent and the Defective in Criminal
Classes. Moral Invalids. Rehabilitation of the Competent. The
Right Use of Leisure Time. The Moving Picture. The Automobile
and Its Influence. Parents Need Social Help in Moral Training
of Children. Parental Love for the Black Sheep. Children's
Courts. Domestic Relations Courts. Dangerous Rebound from
Ancient Family Discipline. Do Modern Youth Need New Community
Disciplines? Questions.
XII. THE BROKEN FAMILY 233
The Problems of Divorce. Frequency of Divorce in the United
States. Cannot Now Make Family an Autocracy. New Standards of
Marriage Success. Dangers of Extreme Individualism in
Marriage. Free Love Not Admissible. Must Work Toward Desired
Permanency in Marriage. Needed Changes in Legal and Social
Approach to Divorce. Prohibition of Paid Attorneys in Divorce.
Divorce Proceedings Should be Heard in Secret. Earlier and
Better Use of the Domestic Relations Court. The Children to be
Affected Society's Chief Care. A Uniform or Federal Divorce
Law. Education Our Chief Reliance. Helps Toward Family
Stability. Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced
Persons? Turning from Compulsory to Attractive Methods of
Reform. Questions.
XIII. THE FAMILY AND THE WORKERS 246
Changes from Ancient to Modern Forms of Labor. The Old
Household a Work-place. Welfare Managers in Modern Times.
Child-labor. Increase in Women Wage-earners. Social Pressure
on the Individual Worker. Demands of Family Life Should be
Considered in Industry and in Labor Legislation. The Code for
Women in Industry. Should Adult Women and Children be Listed
Together in Labor Laws? Women in War Work. Minimum Wage for
Fathers of Families the Vital Need. The Attitude of Women
Toward Labor Problems. Necessary Protection of Children and
Youth in Labor. Women and the Cost of Living. The Family
Demand upon Unmarried Women. Farming and the Farmer's Wife.
Domestic Help and Family Life. The Application of Democratic
Principles to Life. Women Must be More Democratic. The Social
Effect of Trade Unions. Women in Trade Unions. The New
Solidarity of Women. Questions.
XIV. THE FAMILY AND THE SCHOOL 269
New Forms of Education Demanded by Modern Industry. Education
a Social Process. The Three Learned Professions. New Calls for
Trained Leadership. The Special Education of Girls. Formal
School Training of Women New. Modern Training for Social
Service. Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.
Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership. Women
Socially Drafted for Motherhood. Father-office and
Mother-office Still Differ. Should the Education of Girls
Include Special Attention to Family Claims? Adjustment of
Family Service and Vocational Work. Dangers of Specialization
in Professional Work. The New Training in Sex-education.
Heroes Held Up for Admiration. Moral Training at the Heart of
Education. Drill to Avert Economic Tragedies. A Graduated
Scale of Virtues. Dr. Lester Ward's Types of Education.
Questions.
XV. THE FATHER AND THE MOTHER STATE 290
The Socialization of the Modern State. The Interest and Work
of Women in This Process of Political Change. Health a Social
Enterprise. General and Vocational Training for All. Women's
Work in Philanthropy. Culture Aids to the Common Life. Many
Languages in One Country. The Children's Bureau. A Women's
Lobby at the National Capitol. Women's Interest in Public Life
a Social Asset. Social Service in Peace. Problems Voters Must
Solve. Confusion Between National and Local Effort.
Preferential Voting. Proportional Representation. What Shall
Public and What Shall Private Social Service Attempt?
Difficulty in Being a Good American Citizen. Our Country a
Member of the Family of Nations. Vows of Civic Consecration.
Questions.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 314
THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS
CHAPTER I
THE FAMILY
"The family is the heart's fatherland; the fatherland is the
cradle of humanity."--MAZZINI.
"The family has two functions; as a smaller group it affords
opportunity for eliciting qualities of affection and character
which cannot be displayed in a larger group; and in the second
place it is a training for future members of the larger group in
the qualities of disposition and character which are essential to
citizenship. Marriage converts an attachment between man and woman
into a deliberate, permanent, responsible, intimate union for a
common end of mutual good. Modern society requires that the
husband and wife contemplate lifelong companionship, and the
affection between husband and wife is enriched by the relation of
parents to the children which are their care. The end of the
family is not economic profit but mutual aid and the continuance
and progress of the race."--PROFESSOR TUFTS, in _Ethics_, by Dewey
and Tufts.
=Social Work and Family Conservation.=--"By whatever name they may
be called, the most essential elements of social work are those
which seek to conserve the family life; to strengthen or
supplement the home; to give children in foster homes or elsewhere
the care of which tragic misfortune has deprived them in their
natural homes; to provide income necessary in the proper care of
their children; to restore broken homes; to discover and, if
possible, remove destructive influences which interfere with
normal home life and the reasonable discharge of conjugal and
parental obligations. The institutions which exist for the benefit
of those individuals who have no home or who need care of a kind
that cannot well be supplied in the home, only emphasize the
importance of conserving family life when its essential elements
are present."--EDWARD T. DEVINE.
"Human nature has achieved the consciousness that existence has an
aim. Human life, therefore, is a mission; the mission of reaching
that aim, by incessant activity upon the path toward it and
perpetual warfare against the obstacles opposed to it."--MAZZINI.
The Home:
"For something that abode endued
With temple-like repose; an air
Of life's kind purposes pursued
With ordered freedom, sweet and fair;
A tent, pitched in a world not right,
It seemed, whose inmates, every one,
On tranquil faces bore the light
Of duties beautifully done."
--COVENTRY PATMORE.
=The Experience of the Past.=--By many experiments, over many
differing "folk-ways," the modern family has arrived. We name it now
"monogamic," and mean by the name the union of one man and one woman,
in aim at least for life, and their children. Whereas once it was the
rule of a tribe or clan which determined every detail of
sex-relationship, a rule represented either by the mother or the
father, it is now an individualistic choice of two adult persons only,
socially legalized by a required certificate and ceremony. Whereas
once it was the basis of all social order and mutual aid, it is now
one of several institutions inherited from the past, and is itself
subject to the state, which is the chief heir to our social
inheritance. The family, however, is now, as it has always been, the
interior, vital, and so far indispensable social relationship,
beginning, as it does, at first hand the training of each individual
toward membership in society-at-large. In the past, under the
mother-rule, the social elements of the family were emphasized, since
her power was one delegated by the group of which she and her children
were a part and closely related to peaceful ways and to primitive
industrial arts. Under the father-rule, the political and legal
elements of the family were emphasized, since his was an autocratic
and personal control of wife and children, even of adult sons, and in
many cases of his own mother, and marked the beginning and worked
toward the power of the modern state. In all cases, however, it was as
a representative of the group-ideal and the group-control that the
parents held sway over the family; and if the family is to persist in
the future as an institution it will hold its authority over
individual lives as trustee of society-at-large. Name, line of
inheritance, rights and duties of one member toward other members and
to the family group as a whole, must all be determined in the last
analysis by the "mores" of the people and the time concerned.
=New Ideals Affecting the Family.=--To-day the ideal of equality of
rights for men and women, and the ideal of ministration to childhood's
needs, are stronger than the ideal of family control. The social
demand is, therefore, for standardization of family life and of
child-care on a high plane of physical, mental, and moral development
of each individual life rather than for an autocratic representation
of the power of what Professor James called "the collectivity that
owns us." Hence certain problems which have never before been clear in
social consciousness are now arising to enter all debates on family
stability and family success.
=The Headship of the Father.=--During the middle ages of our
civilization and for centuries of our later past the headship of the
family rested securely in the father. Now the ideal of "Two heads in
council; Two beside the hearth; Two in the tangled business of the
world" is working toward democratization of the family. This leads
toward a legal status and an economic adjustment in which the relation
of husband and wife may be equalized toward each other and toward
their children. In this new process, which is a part of the general
movement we call democracy, there are special difficulties of
modification peculiar to the family relation. The monogamic ideal and
practice demands permanency, solidarity of interest and unity of
control both within and without the family circle, at least until all
the children of a marriage have reached maturity. The ideal of the
rightful individuation of women, and even of minor children, works
against that legal solidarity and obvious unity. The old way of
obtaining these elements of family stability, a method still in vogue
in many places and still defended by some persons, was to place all
power of control in the hands of the husband and father, and thus make
the wife a perpetual minor and leave the children wholly under
patriarchal bondage. The modern ideal of women as entitled to
self-ownership and self-control even when married, and the social
need, just beginning to be understood, for women as for men to fully
develop their powers and capacities militates against the legal
headship of the father. To-day there is a demand, growing in
insistency, that we accept the right of each member of the family
circle to individual development and work toward its realization.
There is also the demand that we retain inviolate the social means for
successful family life. Some do not hesitate to say that to fulfil
both these demands is not within human power.
=Is It Possible to Democratize the Family?=--The witty writer who
declares that "the democratization of the family is impossible, since
the family is by nature an autocracy and ruled by the worst
disposition in it," is not without endorsers. There are also those,
more serious in intent, who claim that the family as an inherited
institution is by virtue of its inmost quality inimical to the
personal freedom of its members, and hence that the state, which is
now standardizing child-care, must undertake the practical duties
involved and leave both parents free to change marital relationship at
will before or after the birth of children and maintain their separate
bachelor or spinster freedom.
=Mating and Parenthood.=--This latter view is stated definitely by one
writer who believes that a new morality will "separate entirely,
mating from parenthood" in the interest of a more effective social
arrangement--"mating," or the free union of a man and a woman in
sex-relationship, to be in that case "solely a private matter with
which no one but the parties involved have any concern." "Parenthood,"
on the other hand, having relation, as it must, to society, requires,
so this writer declares, from either the father or the mother, as
inclination and capacity indicate, or from both parents if such should
be the wish of both, a "contract with the state" binding to an
upbringing of the child in accordance with accepted standards of
physical, mental, moral, and vocational demands. Such a contract with
the state in respect to child-care and the training of youth might
give far better results, be it confessed, than follow the utterly
ignorant and careless breeding of the young of the human race by those
on lowest levels of thought and action. Few, however, think such a
contract would meet all essentials of child-development.
=What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?=--What is the ideal of those
most advanced in knowledge of childhood's needs and most sincere in
devotion to the welfare and happiness of the young? It is certainly
not one which ignores or minimizes the influence of the private home
or one which includes the belief that one parent, however wise or
good, can do as much for a child as two parents working in harmony
over a long period of years can accomplish.
Nor can the influence of such a proposed separation of mating and
parenthood upon the sex-relationship itself be ignored in any proposed
new ways of living together. Some of the critics of the family, as we
know it, may put "duty" in quotation marks when dealing with
sex-relationship in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but
experience shows that in all the intimate relationships of life some
stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from
impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental
weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful
human arrangements, and these need social support.
=Modern Ideals in Sex-relationship.=--To so separate mating and
parenthood as to make it the business of no one but the two chiefly
concerned when or how often such mating became a personal experience,
and to make it a matter of social indifference whether one or two
parents contracted with society for the right upbringing of the child
or children involved (with no troublesome questions asked about either
parent not in evidence in the contract), would certainly blur the
social outline of the family, as we know it, to the point of legal
nullification. There might, indeed, grow up in such an imagined
condition a form of contract between two persons mating, as well as
one between parents and state, in respect to parenthood's social
responsibilities, and where such personal contract was broken redress
from the courts might be sought and obtained. The effect, however, of
such a plan as that proposed would inevitably be to leave the nobler,
the more loving and less selfish of the men and women involved, more
surely even than is now the case, the victims of the weaker, the more
grasping, and the more selfish of the twain.
=Ellen Key and Her Gospel.=--Indeed, the high priestess of the gospel
of freedom from legal bondage in sex-relation, Ellen Key, declares
that "a higher culture in love can be attained only by correlating
self-control with love and parental responsibility," a correlation she
believes would "follow as a consequence when love and parental
responsibility were made the sole conditions of sex-relations." She
also says that "in all cases where there is an affinity of souls and
the sympathy of friendship, love is what it always was and always will
be, the coöperation of the father with the mother in the education of
the children as well as the coöperation of the mother with the father
in all great social works." She thus links her ideal of true freedom
for the choices of love with social obligations and hence again with
what is best in inherited family life.
In addition, however, to the claim that love should be freed from
legal restraints in the interest of self-expression and
self-development (whether or not from Ellen Key's high standpoint of
parental responsibility) we have another attack upon the legal
autonomy of the family, as we know it, in the demand of some radical
feminists that "illegitimacy should be abolished."
=What is Meant by This Demand?=--A crusade against all sex-association
that may result in children born out of wedlock is understandable but
is surely not the counsel of perfection in sex-control intended by
those making this demand. What is meant seems rather that we should
take ground against any legal distinction between the status of
children born within and those born outside of legal marriage. What
would that be likely to mean in respect to the monogamic family? The
hard conditions attaching to both unmarried motherhood and unfathered
childhood, often in the past wholly cruel and unsocial, have been much
ameliorated during the last fifty years and largely through the
efforts of those who held firmly to the value of legal marriage and
the accepted family system in general. Laws have been passed and
firmly executed to find the shirking father and bring him to marriage
with the woman involved; or if such marriage is not possible or
feasible to compel him to make financial contribution toward the
support and education of the child.
=The Legitimation of Children Born Out of Wedlock.=--If marriage
occurs, then the child otherwise illegitimate may come within the
legal family through appropriate laws which the most conservative now
advocate. In such cases the belated acceptance within the family bond
does not count seriously against the child. If marriage does not
occur, and there are many cases of irregular sex-relationship where
that is not the right solution of the problems involved in
illegitimacy, then the unmarried mother is helped to establish herself
with her child where cruel stigma and useless curiosity may be best
avoided. To aid in her protection she is encouraged by many agencies
and persons to take the title of "Mrs.," since that is a conventional
term at best and may be given according to age (as in the older
custom) or come to attach itself to motherhood as justly as to
wifehood. More and more society is reaching out through law and wise
philanthropy to fasten mutual responsibility for child-care and
nurture upon both parents even where they are not legally married.
This movement must go on until the handicap of the child born out of
wedlock is reduced to its lowest possible terms.[1]
=Philanthropic Tendencies Respect Legal Marriage.=--These tendencies,
however, are not in the direction, intentionally at least, of making
legal condition and status in respect to name, inheritance of family
property from a father whose parental relationship is not legally
established, and public recognition of parenthood, identical in the
case of children born within and without the legal family circle. Is
such an identical status and condition desirable? If so, in what way
could this goal be accomplished?
If men and women become fathers and mothers without benefit of clergy
or state license and later marry, then the children born before and
those born after the wedding ceremony may, usually do, and always
should, become one flock. In many countries where legal marriage is
difficult because of expense involved or distance from officials, such
cases often occur and with no apparent social harm where there is real
affection and true loyalty between the men and women involved. Many
illegitimate conceptions are similarly taken care of by the enforced
or assisted marriage of the parties concerned just before the birth of
the child. In many cases, however, in our own country doubtless the
great majority, the father concerned has an illicit connection with
some girl quite outside his own social circle and later, as in the
famous "Kallikak" case, marries a woman of his own class and has a
family of recognized children. What would be advised in such a case by
those advocating the legal abolition of illegitimacy? Should a
searching investigation of the whole previous life of every
prospective bridegroom be made, and wherever a previous relationship
can be found which involves parenthood a legal prohibition work
automatically to prevent a second relationship? This seems to be the
plan proposed by Mrs. Edith Houghton Hooker in her recent book, _The
Laws of Sex_, as in her program of "measures designed to minimize
extra-marital sex relationships and to check the commercialization of
vice," she lays down the principle "the common parentage of an
illegitimate child to constitute marriage or if either of the parents
was previously married, bigamy." This would, of course, carry out her
next item of the social program, namely, "place the illegitimate child
on the same plane as the legitimate," but that plane would be a very
low one in the cases that would legally become those of bigamy. In the
case of very unequal partners in an illicit sex-relationship, a legal
union that was based on the fact of equal responsibility for a child
born out of wedlock, and made a legal necessity only because of that
mutual relationship, could surely be good neither for the men and
women involved nor for any child or children thus legitimatized by
force of arms, as it were.
=Illicit Unions of Men and Women in Divergent Social Position.=--On
the other hand, in cases where the illegitimate parenthood is the
fruit of a union between a man of a high and a woman or girl of a very
low grade of intelligence and of social position a legal prohibition
which would work automatically to prevent any later and legal marriage
with a woman of higher grade (because of the existence of a child by
the extra-marital relation) would not be wholly satisfactory.
Although such a regulation would prevent any legitimate children being
born of that father, it would not necessarily legitimatize the child
or children of the first relation. The social value of either of these
plans is extremely doubtful.
=Shall We Return to Polygamy?=--Again, in such cases as have been
indicated, should the first mother be ignored and the child or
children of the irregular union be adopted into the legal home of the
father and added to the registered children of the second mother? Some
such plan has been adopted in some countries and at certain periods of
family development. Such a course undertaken now, however, in modern
conditions would, in addition to the possible suffering of the adopted
children, be most unjust to the unmarried mother. Or, again, would it
be advised that the first mother with her child or children be
accepted as a legal part of the home in which the second mother is
legally installed? That would be a frank return to polygamy in cases
where there have been irregular pre-marital relations outside of the
monogamic bond. Or do all those who advocate the abolition of
illegitimacy take the ground, which some of them definitely do, that
the monogamic family is obsolete and that the state in its corporate
capacity should take full charge of all children? Or, when the demand
is sifted to its ultimate elements, is it merely that the unjust
conditions attending the lives of children born out of wedlock must be
ameliorated by a larger charity of feeling, a better understanding of
human weakness and the effect of bad social conditions, and the
constant effort to give all children as nearly equal chance at the
best things of life as can be made possible by social feeling and wise
social care?
=All Children Entitled to Best Development Possible.=--If the latter
is all that is meant, the phrase the "abolition of illegitimacy" is
unfortunate and the real agreement among philanthropists, educators
and all right-thinking people on the just claim of all children
(however they may chance to arrive on this troubled planet) to the
best development possible, should be emphasized in the slogan. It is
well to remember that only a minority of children in any country, and
in many countries a very small minority, are involved directly in this
problem of the right treatment of children born outside the legal
family. It would seem the part of social wisdom, therefore, in this,
as in all other matters of social control, to ask ourselves the
question, What rule on the whole gives the best condition for the
largest number of persons?--and on the answer to that question base
our law and custom, then add considerate treatment for the minority
who must in the nature of things have some handicap if the rule is
obeyed by the majority.
=The Work of the Children's Bureau.=--To lessen this handicap, the
Federal Children's Bureau in Washington, D.C., began in 1915 an
inquiry into illegitimacy as a child welfare problem, causing studies
to be made of laws in different States of the Union. The results of
this study were published in 1919 in Bureau Publication No. 42. In
1920 conferences were held under the auspices of the Bureau to
consider standards of protection which might be embodied in laws. A
Committee appointed to draft suggestions arrived at and to recommend
the same made a Report, which is published in Bureau Publication No.
77.
The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws on
request formed a Committee on Status and Protection of Illegitimate
Children which reported at length to the Thirty-first Annual Meeting
of that body in August, 1921. This report formed the basis of
discussion by legal experts, and in the meeting at San Francisco of
recent date a revised program for "Uniform State Legislation for
Children Born Out of Wedlock" was accepted and recommended. The title
used is itself an advance upon old ideas.
=The Suggested Uniform Law.=--It is less harsh to speak of "those born
out of wedlock" than of the "illegitimate." Moreover, the
recommendations include a suggestion that in future in all reference
in legal papers or official notices to a child born out of wedlock it
"shall be sufficient for all purposes to refer to the mother as the
parent having the sole custody of the child or to the child as being
in the sole custody of the mother, no explicit reference being made to
illegitimacy except in birth certificates or records of judicial
proceedings in which the question of birth out of wedlock is at
issue." The general law in the States of our Union legitimatizes a
child born out of wedlock by the subsequent inter-marriage of the
parents. This makes it easy for men and women to repair an injury if
they can marry after the birth of their child. In any case the
recommendations for uniform State laws make it clear that the tendency
is strong to bring legal pressure to bear upon the father of a child
by an unwedded mother to pay the expenses of her confinement, to
support the child under the laws requiring "support of poor relatives"
or under statutes specifically obligating recognition of parental
responsibility outside the marriage bond; and this obligation, it is
held, should continue in recognition and enforcement until the child
is sixteen years of age.
Although there is strong demand on the part of many to give the child
born out of wedlock the "right to inherit from the father's estate
even though not legitimated," the Committee of the Commissioners on
Uniform State Laws do not so recommend. Their statement concerning
Liability of the Father's Estate is as follows: "The obligation of the
father where his paternity has been judicially established in his
lifetime or has been acknowledged by him in writing or by the part
performance of his obligations is enforceable against his estate in
such an amount as the court may determine, having regard to the age of
the child, the ability of the mother to support it, the amount of
property left by the father, the number, age, and financial condition
of the lawful issue, if any, and the rights of the widow, if any."
To this writer this covers the just obligation if rightly administered
and by leaving still a distinction in law between the rights of
children born within and those born outside the marriage bond helps to
preserve the interests of the majority of children.
In any case the preservation of such distinctions as are left in the
milder and more humane laws advocated should help in making men and
women anxious to give all the children for which they may be
responsible a legal right to both parents by due process of marriage.
=Have Unmarried Women a Social Right to Motherhood?=--It is not alone
philanthropic interest in the welfare of a class of children now
handicapped by birth outside of legal family bonds, that has issued
the call to "abolish illegitimacy." The slogan is also an expression
of a new demand that women fit to bear and rear children and deeply
desiring that personal experience and the social obligation which it
implies, should be given a social right to become mothers whether or
not the fitting permanent mate be found for a life-union under the
law. This demand is reaching a critical poignancy in those countries
in which the Great War has added to a long-increasing "surplus of
women" an astounding total of millions of women fit to marry whose
rightful mates are buried on the fields of conflict. Shall these
women, it is asked, be denied motherhood as well as wifehood? Shall
the state lose the children these women, child-loving and noble and
wise, might bear to help make good the horrible losses that war has
entailed?
Moreover, women everywhere are discerning the shallow inconsistency
between the ideal so long preached of motherhood as woman's chief if
not her only contribution to normal life and genuine social usefulness
and the abnormal economic conditions and double ethical standards
which doom so many women to single life. Still deeper in the hearts of
women, now for the first time free to give voice to inner questionings
of the inherited organization of society which has bound them to
conventions written solely by men in statute and custom, rises the
query, Is the present fashion of courtship and wedding favorable for
installing fit women as mothers or keeping to single life those least
capable of that social function?
=Ellen Key's Estimate of Motherhood.=--Ellen Key expresses this
feeling that fitness for a task so tremendous as parenthood is more
important than any mechanism by which parenthood is secured when she
says, "It is solely from one moral point of view that motherhood
without marriage, as well as the right of free divorce, must be
judged. Irresponsible motherhood is always sin with or without
marriage; responsible motherhood is always sacred with or without
marriage." And again she says, "The one necessary thing is to make
ever greater demands upon the men and women who take to themselves the
right to give humanity new beings." Ellen Key has also much to say
about the superior value of what women can do in and through their
race-service as mothers to anything they can do outside of that
office, except perhaps as teachers helping mothers. Her feeling on
this matter is echoed by not a few women who ask for the social right
to motherhood even when denied or not desiring ordinary family life.
She declares that "It is an indisputable fact that if the majority of
women no longer had the calm and repose to abide at the source of life
but wanted to navigate all the seas with men, the sex contrasts would
resolve themselves not into harmony but into monotony. Until women
come to realize this it must still be insisted that the gain to
society is nothing if millions of women do the work that men could do
better and evade or fulfil poorly the greater tasks of life and
happiness, the creation of men and the creation of souls." To fulfil
these tasks properly she insists that women require the same human
rights as men but they should use their new power of choice "in the
field of life, in those provinces in which imponderable values are
created, values that cannot be reduced to figures and yet are the sole
values capable of transforming humanity; for it is not utilities but
complete human beings that elevate life." The same feeling that she
expresses animates many women who desire fit women to be mothers, even
if unmarried, at whatever cost to old forms of family autonomy.
=Monogamic Marriage Does Not Work Inerrantly.=--Certainly no one can
contend that monogamic marriage has worked inerrantly to give women
who are "born mothers" a chance for their natural career, or to keep
from physical motherhood within legal marriage all the women unfit for
the spiritual tasks of parenthood. It is certain that in present
conditions many women most needed for the transmission of both
physical and social inheritance in finest form are side-tracked from
the central roadway of life, and the race suffers thereby.
Any custom, however, which should make it a negligible matter whether
or not a permanent "houseband" were enlisted with a "housewife" in
building a home in which to place a child desired must tend toward a
reversion, not an advance, in social organization. Or so it seems to
many students of the evolution of the family.
The mother and child made the first social grouping in which love and
trust could work. The father, as we know him, is a later asset of
social progress. He has taken into the home many things we want now to
get rid of, as, for example, a social tendency toward masculine
monopolies. His genius for organization in political and economic
fields has in many ways worked against the right alignment of men and
women in family relations. But can we do without the father
altogether, save for a brief hour of service as a "biologic
necessity"? Still more, can we have for mothers that "calm and repose"
which Ellen Key bespeaks for them unless they have fathers of
efficiency and character to help them in their peculiar task of
life-creation? Is not the alternative to the father's partnership in
family life the creation of a class of "state mothers" or the social
endowment of all mothers by public grant?
=New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support.=--In point of fact,
all the demands for new freedom in respect to motherhood rest
primarily upon the recognition by society-at-large of a claim upon it,
financial as well as spiritual, for the benefit of all who are allowed
to be mothers, in right of their own fitness for the function. And
this recognition of the social value of mothers is emphasized by many
who hold firmly to the monogamic family. It is not clear that any
sweeping changes away from the private family should be made to meet a
condition that may be changed by less drastic means.
=Local Discrepancies in Numbers of Men and of Women.=--Fit men and
women are not always together in the same place. To have more men in a
given locality than can possibly have wives or more women than can
possibly marry under the monogamic system is to derange its workings.
Is it conceivable that we shall always be so stupid and clumsy in
economic adjustment that such conditions shall continue, now that we
are able to be more easily mobile and flexible every decade? The mere
mechanical maladjustment caused by serious discrepancies in numbers of
the two sexes; in cities and in older countries more women, in
manufacture and pioneer agriculture more men; certainly creates
serious conditions. Social engineering is needed for remedy. We may
not, as so long ago was done in Virginia, transport hundreds of
"attractive damsels" from crowded towns, where women most do
congregate, to a new country, to be eagerly accepted wives on landing
from the ships. We are told, however, that many girls are being
assisted to emigrate from England to places where their service is
needed and where there are so many surplus men that they do marry in
short order. We shall find that nature and economic adjustments will
unite to more and more even up the two sides of life. It is a
sinister condition of modern life that forbids early marriage to so
many men and all chance of suitable marriage to so many women who
really desire that relationship with all their hearts. We must go
about its remedy with open eyes, and from frankly accepted reasons,
for the sake of better family conditions.
=The Increasing Tendency of Women Toward Celibate Life.=--There is,
however, another condition, many-sided and complex, often operating
upon the persons most involved unconsciously and seldom treated with
clarity or frankness, which works against the family as an
institution. This condition is the increasing tendency of many of the
ablest women to marry very late or to refuse to marry at all. These
are not the women who feel defrauded that they are not mothers in
their own person, still less that life has cheated them in not
furnishing a husband. They are usually those who in youth began some
specialized form of vocational service which holds their interest and
leads toward pecuniary profit and social recognition.
They are the modern spinsters, happy and busy, who often feed their
motherly instincts by caring for other people's children and feel a
sense of relief that it is a voluntary service, which they may rightly
indulge in vacations, and not a bond that never releases from duty.
They are the maiden aunts who spend affection and money upon the
families of their relatives; who help their younger brothers and
sisters through college; who take care of the aged and invalid in the
family connection, and act often as stay and prop to all the weaker
and more burdened of their kin. What many families would do without
this type of unmarried woman is hard to tell. They are often grateful
for their release from wearing domestic cares and enjoy their sense of
power in general serviceableness to those they love while at the same
time appreciating with keen satisfaction their own joy of
craftsmanship in some chosen profession. Except for a brief hour now
and then, when sister has a new baby or brother takes a new wife, they
feel anything but troubled over their condition of single blessedness
until, perhaps, a premonition of lonely old age stirs regret.
=The Demand of Eugenists.=--From the point of view of the eugenists,
who demand more fecundity on the higher and less on the lower levels
of life, one of the most sinister of all influences inimical to family
life is this large and increasing band of superior and happy single
women who are not even discontented and make no demand for any closer
touch with life than is now given them. If it is bad for the family
for a large number of women unable to find suitable permanent mates to
be so eager for motherhood that they claim social permission for that
public service whatever their marital position, it may be still worse
for the family for a large number of highly superior women to cease to
care greatly for intimate comradeship with men or for the actual
experience of motherhood. Many women working and living in solitary
fashion until too old to risk the chances of marriage, and able to
find highest comradeship and largest comfort in other women's
companionship, have been so held by family burdens in youth that this
result has been inevitable. Society has, therefore, a task to prevent
the weight of past generations, falling now so heavily upon some young
men and upon far more young women, from operating against the
well-being of the generations to come. We should make it our social
business to share more justly the burdens due to old age and chronic
invalidism.
=Women Can Not be Forced Back to Compulsory Marriage.=--It is too late
in the day to pass laws forbidding women from gaining economic freedom
and social power in professional careers so that all the best of them
shall again be obliged to marry as a "means of support." Few persons
would do this if they could. But we can and should make haste to bring
together, as the State Universities of our country do so helpfully,
those who should be the fathers and mothers of the future, in that
period of life when love will take chances for the future.
"Propinquity," the old adage declares, is the "best incentive to
courtship," and it should be made to work more effectively.
In our own country, eugenists may be comforted to learn, it is still
fashionable to marry, even in the best families. We are told by our
census that more people marry in the thousand and marry young in the
United States than in other countries.[2] And although it may be
claimed that the older Americans and the finest types do not reproduce
so freely as social well-being requires, there is much hope that
movements of population, so much freer here than elsewhere among the
educated and competent, will lead to better sex-adjustments and to the
absorbing of more first-class women in family life.
=A Few Believe in a "Third Sex."=--There are those, however, although
but a few, who do not view with alarm the modern increase of unmarried
women of types most needed for motherhood. These believe that in the
present time, and perhaps in a long future, our complex social needs
cannot be met by holding the best blood and breeding within the family
bond, but that there must be a reserve of celibates, a few men and
many women, to carry on the school and to work for social amelioration
and social progress. This point of view, which has been sometimes
characterized as "defense of a third sex," is based on two premises:
namely, first, that all of a married woman's time and strength
throughout her whole adult life must go into strictly family service
in order for the family to be maintained; and, second, that those men
and women who specialize in some vocation in such extreme degree that
they cannot marry and have children are thereby, by reason of that
celibate concentration, better able to function socially in their
chosen work. It is the object of this book to disprove both these
assumptions.
=Most Social Students Advocate Marriage.=--Celibate concentration upon
a specific task, however valuable that task may be, is open, we
contend, to serious social dangers, as history amply proves. And
family life has now such varied and efficient aids from commerce,
manufacture, educational provisions in school and recreation centres,
in summer camps and special organizations of youthful energy toward
social serviceableness, that men and women can marry and rear
families, if they really desire so to do, more easily than ever
before, provided they are willing to pay the price of simplicity in
the home and in individual mastery of the technic of new ways of
living. What is needed for the best development of the family under
modern conditions is not more celibates, men and women of high ability
and noble consecration to undertake wholesale service in its behalf,
but rather that more of the best and the best-balanced men and women
be absorbed, to necessary degree, and at the right period of life, in
the task of actual transmission of their quality and tendency through
the living tissues of the social organism in the vital process of
parenthood. What is needed to secure that result is not only a new
ideal of social obligation but also, and definitely, such skill in
economic and domestic adjustments as will more and more leave a margin
of strength and energy for a chosen vocation not wholly mortgaged to
family uses, in the case of women as of men. It is quite time that
some of the rightly honored "maiden aunts of society," as our leading
spinsters have been called, used some of their wisest thought and
their most self-sacrificing service toward securing such economic and
domestic adjustments as will work toward the diminution of their own
kind!
Again it must be insisted that what society-at-large now needs most is
not celibates, however wise and good, working along one line, without
close touch with the main experiences of birth and death and common
social relationship, but rather the deepening and broadening of common
human relations through the reaction of the wise and good upon all the
fundamental ties that bind the race and the generations together. The
loss to society of those who might have been fathers and mothers and
chose to be so devoted to religious orders as to stand apart from
their race-life is an admitted calamity in the view of most people who
study mediæval history.
=Dangers of Extreme Specialization.=--Moreover, the tendency now in
all departments of industry and professional service is toward a
specialization which often defeats its own end and lessens rather than
increases the usefulness of its own department. "We want not workers,"
says Emerson, "but men working." We want not specialists in the
extreme sense but all-round students devoting themselves to one sphere
of research or activity with a constant sense of its relation to all
other spheres of thought and action. Particularly in social service we
want not so much those who in early life specialize in one or another
form of social pathology or social therapeutics but rather those
mature and rounded in personal experience who elect some particular
service with full realization of its place in the network of common
human relationship. Especially is this true of all social work which
deals directly with individuals.
The higher development of the family and the wider range of social
service, therefore, alike, demand that a much greater proportion of
the moral and intellectual élite of the race pay their debt to the
generations through the family.
=Industrial Exploitation of Childhood and Youth.=--There is another
condition of modern life which must be noted as inimical to the
stability and the efficiency of the family, a condition which works
from the bottom upward through the lower levels of society as others
which have been noted work from the top down through the higher
levels. It is the condition which leads toward the misuse of young
girls in wage-earning tasks. There is a difference of opinion among
the wisest in regard to the social usefulness of forms of protective
labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There
can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the
charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential
mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of
manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or
mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It
means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education
and development and meant to attract toward successful family life
rather than away from it.
The wrong and injustice of child-labor is equal for both sexes and no
law can be too stringent or too severely enforced against it. The
social waste of using youth exclusively in wage-earning pursuits can
easily be proved, in the case of girls, to extend to years older than
in the case of boys. The family cannot be maintained in stable
condition, and certainly can not progress in social value, unless the
majority of young girls are given the right attitude toward it and
time to prepare for its opportunities and responsibilities. If, as is
generally now believed, the legal majority and voting age for boys and
girls should be the same, namely, twenty-one years, then the girls, as
potential mothers, must have a distinct and specialized protection up
to that legal majority from all that harms health, prevents
safeguarded recreation, or turns life-currents away from the home to
the factory. The death-rate of babies when mothers work in factories
or shops with no provision for special rest is one testimony to the
social improvidence of our present industrial use of older women. The
life-long invalidism of many women, the childlessness of multitudes,
the statistics of home conditions revealed by Children's Courts
furnish testimony of like character. The unknown toll of loss of
personal aptitude for family life leading to broken homes, or to
hopeless struggles against invasions by poverty of the right of common
men and women to a home, are proof positive that a change in economic
conditions is demanded in the interest of family life.
=Social Measures Needed to Prevent These Evils.=--These social evils
connected with child-labor and the neglect in the industrial world of
youth and its needs are not to be mended by helps to individuals
alone. More radical measures are required for the protection of
society's most precious asset, the health, happiness and leisure of
all its children.
"Education," says the ancient sage, "is the ladder that every child
must climb in order to become all that he is meant to become; and
therefore children are made unfit for other employments in order that
they may have leisure to learn." To this may be added, the type of
education that fits the average girl for high usefulness as a
housemother is an absolute need if the average home life is to be made
a centre of freedom and of happiness. Those, therefore, who are
working against child-labor and against the unrestricted use of
mothers of young children and of potential mothers, in wage-earning
industry, are working directly, and with great power, for the
preservation and stability of the family. Those also who are working
through the formal education of the schools for the insertion of study
and practice along lines of home-making are making a complementary and
valuable contribution toward the inner unity and the outer success of
the family.
=The Attack upon the Family by Reactionaries.=--One more and most
important attack upon the family as it exists to-day must be noted in
this list of elements in modern society which work against this
inherited institution. It is an attack which, however mistaken, is
ostensibly, and often honestly in intent, a movement for the
protection and improvement of the family order. It is the effort to
turn the history of that institution back upon itself and make the
family again, as in the past, a legal unity with one representative,
the husband and father, through whom alone the wife and children have
distinct relationship to society-at-large. It is an effort to return
to mediæval thought and practice and to reaffirm in legal outline the
headship of the husband and father, the permanent minority of the wife
and mother, and the complete subordination of the children. It is even
an effort to rescind such laws as have given married women independent
contract-power and property rights, the equal guardianship of their
children, the full use of educational provisions, and individual
relationship to the state through the franchise. Voices are not
wanting to insist that only through a return to this old domestic
order of kingship of the man can the family be preserved.
A recent book claiming intellectual authority and endorsed by many men
in high positions states this opinion clearly, and seeks to strengthen
it by the use of scientific half-truths used not scientifically but as
a support for a metaphysical theory of masculine and feminine quality.
Every step that has been taken from the male despotism within marriage
and parenthood has met such appeals to stay the progress of democracy
toward the hearth-stone lest the family order be wholly destroyed.
Most people, however, believe that the steps which have been taken
away from that family despotism are too many to be retraced. Women
will not be put back into perpetual legal minority when once they have
become adults under the law. They will not consent to lose property
rights and the power of guardianship over their own children. They
will not consent to their own disfranchisement or to the loss of
opportunities of education and of economic independence. It is as
futile as it is stupid to expect that in this matter history will go
backward. To oppose measures already accomplished which are in the
direction of democratic adjustment of social relations, even by those
who think certain measures "a reform against nature," is not only idle
in effect but shows that the opposer is out of touch with "whatsoever
forces draw the ages on."
There are many elements in the restlessness of a period too rapidly
changing to be always sure of its ground that needlessly confuse the
issues of family obligation and personal loyalty to accepted tasks.
There are many tendencies toward extreme individualism which need
balancing by clearer ideals of social serviceableness. Especially is
this true in the case of women somewhat intoxicated by the belated
freedom and power which came to them after too prolonged a struggle
against inherited bonds. There are many economic and educational
requirements yet to be met in order to protect and maintain the
accepted ideal of monogamic marriage. But of all the ideas inimical to
the family in our modern life, the demand for its return to
aristocratic and outgrown forms is the most absurd and the most
harmful. All history shows that those who try to put a law, a
political system, an economic method, a rule of morality, or a
religious ideal back into a form discarded by the majority of those
who constitute the ethical and intellectual élite directly work toward
the chaos of revolution. To try to force the family ideal or its legal
bond or social outline back into the patriarchal form is to do the
utmost possible to bring on a catastrophic struggle between the new
and the old. The evil wrought by such reactionary teaching is in the
exact ratio of its power of influence. Whatever we may try to do, as
balance, through evolutionary methods at points where changes in form
have not been as yet made safe and sane by required adjustments of the
individual life to the new order, we should make haste to attempt. No
person, however, who is in actual touch with the movement of social
progress can hope to turn any great democratic tendency back upon
itself and "make that which hath been as if it were not." No truly
just person will wish to do so.
=The Prevalence of Divorce.=--Many urge reactionary attitudes toward
present family ideals and practice because of the divorce problem. The
omission of this from the list of causes for the modern instability of
the family and for its too frequent lack of success may have been
already noted and condemned by the reader of these pages. The fact of
divorces, however, whether they be many or few, is to the writer a
symptom, not a cause, the legal expression of a social disease, not
the disease itself. Bad diagnosis, or inadequate treatment on the
basis of a symptom, may increase the disease; and the facts concerning
divorce are of so serious a nature that a separate chapter has been
assigned to them under the heading: The Broken Family. The prevalence
of divorce, however, it must here be said, demonstrably proves two
things--one that men and women now feel themselves at moral and social
liberty to seek divorce when longer living together seems to them
intolerable, and that women are using their new freedom and economic
independence to make marriage conditions more to their liking. They
are setting a standard respecting desirable husbands, not always
wisely, often selfishly, but in the long run and large way to ends of
greater equality of demand in the marriage relation. The tendency on
the whole is toward a higher conception of what marriage should be and
what it should do for both parties in the bond. The statistics of
illegitimacy, of commercialized prostitution, of venereal disease, of
infant mortality, of early death or life-long invalidism of wives and
mothers, of marital unhappiness and parental neglect which are found
by honest investigation in states and nations in which no divorce is
allowed do not lead to the belief that legal permanence of the
marriage bond secures socially helpful family life. On the contrary,
such facts already show that divorce in the civilization we have
inherited comes as a result of bad conditions which worked infinite
harm before divorces could be obtained.
=Old Institutions Need New Sanctions.=--We must now ask of any laws
concerning any institution not what did ancient "folk-ways" ordain but
what do modern conditions require? No form of human association,
however old and whatever its contribution to the social inheritance,
but is on trial to-day before all free minds. That trial must be
openly conducted. No "secret diplomacy" to reinstate old ideals or
laws against the common belief; no "boring from within" to propagate
new schemes the object of which is to gratify personal wish without
regard to public good; but "open covenants" with the future "openly
arrived at" in an ethically consecrated present. What shall be our
guide in such a free and frank consideration of the present and the
future of the family?
=The Monogamic Family Justifies Itself by Social Usefulness.=--In the
first place, one must accept the fact that it is presumptive evidence
of the continued worth and value of any inherited institution if it
can be proved that it has served vital social needs which still
operate and that no other existing institution is able or ready to
take its place for the special social service which it was designed to
render. To the present writer it seems clear that the monogamic family
holds its title clear to social preservation on both these points. The
family preceded individualistic marriage as we know it and was
developed for the purpose of giving to oncoming generations a share in
the race-life, whatever the ideals concerning that race-life may have
been at any period of social order. Even in its present undeveloped
form, with its cramping limitations of past autocracy and with its
crude attempts at an as yet half-understood democracy, we may well
count the private monogamic family as a priceless inheritance and work
toward its better organization and larger service to social life. No
other institution yet developed has shown in history or now shows in
present life a worthy substitute for its functioning in child-care and
child-development. Many also believe that no form of sex-association
secures such possibilities of moral discipline and personal
satisfaction as does the guarded relationship of monogamic marriage.
=The Inherited Family Order Demands New Social Adjustments.=--There
are, therefore, no reasons for welcoming the decline of the private
family. There are many that demand imperatively some adjustments in
inner comradeship and in mechanical arrangements surrounding the
household, in order to hold firm its spiritual values during changes
in social conditions. How far these changes of detail may go or what
will be the end of some present clearly outlined tendencies no one can
prophesy. The duty of the hour is, however, to set this treasure of
social inheritance in a clear light; to show its actual and potential
social value as at present perceived; and to try by all simple
measures open to our intelligence to aid in its evolution toward a
more perfect expression of the love of man and woman each for the
other and of the protection and care of both for the children of that
love. The basic test of all proposed changes in any inherited
institution is from henceforward, we must believe, that which inheres
in the spiritual essence of democracy. What is that essence of
democracy which must be applied as test within the family, as within
the state and within the industrial order? It is the fundamental
belief in the worth and dignity of every human being and the equal
right of each and all to personality. No man, as in the older days,
must be obliged to be husband and father, but may choose, if he deems
it essential to his own being, to remain in a solitary path outside
the current of the generations. No woman must be obliged to live
solely to serve a family. She, too, has right to self-development in
some chosen way. No married couple must be forced to add to the
children already here; they may justly be protected in living and
working together in some comradeship that has no family limitations
save those of mutual loyalty and mutual service. No child is to be
justly held so much under family control as to have his nature stifled
or warped, and no child shall be made a pecuniary asset to the family
regardless of his own needs. No family autonomy is henceforth to be
secured by fiat of law enthroning one "head" as the legal despot or
economic ruler. The family must be democratized in that sense in which
each individual within its bond shall be sustained in seeking and in
maintaining the conditions of personality. No one human being to live
solely for others' service or to have his or her value estimated in
terms of contribution to other lives, but all to seek the utmost
perfection of individual life as a contribution to the common life;
this is the democratic ideal.
=The Family as an Aid to Spiritual Democracy.=--There seems to be no
other inherited institution in which this spiritual essence of
democracy can be so clearly and so well realized as it may be and
to-day often is in the private monogamic family. The permanent and
successful family offers a unique centre of personal development at
the heart of all other social groups. Founded as it is in selective
affection, and in aim at least permanently secure, it offers a refuge
in every distress and a help in every trouble of each of its members.
There was never a time when such a mutual resistance of a small and
intimate group to the complex pressure of the world upon each
individual life was more sorely needed. The confusing social currents
of this changing era set free from ancient moorings many who can find
no clear chart for newer voyaging in thought and action. These need
what the family more than any other inherited institution can still
give--something of the simplicity of the blood bond and something of
the strength of clan membership, and more of the partial affection
which sets each personality in its best light and gives each a chance
to better its own world achievement in the appreciation of its
dearest.
=The Family the Nursery of Personality.=--The family in this sense of
comforting and developing the individual nature has as yet no rival.
Says Browning, "Every man has two soul sides--one to face the world
with and one to show a woman when he loves her." There are those who
blame the family relationship for its exclusiveness and partiality,
and there are countless instances where the ego is so extended into
the blood group that selfish disregard of all others becomes a mark of
family affection. Yet is it profoundly true that just as the baby
needs some one to whom its little life is all-important in order to
gain strength of will to achieve its difficult beginnings of
consciousness, so all of us need a small group in which our well-being
and our happiness are of greater concern than those of any one person
can be to all the world of persons. No truly enlightened person
believes that he or she is as wise or as good as the best friend
thinks; and no truly enlightened person believes that the affection of
one's family is a just gauge of the value of one's life to the world.
We all need, however, and children particularly need, some inner
circle of love which comes to us by virtue simply of our being, to
help us when we make excursions of moral and affectional adventure in
the world outside, in a world in which we are valued only for what we
can achieve.
=Life, Not Theory About Life, Teaches Us.=--Let no one believe,
however, that any theory about or claim for the family really
indicates its value. We live before we can interpret our life, and
what is already achieved by those in the forward ranks shows what all
may yet become. We are not left to chance or imagination or to
argument or affirmation of principles to visualize the family as it is
or as it may be. We may look about us and see what it is and can do
for men and women. Few, perhaps, are standing on the heights of their
own being when they build the family altar. Yet in the love and
sacrifice of plain and unknown fathers who cheerfully toil for their
loved ones, in the patient endurance of simple-hearted mothers who
give so much of their lives in ready service to husband and family, in
the frolic-joy and eager activity of ordinary children whose only
dower is the free and happy service of their parents, is the fruit and
the promise of the human family.
=The Moral Elite in the Modern Family.=--Above all, we have to-day a
growing number who live in the spirit of a true marriage and a noble
cradle of infancy and show by actual example what the family is meant
to be. These prophesy a marriage that demands each of the other that
a perfect life shall perfect their love. These give a new pattern and
type of parenthood, woven of the tears and joy, the aspiration and the
service of those who call children from the storehouse of universal
life, not in response to careless passion but in the solemn joy of
creative purpose. These are the men and women who shall yet build from
the home as the heart's centre, a wiser school, a more righteous
state, a juster industry, and a purer worship of the ideal.
It is in the new comradeship of men and women on all the levels of
life that such auspicious promise of better social life is found. It
is on the new basis of reverence of each personality for every other,
not only for the person that other is but for the person he or she may
become if given fair chance for best achievement, that the new social
ethics rests. It is on that basis that we may build a faith assured
and strong that the family will not be lost in the time that needs it
most but will shape itself to finer issues and more useful service.
QUESTIONS ON THE FAMILY
1. What has been the general trend of development in Matrimonial
Institutions?
2. Has the monogamic family, as now outlined and legalized, any
elements inherently inimical to a democratic order of society?
If so, what are those elements? If not, what stand should be
taken in regard to proposals for fundamental changes in the
inherited family system?
3. If the inherited family system should be preserved and
maintained, what, if any, changes in form, or practical
adjustments to the new freedom of woman and new ideals of
education of youth, are demanded for its present stability and
future success?
4. In _Taboo and Genetics: A Study of the Biological,
Sociological, and Psychological Foundation of the Family_, by
M.M. Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Blanchard, it is
claimed that "The chief interest of society should be in the
eugenic value of the children born into it." Is that true, and
if so, how can this social interest be best excited and
maintained?
5. Dr. Edward T. Devine advocates social insurance for sickness
and widowhood, but not out-door relief or widow's pensions;
also advocates physical investigation and home visiting for
school children, but not school lunches, eye-glasses or
clothing as a free gift. His conclusion is that "the state
should enforce a minimum standard of child-care, but the
expense of providing it should fall on parents or on some
insurance fund to which parents have contributed." Is this
sound American doctrine? If so, should proposed legislation be
gauged by it?
6. Read chapter, "The Family," in _A Social Theory of Religious
Education_, by G.A. Coe. Is the emphasis laid upon equality in
this statement justified?
FOOTNOTES:
[1] See _Children Born Out of Wedlock_, by George B. Mangold, Ph.D.,
University of Missouri, 1921.
[2] See Chapter V, "The Home," in _The Normal Life_, by Edward T.
Devine.
CHAPTER II
THE MOTHER
"Strength and dignity are her clothing;
She openeth her mouth with wisdom;
And the law of kindness is on her tongue.
She looketh well to the ways of her household,
And eateth not the bread of idleness.
The heart of her husband trusteth in her;
Her children rise up and call her blessed;
Give her of the fruit of her hands;
And let her works praise her in the gates."
--PROVERBS.
"A being breathing thoughtful breath,
A traveller betwixt life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect woman, nobly plann'd,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still and bright,
With something of an angel light."
--WORDSWORTH.
"Yet in herself she dwelleth not,
Although no home were half so fair;
No simplest duty is forgot;
Life hath no dim and lowly spot
That doth not in her sunshine share."
--LOWELL.
"I loved the woman; there was one through whom I loved her, one
Not learned, save in gracious household ways,
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
No angel, but a dearer being, interpreter between the gods and men.
"Happy he with such a mother! Faith in womankind
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high
Comes easy to him, and though he trip and fall,
He shall not blind his soul with clay."
--TENNYSON.
=Antiquity of the Mother-instinct.=--The mother-instinct of protection
of offspring, of care of weakness and of sacrifice for the young, came
to high power before the human was reached in the scale of beings. It
must never be forgotten that humbler sisters set the fashion of
motherhood's devotion too long ago to reckon the time and in types of
organism too remote to be always recognized as kin to the human beings
we know to-day. This is the greatest and most racially useful of all
the biological assets stored up for us in the prehuman struggle toward
what we now call civilization. Nor should we fail to give full value
to the testimony of primitive human life that the mother and child
formed the first social group within the loose association of the
herd. It was the first group to develop, by virtue of its conscious
relationship, the sense of trust and the habit of service of the
stronger to the weaker, thus leading toward mutual aid within an area
of affection and good-will. These facts give basic assurance that
mother-love will last, no matter what changes in form of its
expression may be called for by changes in social order.
The reason why the relationship of mother and child was able thus to
lead the way toward social organization for the common good is
obvious. The intimate physical tie, the easily understood claim of the
child upon its mother, the prolongation of human infancy instituting a
habit of continuous service of the young and hence a tendency toward a
settled home and peaceful industries, all made it easy for woman to
become care-taker of children. These also made it easy for the early
social order to hold mothers to the task and, in growing measure,
protect them in it. What have been the recognized essentials in that
care-taking of motherhood? What are the permanent elements in the
mother's devotion to offspring which persist under all changes in
social conditions?
=The Recognized Essentials in Child-care.=--The more important items
in a program of child-care may be summed up as follows:
First--Protection of infancy and childhood from threatening
dangers.
Second--Providing food, clothing, and shelter for the young.
Third--Drilling children in physical habits and manner of
personal behavior demanded by the family rule of time and
place of birth.
Fourth--Teaching the child to talk, to walk, to obey, to
imitate.
Fifth--Interpreting to each newcomer the group morals which
govern the family and the educational process in the
period and locality into which he is born.
Sixth--For ages untold, the more formal education of all girls
and of all little boys in the folk-lore, the vocational
skill, the ways of living together and the methods of
social arrangement both within and without the tribe or
state or nation into which they were born.
Are any of these essential elements of motherhood's ancient devotion
to child-life lifted wholly from her obligation? Careful study of the
family needs and conditions, and the effect upon them of modern social
control and social organization, indicates that not one of these
ancient obligations is taken bodily from the modern mother's service.
=The Protective Function.=--The protective function has indeed been
considered for many centuries peculiarly the father's duty. Ever since
man was bound to family obligations he has been charged with repelling
enemy attacks upon the group of which his own family was a part and
with the task of standing guard over wife and child as against all
physical dangers. Man has developed under this social pressure a sense
of chivalry and a tendency to "save women and children first" which
give noble examples of courage and self-sacrifice to fire the
imagination of each new generation. Has the father-office developed
such many-sided and adequate protective service to childhood that
mothers have been able to "lay down their arms" and rest content in
the knowledge that their children are shielded from every danger? It
seems not. In the days when women were ignorant of all outside their
homes they may have felt so secure because not understanding the cause
of many family tragedies. In the days when they had no power to change
conditions affecting the home from without they may have felt excused
from the protective function of early motherhood, since men had taken
over physical defense and economic support and the relationship of the
family group to the social whole. No open-eyed woman in a country
giving women social, economic, and political power can so think
to-day.
It is a far cry from the savage mother, beating back some beast of the
jungle or the plain, to the modern mother whose physical protection
and that of her children is amply provided not alone by the husband
and father concerned but by organized society with its police power,
its courts and laws. The dangers that threaten child-life to-day in
the more civilized communities are not the same that threatened the
young of the herd-pack or the early lives of primitive men and women.
Then the mother had sometimes to defend her child against its own
father, especially her girl-babies against the social fiat of death
executed by the father's will. Ancient folk-lore and myth show us many
a struggle, intense and cruel, between mother-love and this
group-sentence of death upon some of its young. In case of war also
the ancient mother had to protect her virgin daughters against outrage
and capture, albeit so feebly and to so disastrous an end. And war,
since it is always and by its nature must be a return to savage
conditions, now leads to the sacrifice of women and children in much
the ancient manner; and faced by its horrors at close touch, the
mother-instinct essays the old task to the same bitter defeat.
In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule
was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of
women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had
large use of their protective function in easing family discipline and
in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs
was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and
often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all
show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises
of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives
would have been utterly sacrificed.
=Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children.=--To-day the
dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in
form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the
average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants,
the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness
of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many
human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal
and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of
"normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but
rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early
civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality
but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher
times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last
to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of
what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover,
we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child
to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual
father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are
dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can
abolish.
=Women's Leadership in Social Protection.=--Why, then, do we say that
the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and
still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is
to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to
summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which
children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother
fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the
banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands
to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic
through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It
is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it
wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the
guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and
at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws,
well enforced. It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the
often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading
of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children
against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those
whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could
not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother. In the
days when wives and mothers had no legal rights which society was
bound to respect, appeal was woman's only weapon; now the modern
mother has command of her protective function and exercises it
fearlessly. The same spirit is in all the long process of change,
however, and women to-day banding openly together and joining also
with men on equal terms, to secure laws protecting children from
cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent"
in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to
sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be
preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's
power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral
danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any
past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient mother who
band themselves together, again with men on equal terms, but oftenest,
perhaps, with men whom their own social interest has summoned to the
task, for the establishment of "Health Centres", of adequate and
efficient clinics and dispensaries; for securing necessary education
and care of mothers before the birth of their children, and for
mothers and babies alike needing good, fresh air, rest and comfort
after birth; for the raising of standards of physical well-being all
along the line of life from youth to age. The ancient mother was too
ignorant and had too little power to save her children and family from
physical ills, but she did her best. The modern mother is able to
learn about requirements and to act with power for the better health
and better training of every child. Is she always ready for and equal
to the task?
At least we can claim this for the mother devotion in modern times,
that it shows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power,
an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare
of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective
functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern
legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral
safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in
detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill
by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of
the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women
workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This
protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who
are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of
those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret
new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward
social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers
to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young
in terms of social obligations.
=The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.=--The second recognized
ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food,
clothing, and shelter for the young. This duty has undergone great
changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of
population has altered almost past recognition. These changes seem to
many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these
matters to the vanishing point.
It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother
scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her
bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save
the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern
mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all
parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. Is the modern mother,
then, released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a
long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn
needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from
the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the
modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all
garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern
mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing?
For the modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon
the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in
land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and
landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a
home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live?
Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care?
=The Woman in Rural Life.=--The country-woman, dealing at first hand
with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal
devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which
her ancient ancestor struggled. She has, it is true, "scientific
farming" of men to raise the harvests that ancestor's heroic but
feeble efforts could not secure. She has mechanical and commercial
aids as housemother such as the primitive woman never imagined. She
has been released from much of the drudgery which burdened her
grandmother in the domestic stage of industry. She is under social
protection such as no previous woman enjoyed in the solitary household
of the past. And in the United States the Federal Government is
offering her aids.[3] It is, however, true that the housemother in
rural communities still feels many of the obligations of the ancient
woman. The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw
material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework,
washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all
their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past. This
fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines
for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they
help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it
more easily.
The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as
many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring
the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the
store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of
the men-folk to go further afield for their own work. This movement,
which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger
classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry
of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making
farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning
young women to the life of the farmer's wife.
Meanwhile, the higher forms of social organization possible in cities
and in closely settled towns and villages are working to lessen
house-keeping burdens to an unprecedented degree. It is noticeable
that all schemes for so specializing woman's work and so easing the
domestic burden as to make, as one writer puts it, "the home a rest
place for women as for men," have their imaginary seat in great cities
or closely built suburbs. The farm-women we know can combine and
coöperate to a greater extent than they now do and the town and city
women may take far better advantage of the agencies of household
assistance now at their doors. How far this movement to relieve the
home of household work may go we do not know.
=Modern Demand for Standardization.=--Is there any plan yet proposed,
however, which can relieve the mother of her primary and ancient
obligation to see that her family is well nourished, suitably clothed
and healthfully sheltered? Some one must attend to the needs of each
family in these vital particulars which underlie all problems of
public and private health. Shall the state do it? So far the
experience of state institutions and even of private "homes" do not
encourage hope along that line. So far the physical and affectional
needs of children and youth, and of husbands and wives, and of fathers
and mothers have not been met by any substitute for the private home.
And in the private home, under any plan, there must go on certain
processes which have to cost some one member of the family a great
deal of thought, much personal effort and constant attention. For most
families in average condition that person is naturally the
housemother. If the husband and father is the chief or only
wage-earner in "gainful occupations," then his health and strength are
of primary concern to all the family and must be secured by adequate
and healthful provision of food and clothing, and the home must give
him what he vitally needs for maintaining power of economic service to
his family. If the mother, also, is a wage-or salary-earner we have
the dictum of economists that her inherited and usual place in the
family machinery must be filled, if at all successfully, by trained
and congenial helpers at a cost in present conditions prohibitive for
the average family income. The estimate of Mr. Taber, in his excellent
book, _The Business of the Household_, is that unless for causes of
illness or special emergency "no family having an income of less than
three thousand dollars has any right to maintain a maid." This
estimate seems not only economically correct but shows why so few
families have incomes that can release the housemother from housework.
It also shows why only the exceptionally trained and competent
vocational worker, if a married woman and mother of young children,
can earn enough to release herself from the miscellaneous tasks of the
private household without loss to the family treasury. The easing of
the burden of housework, almost unbearable as it has been and
responsible, as we have good reason to believe, for much ill-health of
women and much unhappiness in marriage, is coming fast and from quite
other directions than is often perceived. The commercial aids of
wholesale preparation of food and clothing, and the new fashions in
house-building and household management are alike working toward such
a reduction of private household service as may enable the average
woman to meet the family needs, even where there are several young
children, if she is strong in body and trained in efficient ways of
working, and yet have considerable time left for other activities.
The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and
reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment
house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief
from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at
command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially
do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best
place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many
such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also
many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home
associations which support family affection. They are also for the
most part in localities where people are brought together without plan
or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which,
so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community
spirit.
=The Apartment House and the Family.=--The apartment house seems to be
the best place for those families in which all the adult members are
busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit
by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such
families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family
comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the
lowest terms. If to the usual apartment house provisions for aids to
the housemother are added, what is now offered in some places, namely,
the "Auto-Service for Meals," whereby the principal meal, at least,
the dinner, is brought to the door ready to place on the table and all
cooking dishes hard to wash are returned to the centre of supply to be
prepared for another service, then, indeed, can all the members take
turns in rendering the small offices for family comfort still required
and each go about his or her special vocation at will. This seems to
be the goal of many progressive minds, although personal taste is
seldom satisfied by "coöperative" cooking.
It must be remembered by all, that the sort of family pictured above
has in it no children of ages requiring freedom of motion and constant
attention (unless, indeed, "the boarding-school in the country" for
all over four or five years is contemplated). It has in it no aged
whose needs in diet and in physical comfort vary from the usual. It
has in it no chronic invalids and no convalescents, no blind or lame
or specially weak requiring special help. It is for the particular
benefit, at least, of families of a particular type, of which the
cities, with their more varied facilities, contain an unusual
proportion. For the family of the ordinary type, with its many
differing needs and its variety of claim upon some one person for its
central direction and service, the various aids from without which
have been indicated serve rather to relieve from excessive burdens
than to remove altogether the special obligations of the woman-head of
the family.
Moreover, the time left to the average housemother from the old
housework by the new helps in that work is, in part at least,
mortgaged in advance to social effort to make the new commercial aids
to family service actual helps and not hindrances to family health and
comfort. The food supply drawn upon must be sharply investigated lest
it contain deleterious substances or be denuded of nourishing quality.
The ready-made clothing must be bought with knowledge and constant
vigilance against cheating in material or in construction or in sins
of fashion against health and beauty. The labor-saving devices of
every sort must be put to intelligent test and require specific
training for most efficient use. The family budget must be more
carefully planned and more heroically maintained at prudent levels.
The public service of markets, transportation facilities and functions
of "middlemen" must be understood and controlled as never before.
Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered
supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest
needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing
facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than
to the needs of family life.
Hence we may say that the old forms of effort by which mothers fed and
clothed and sheltered their children led directly to absorption of
interest, energy and conscientious labor within the house. The new
forms of effort by which these essentials of healthful and comfortable
living are secured lead directly to all manner of coöperative social
adjustments of supply to demand. The standard of demand, however, let
it never be forgotten, is made and maintained within the intimate
family circle itself, and the personal intelligence and ethical
maturity of the housemothers, who form the major purchasing class of
every civilized community, determine that standard. For that great
enterprise of high standardization the same personal devotion to the
central demands of life is required in the average modern woman which
made the ancient mother so great a leader in primitive culture. The
new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than
any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the
personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the
centuries and have pictured the myth goddesses bringing the cup and
the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple
garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the
nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the
mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed
her.
We may say "our father-land," but we always say "our mother-earth." To
those who see clearly the value of the ancient family rite of the
meal alone together, to which it may well be every member of the
family has made a distinct contribution; to those to whom the private
table still appeals and who still appreciate the taste and quality of
every purchase made for each individual member of the intimate group
(things taking time and thought most often of the mother), the
individual home has meanings that are not lost but rather are growing
in spiritual importance as the drudgery of the household is lessened.
=New Uses of Electric Power.=--To-day another great contribution to
the spiritual value of the private household ministrations is offered
in the new uses of electric power. Already the "servantless house" is
widely advertised. Already the grave difficulties in household
adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and
women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby
giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of
limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern
wizard of electricity. It seems to many of us that had this magician
been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery
the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so
absolutely, if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of
domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could
have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic
evils of our present labor world. However that may be, it is clear
that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy
control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could
have conceived. The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe,
is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and
such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as
will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate
capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field
that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the
real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of
affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before.
=Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the
torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well
said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely
through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan
of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in
the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of
communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and
humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a
prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a
necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health.
So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be
happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare.
That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful
nurse must have the mother-feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that
the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their
own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are
being used to lead women to this personal office.
If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in
affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than
in any other way that babies seem to thrive. No one can claim that
ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The
affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire
to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child.
That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a
return of affection from the child. Such personal ministrations of the
mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole
character in later life. One may worship from a distance, and the
capacity to justly estimate excellence grows with maturity. But the
child knows best those who serve his needs most intimately and gives
his love to that person.
=The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service.=--There is much
compensation, therefore, for the woman who gives herself to her child
in old-fashioned ways of personal service. She gets the charm and the
allurement of the growing bud on life's tree. If she misses that she
loses something of her birthright and some "substitute-mother" gets
something of satisfaction from the child that she does not.
=Early Drill in Personal Habits.=--The third essential of the
inherited obligation of mothers to their children is the early drill
in personal habits that are required for health and decency and
propriety in any given time and place. For this it is an absolute
necessity that either the mother so serve herself or that she secure
some substitute-mother of refinement, knowledge, affection and
devotion which make her an equal in the family circle. How many nurses
fulfil that demand? Many, even of those least recognized by their
employers as entitled to special gratitude and appreciation. The point
to be noted is, however, that even if experts for "hour-service" as
nursery governess could be had in sufficient numbers and even if the
majority of families could financially meet the expense of those fully
competent, such service would not, as a rule, meet the needs of
children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not,
indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant
readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along
the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself
to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared
service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time
or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal
care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by
the time the baby becomes the child.
If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent
mother, or substitute-mother, has the process to repeat with each
newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of
very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety
and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the
family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for
whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate
home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie
picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush
drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker
Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance
fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained
and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care
of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of
a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had
not made possible before for the field-hands of the South. The people
coming to us from all the peasant classes of Europe and the East have
many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that
belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It
may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the
belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack
of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it
may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by
lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need
the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and
teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what
children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may
be impossible in the congested quarters of a great city. But the need
thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the
United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or
substitute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along
the way of life but every own mother or substitute-mother should have
a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in
dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The
housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable
living-place into which to put every home.
=Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The
fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to
teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All
these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They
are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health
and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from
the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of
talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward
that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and
understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for
the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can
understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and
other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's
language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art.
In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most
beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the
fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to
welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the
practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the
family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are
several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is
often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all
to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through
childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but
the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious
absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts.
Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or
unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this
end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many
children in the family for the father to properly support, or the
mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often
means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older
children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be
defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a
tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the
development of either. The coming of new members to the family,
however, in right spacing and right conditions, means that each child
gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and
makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of
obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family
public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by
all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter
into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many
temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to
like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are
children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes
family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more
effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules
and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and
social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way
to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense
of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance
and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together.
=Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this
preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests
to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the
father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard
questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so
overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot
give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children
to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the
helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as
many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers,
although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger
concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all
their younger children in the hands of the mother.
What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of
which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and
its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the
child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the
real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family
table and the intimate association with father and mother and brother
and sister. These make a school of preëminent importance to the later
training.
=Women's Relation to More Formal Education.=--The fifth obligation
which the modern mother inherits from the ages is that relating to the
more formal education of all girls and of all little boys in the
folk-lore, the vocational skill, and the methods of social arrangement
which set moral fashions and demand personal obedience to the social
order into which one is born. This obligation is so largely shared
to-day that many see in it no special burden for the modern mother.
The school training once so largely within the home, or for the older
boys so definitely obtained in fraternities or war-groups of men, is
now a separate institution. The customs, tribal or national, that once
ruled the family-training are now solidified and definitely outlined
in laws written on statute books. The illiterate parent cannot, if he
would, disobey the compulsory school law. The poverty-stricken parent
must either starve himself to feed his children according to the
demands of the health board or he must accept public or private
charity for their sustenance according to modern demands. The ignorant
parent must submit to treatment of his children by public nurse or
doctor of whom he may be afraid. The parent not ignorant, but
differing from the majority as to what will prevent disease or cure
it, must accept the public rule.
The decay of domestic industry and the growth of the factory system
have given rise to so many and serious social dangers that laws are
now passed forbidding home manufacture on grounds of need to abolish
sweatshop conditions, although to many such prohibition seems, and to
some may be, the denial of parental moral protection to children and
youth in families of the very poor. The training for self-supporting
work, which came about so naturally from within the household in the
handicraft stage of industry, now requires many public agencies of
education. The new social "mores" accepted by the majority and
supported by law and court may be directly opposed to the inherited
ideal of right living of large numbers of people in any given
locality, especially in the United States with our large immigrant
population.
To have education so much a public concern seems to many to so
minimize the mother's share in it that she is placed in the same
general relation as the father to what was once her special duty.
Ideally, both parents are equally bound to decide all questions
concerning the formal education of their children within the limits of
personal choice made possible by the public provisions of which all
parents may now take advantage. In some favored families this really
occurs. Actually, however, in most families the mother has more
leisure to learn of possible opportunities, to influence possible
improvement, and, above all, to help to wise individual choice in the
use by the family of these socially provided educational facilities
than has the father. She is also now more likely to belong to
associations or clubs or classes for adult study in which educational
problems are discussed than is he, and often more intimately
acquainted with children's desires or needs in education.
=Women's Relation to Educational Agencies.=--A glance at the list of
national and local associations for the study and application of
educational science and art will show the vast majority of women over
men (in the United States at least) who are trying to find out what
real education in modern life should be and how to secure that best
training for their own children and for the children of all. The
educational obligation is, therefore, not taken from the average
mother's duty; it has changed its form only and often is the more
difficult to meet successfully because of the high specialization of
the teachers and the confusion of the school direction. No one would
claim that fathers, if loyal and worthy, are less anxious than mothers
for the trailing of their children toward successful living. The fact,
however, that most mothers stand nearest to the lives of the children
make them most often the necessary purveyors of educational
opportunities from the public provision to private use.
=The Social Value of Parental Affection.=--Below and within all other
gifts to humanity which have come by the way of motherhood's devotion
to child-life is that selective and partial affection which secures to
each child one adult person at least to whom he or she is supreme in
interest. Most normal women feel when they hear the cry of their own
new-born that all of life is justly tributary to that one priceless
creature who has come at their call out of the mystery of being to
travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. Nor is this
inherited tendency toward partial affection a sign of undeveloped or
selfish quality in the woman of to-day. It is a provision of nature
still supremely useful in helping each tiny atom of the social whole
to find and keep its own place in a world of struggle and hardship.
The fear of defeat handicaps many a purpose before it is put to the
test. The sense of loneliness drives many to lower companionship when
higher is hard to attain. The lack of courage and the paralysis of
faith in one's self or in others makes invalid many a nature which
might otherwise achieve. To prevent such waste from inner weakness and
to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's
fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal
values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this
mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its
acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social
solidarity and the claim of all upon each one must never be absent
from the family influence if that influence is to be wholesome. The
family, however, exists to make a small spot in which there may be a
unity found nowhere else, and at the centre of the family life is
still the mother.
Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much
careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to
secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young
life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and
devotion for every child in the interest of every child? "The
community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental
love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in
any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure
for each child his rightful share in that endowment. The main business
of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were
drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little
social permission to do their work by proxy. Many social helps in her
task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation
as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt
to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts
the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most
successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of
the housemother.
=What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability
to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their
relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful
results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new
relationship to the home--that of mutual headship with man in the
social institution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate.
Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of
domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring
a new relationship to the school--that of learner in the highest
educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area.
Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her
ancient devotion to child-life.
The mass of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial
order--that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands
that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of
staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products
and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding
laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic
industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to
the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary,
instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The
feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a
delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that
she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial
exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have
tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in
domestic handicraft.
Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social
control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands
that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is
being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized
and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity,
dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancestors. Woman is
acquiring a new relationship to the state--that of citizen with full
responsibility instead of her old perpetual minority under man's
control. Social welfare demands that she take into the body politic
the same devotion to the weak and undeveloped, the same patient, wise
dependence upon the spiritual elements of justice and wisdom which
have made her private motherhood so successful. She must not now, on
peril of a social setback, take up man's weapons of selfishness, of
violence, of impatient revolution--weapons the best of men have
already discarded.
Women should now be clear-sighted enough to see that the world needs
from them not the same but different contributions to the upreach and
onward march of the race from those elements in which man has
excelled. If society-at-large is to become truly a family of those who
love and serve each other, then human beings of the mother-sex must
take into public life and public service the best they have learned
and taught in the individual home. What women most need now is to
"retain all the good the past hath had" as they step forward to their
full liberty and responsibility in new relationships to life.
QUESTIONS ON THE MOTHER
1. What, in general, have been the social demands upon wives and
mothers, and how have these been met in the past?
2. What, if any, of these inherited social demands are now met by
social agencies outside of the private family?
3. What, in general, may be defined as the line of demarkation
between the private obligations resting still upon mothers for
personal service to family life and agencies of public
child-care and social standardization?
4. How far is a trend toward minimizing the demand for personal
service of the housemother in the private family to be
encouraged?
5. If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and
one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does
her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time
and strength must go into the housemother's service and for
what period of years?
6. What amount of time and strength might be left, in the case of
strong and competent women, for other vocational work?
7. Is the modern "nursery school" an adequate substitute for the
early home-training? (See report, "A Nursery School
Experiment," published by "Bureau of Educational Experiments,"
144 West Thirteenth Street, New York City.)
FOOTNOTES:
[3] (_a_) See, for example, "Conveniences for the Farm Home," Farmers'
Bulletin No. 270, and (_b_) "The Farm Kitchen as a Workshop," Farmers'
Bulletin No. 607.
CHAPTER III
THE FATHER
"Who plants his soul in stalwart sons and daughters keeps on giving
His life and vision to his fellow men;
His power grows like leaven.
"His children strive to take his spirit up and keep it living;
They share with all the love he gave his own, as he had shared,
And lives, his love has served, all call him father."
From the Tribute, _To My Father_,
by HORNELL HART.
"To dwell in the wide house of the world; to stand in true
attitude therein; in success to share one's principles with the
people; in failure to live them out alone; to be incorruptible by
riches or honor; unchangeable by poverty; unmoved by perils or
power--these I call the qualities of a great man."--MENCIUS.
"For the man who is such as no longer to delay being among the
number of the best is like a priest and minister of the gods,
using the deity that is planted within him, that which makes a man
uncontaminated by any pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by
any insult, feeling no wrong, a fighter in the noblest fight, who
cannot be overpowered by passion, one dyed deep with justice,
understanding that only what belongs to himself is matter for his
activity, yet remembering also that every human being is his
kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to mans
nature."--MARCUS AURELIUS.
"'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
The governor who must be wise and good.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees;
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business; this is the stalk
True power doth grow on."--WORDSWORTH.
=Historic Background of Fatherhood.=--The father seems to have had a
precarious attachment to the family in earlier forms of life. As Le
Tourneau well says, "The animal family is especially maternal;
although father birds often share parental duties, many mammals are
less developed in duration and strength of affection." Fathers,
mothers, and their offspring are not closely grouped in lower life.
The relation of the sexes, even when the human was reached, seems not
to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of
parenthood. "Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John
Lubbock. The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of
such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other
elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation,
made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men
to learn that babies take two parents to give them birth.
When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a
mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to
many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which
proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom
to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order
to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his
make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive
consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very
exciting.
The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so
many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function
and how he linked it with the god-idea. The "religious dedication of
women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of
ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything
earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with
sex in its relation to religion. This idea of the sacrifice of
sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual
celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed
to be better served by monks and nuns than by fathers and mothers.
In the family relation the experience of fathers, after they knew
themselves to be such, has been widely varied and not along any single
line of development. To quote Le Tourneau again, "There has been no
strict relation between intellectual development and the form of
sexual union. Even among monkeys, as in men, we find both polygamy and
monogamy; and bees and other forms of lower life show a high degree of
social organization and division of labor without the institution of
the family at all." The relation of the sexes has always been a deep
concern of human society even in most primitive forms of social order,
but after men knew the connection between the gratification of
sex-instinct and the procreative function, they began to reason about
and to make more definite the customs that outlined permitted
marriage. The varieties of social expression in these ancient customs
is witness alike to economic pressure, the effect of climate and
immigration, political struggle and the institutions of war and of
private property.
=Purchase and Capture of Wives.=--Purchase and capture began early to
run a race in the supply of wives. Purchase, which kept the twain
together in nearness to one or the other side of the family line, was
usually best for women; especially when, as often happened, it gave
her the protection of her own blood relations. Capture, on the other
hand, made woman not only the possession of her husband in a peculiar
sense as separating her from all who might, through the working of
natural affection, act as her helpers in time of need, but made it
possible for the slavery of the wife to the husband to take on more
cruel forms. Although, it must be said, even capture gave a few women
of superlative charm a chance to take precedence of common wives
gained in the usual manner.
Two influences, one from the custom to allow marriages only within a
certain blood bond, and one to allow marriages only outside that
family relationship, have worked in the first instance to preserve
certain racial traits from extinction, and in the second place to mix
the common elements of human nature to the enrichment of the common
stock. This balancing regard for the known and allurement of the novel
has also worked to give manifold forms of family association, since
those customs were superseded.
It would seem that not only were "trial marriages" for individuals an
ancient, not at all a modern device, to see how the twain could get
along together, but varying trial forms of marriage for racial,
tribal, and national groups have made all manner of experiments to see
what on the whole would serve best the social need in the family
relationship.
That process of wide experimentation at last settled into the ideal
and practice of one father-head, at least, even if still allowing more
than one wife and mother within its bond. That father-head seems to
have found his place only on condition of grant from society of
complete authority over wife and children.
=The Patriarchal Family.=--The patriarchal family, which Sir Henry
Maine described so well, but which he mistakenly supposed to be the
first great type of familial association, placed firmly at the centres
of social order the power and responsibility of the man. Doubtless
that power and responsibility drew their chief sanction from the idea
of man as the real source of being. After man learned that he was as
much a parent in being father as woman was a parent in being mother,
nothing seemed to have contented him but spiritual supremacy in
parenthood. The classic picture and interpretation of this phase of
family development is contained in the great drama of the Greeks, the
trilogy of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, and the
Erinnyes. Here we see how the mother-side of life, once so powerful as
representative of tribal unity, was set aside and overborne by the
father-side, as Apollo proudly claims all generative power for man and
relegates the mother to the position of an underling nurse. It will be
remembered, however, that Athena, although, as Apollo said, "having a
father only," makes the mothers still invaluable as guardians of the
family altar and as those who can bless or blight both the fruitage of
the earth and of the marriage bed.
The Greeks, by virtue of their superior self-consciousness when
passing through radical social changes, and by virtue also of their
power of literary portrayal of experience, have set down for us, for
all time, the way by which man attained his unlimited power over woman
and over the family order.
We need not accept in full measure Dr. Lester Ward's picturesque story
of the manner in which women were made subject to men, _i.e._, that
female sex-selection so overdid the business of rewarding with favor
the strength, the fighting quality, and the cunning which grew to
mental power in the male, that when human men and women were reached,
woman found a master ready-made by her subhuman sisters. We may,
however, find a most suggestive indication of the real reasons for
that masculine supremacy in Doctor Ward's testimony to the way in
which the female sex, when it had the power of special selection of
the kind of mates it wanted, set a fashion in masculine attainment
which did work later against her own command of the sex-relation.
Women did not become subject to men because of physical weakness. The
savage woman does continuous work heavier and more strength-demanding
than that assigned to the savage man. It was not even that the
primitive woman had always to carry the child as she worked, and had
therefore a double burden, although that greatly helped men in gaining
supremacy. It was rather that the larger leisure of primitive man and
his consequent development of thought and imagination enabled him to
secure religion and statecraft as allies to his physical claims. The
intellectual side of the male development was doubtless greatly aided
by female selection, and when man was reached he already knew how to
outwit other men and most women in the race for power.
=The Three Chief Sources of Influence.=--It has been well said that
the "three great sources of influence in barbarous as in civilized
countries are religion, military power, and money." All these
influences became masculine monopolies ages ago.
The ancient woman was sometimes a priestess and often a healer in her
simple fashion and in all ages has acted as nurse in illness and
care-taker of the aged and the feeble when these have received care.
She has been mistress of the ceremonials of birth and death and
marriage when these have been parts of the family ritual, and
courtship has been largely in her charge. All the customs that relate
to intimate household experiences have been shared by women as ritual
and rule of life.
Men, however, took over the simple elements of religious feeling and
social requirement in which women bore so great a part and made of
them religious cults and theologies, and they then became a masculine
monopoly. Men also took over the simple healing of gifted women and
made it first the prerogative of the "medicine man" and at last of the
medical profession, from which women were barred until very lately.
The social customs which women once had power to enforce in so many
ways became the "law," made and executed solely by men. Art, science,
literature, grew to great proportions as man acquired the opportunity
and the skill to concentrate his intelligence upon specialties of
effort; and from all the walks of educational preparation and of
professional achievement women were debarred. Hence, in the family
order, in which the first and obvious place of women had been
relatively high, man took the position of mastery by right of
religious priesthood, by right of legal supremacy, and by right of
monopoly of the money power.
Back of all this lay the assumption of the superior relation of the
father to the spiritual life of the child.
Man gained his larger leisure first by the use of women as slaves when
individual women became the property of individual men, and later by
conquest over other men through which process he secured more slaves,
and finally by the military systems that in various forms gave some
men a chance to work at what they liked and from which they could gain
advantage in the growing complexity of increasing social organization.
Man's larger leisure, which gave him money power or its equivalent in
earlier forms of exchange, could not have been secured by him had not
woman been socially and by religious sanction set to the constant task
of the family service and the more peaceful occupations of primitive
agriculture.
=Ancient Military Training of Youth.=--Doubtless man's military
prestige and power gave him the greatest advantage over woman and was
the source, more than anything else, of her subjection in the family
order. This came about not only because military success gave the
women of conquered tribes into the absolute power of the conquerors,
and broke for such the social bond of remaining mother-right, but
because of the special training of boys and young men which the
military systems of all ages have initiated. "The ancient
fraternities," and the manner of education which separated those who
would be "braves" from the family life in early youth, the strong bond
of a common purpose made appealing to youthful imagination by mystic
ceremonials and burnt into the consciousness by painful "initiations,"
all combined to teach men how to work together for common ends and in
a way unknown to the training and opportunity of women.[4] This it was
which gave a consistency and a power to man's collective life which
woman could not gain in the past, and exclusion from which enabled man
to become her legal and economic master even within the home.
The economic power which man acquired through specialization of labor,
made possible for him by social excuse from exhausting personal
service within the family; the political power, made possible for him
by military achievement, from which women for the most part were
strictly barred by the "Trade Unionism" of war preparation; the
intellectual power, made a sex-monopoly in education and professional
use and opportunity; and the religious sanction of priesthood and
theology, which fastened all these to law and government, secured the
complete subjection of mothers to fathers and gave woman in the family
the status of her infant children.
=Ancestor-worship.=--This triple influence of money, military power,
and religion, gave the definite basis for ancestor-worship, which has
been so widespread and so influential in the setting of social
customs. Ancestor-worship, with its separate family ceremonials, for
which the wife must learn her husband's family ritual, led to
child-marriage, and that in turn to the slavery of the wife not only
to the husband but to the older women of his family. Child-marriage
led also to many tragedies of racial decay before it was seen to be
inimical to strength and power of achievement. When child-marriage was
not a part of marriage customs, however, and a suitable age was
demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the
father secure. He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the
family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the
children yet to be. The Greek poem before referred to shows in the
pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain
Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and
her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid
for peace of the dead and the service of the living yet to be born,
shows vividly how religion made firm and binding the father's place in
the family.
So deeply did this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the
social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man
could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social
opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth
who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is
praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and
give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully
says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for his
ancestors," pictures vividly the sense of responsibility to the family
life once almost universal.
This feeling, bred by ancestor-worship, has persisted long after the
church in its various forms has superseded the ancient family worship.
We find it as late as in Colonial times in Protestant New England,
where the bachelor was fined and subjected to humiliating community
supervision and the spinster, almost unknown above twenty years of
age, if persisting in her single life was treated as an exception to
be held in social tutelage.
=The Double Standard of Morals.=--The triple bond of money, military
power, and economic supremacy, which made men masters in the family
life, made them also able to free themselves from exclusive devotion
to one wife, whether under the law of polygamy or professed monogamy;
as it has been possible for men to divorce their wives for slight
causes, while wives often received the death penalty for even supposed
infidelity. It has also instituted and maintained for ages a double
standard of morals by which the same act mutually shared by men and
women has been for men a slight peccadillo and for women a deadly sin.
Chastity has been made almost the sole virtue of women, invasion of
which even by resisted force has destroyed her "honor," and voluntary
rejection of which has made her a creature of social ostracism. Man,
on the other hand, has been forgiven all manner of slips from the
straight and narrow way of marital fidelity, provided he could achieve
something of importance in the world of thought or action.
This double standard of morals has reacted upon the family not only in
preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for
their own best development and that of their children but has thrown
over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its
cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood.
=Basic Needs for Equality of Human Rights.=--When women as mothers
have no power of guardianship of their own children; when they as
persons have no power of self-defense against cruelty and outrage of
their own fathers or husbands; when as members of society they have no
contract-power but must suffer all manner of injustice unless highly
fortunate in their male representative; when as citizens of a
so-called democratic state they have no voice in either law or its
enforcement, then they are indeed a subject class. Any subject class
dependent upon privilege or special favor for all the order and
circumstance of life is clearly not a fit part of modern democratic
society. It is, therefore, of tremendous social importance to the
family, as truly as to all other inherited institutions, that women
are now rapidly emerging from that subject condition of perpetual
minority under the law to the individual responsibility and
self-protective power of the legal adult. This passage "from status to
contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the
affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of
government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body
politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps. To-day
the ideal of equal rights between the sexes and in relationship of men
and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of the
enlightened. What is before us is the slow and in some respects
difficult task of working out that ideal in social adjustments. While
at work on this task it behooves us to go over the past experience
more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal
family gave to society and through society to wife and children as
well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife
and children.
=Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.=--It seems not
too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first
attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of
religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from
particular men. In such period and condition the sex-relationship
itself had not attained its present spiritual quality. There was
apparently required the sense of ownership on the part of one man to
safeguard those women most generally desired from exploitation by all
men. Some legal order in the oppression of women by society had to
precede, apparently, the abolition of oppression of women itself; just
as to-day the effort is to "humanize war" before we can become wise
and strong enough to abolish it. No social device that the imagination
can conceive could be so well fitted to protect motherhood, in an age
before justice could give power of self-protection, as was that of the
patriarchal family. The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the
political aspect of the building up of great families from which the
state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the
industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the
patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social
order and the chief heir of social privilege. It seems apparent,
therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the
father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and
the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the
economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange
of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from
the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship
of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all,
and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of
Heaven.
"Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but
social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition
of equality of personal rights within that order. The great lady of
the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month
after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and
her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and
only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new
owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery,
realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in
appropriate social conditions.
To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family
and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and
mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the
thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked
at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject
condition in the past. We have to remember, however, that social
history seems to indicate that no system of human association has
grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its
dominant features. The protection of wife and child, which rested for
so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from
outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages
of the world.
The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of
forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to
persist after the need for them has ceased. This hindrance has been
shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power
of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by
ethical and humane considerations. A form of family relationship
entrenched in institutions of age-long prestige and supported by the
triple influence of money, military power, and religion, lived on
after its work in securing social order had been accomplished and long
after its usefulness was entirely ended. After the father-headship
ceased to express the highest ideals of either sex-relationship or
parental devotion, its retention produced social evils and personal
wrongs which made a conscious and determined movement for "Woman's
Rights" necessary, and still makes necessary close and definite
attention to the equalizing of opportunities.
=The Social Value of the Patriarchal Family.=--It is well, however, to
consider not only the negative but the affirmative side of the social
inheritance of the patriarchal family, in which has grown up and
developed the ideal of monogamic marriage. What did the father gain,
intellectually and ethically, from that patriarchal order, and what
did he give, not only in protection of wife and children but toward
their moral development in social life?
The effect of unlimited power over another is generally worse for the
one who wields than for the one who is subjected to that power, and
the faults of men have their deepest origin in the family order that
gave all its members into his complete control. Man's faults of
dogmatism, of selfish domination, of sacrifice of personal life to
further desired political or economic ends, have roots in the
patriarchal family. Man's careless misuse of his own moral ideals for
purposes of ambition was certainly fostered by this sense of ownership
of women and children with legal power to use them for pleasure or
profit.
Something else, however, came to man in and through the patriarchal
system. Society, that gave him liberty to rule the family, rigidly
required of him that such rule should be in the social interest, as
that interest was then understood.
It was obviously for the interest of society that women should be
chaste, in order not only that a man might know his own children but
that the family line and inheritance should be preserved from
insecurity. A man's infidelity to the marriage vow might seem to do no
perceptible harm if practised outside the family circle, but woe to
him if he trespassed upon the family ownership of another man.
There might be more than one wife acknowledged as secondary in status
or a mere concubine slave to help in domestic duties while giving
pleasure to the head of the family, but there was early a social
demand for one chief wife whose offspring should inherit the family
power. Although even in this fixed demand there were loopholes of
"legal fiction of adoption" by which some favorite child not of the
actual line of inheritance might be given the place of honor and
control. Again, if the father under the patriarchal system was the
recognized economic master he was also legally held to the financial
support of wife and child. In the collective family life his
obligation extended far through the line of kinship and of alliance by
marriage, and to-day in many Oriental countries the father may be
bound to poverty as the responsible support of a large company of
dependent pensioners. It must also be remembered that if the ancient
father, as head of the family, held the permission of society to
discipline wife and child even to severity of corporal punishment he
was also charged with the task of insuring their obedience to whatever
social laws were in force and was himself legally liable to punishment
if he did not keep his family law-abiding. That moral responsibility
for the behavior of his family, early outlined in detail, was
increasingly eased by the growth of personal relationship of women and
youth to society. That was shown in the laws that defined the extent
of punishment allowed the father-head. Although he might be secure in
his legal right and duty to bestow on wife or apprentice "moderate
castigation," an old Welsh law limited him to "three blows only with
a broomstick on any part of the person except the head;" and another
ancient law allowed the use only of "a stick no longer than the
husband's arm and no thicker than his middle finger" in the case of
the wife; while Blackstone's well-remembered restriction was to "a
stick no bigger than his thumb."
The moral responsibility of the father for his children, carrying with
it as it did the liability of prison or even death for the misbehavior
of sons, was governed by various statutes which show in the Middle
Ages a growth toward freeing children from parental control and
placing upon them when "of age" a definite and personal legal bond and
penalty.
For example, we read that the Anglo-Saxon law held many children at
the age of ten responsible for some acts which were forbidden, but
that most youth were legally minors until the age of fifteen. Until
the early period of the eighteenth century it was still possible for a
parent to legally sell his children, "a girl up to fourteen, a boy
under seven." And after that period a wayward or troublesome son or
daughter, or any of the offspring, when the parents could be proved
financially incapable of their care, could be sent to convent or
monastery.
The ability to bear arms seems to have been the criterion for legal
coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in
tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of
light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of
twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when
he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could
swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were
released from liability to punishment for their sons' misdemeanors.
On the other hand, after the tenth century, no child under ten could
be punished for his father's crimes unless it could be shown that he
was a party to them, and the custom of carrying family autonomy so far
as to wipe out innocent and guilty alike, when a treason or crime of
any sort angered the powers in command, was practically ended.
When the beginnings of the modern industrial order appeared and
burghers shared with knights and yeomen the social responsibility, "a
burgher's son acquired freedom and legal responsibility when he could
count and measure broadcloth." The wife gained a growing and perilous
freedom from laws which increased her direct relationship to the
state. She attained the power of being punished even by the death
penalty for broken laws far earlier than she attained the slightest
influence in the passage or enforcement of those laws. It was
generally thought, however, until very recently, that if a wife "did
not behave" it was the husband's fault and right that he should suffer
the consequences.
=The Responsibility of the Ancient Father Commensurate With His
Power.=--Again, it must be remembered that if the ancient father was
by virtue of his military training and activities separated from the
domestic interests which he so often and with full social permission
sacrificed to war and preparation for war, he was at the same time
under perpetual conscription by the community of which he was a part
to serve as protector of his own family and the families of those of
the same social group. The social pressure upon the father-head of the
family was therefore severe and unremitting, since he was in so many
ways responsible for, as truly as master of, his household. It was no
light task to be a worthy head of a patriarchal family in all the ages
when growing law was superseding custom and advancing civilization was
increasing the complexity of social life. This task when well achieved
gave to man a serious sense of his duty as well as a firm conviction
of his power.
We see the fruits of that ethical training in family responsibility in
many of man's noblest traits; preëminently in his recognition of the
duty of protection of the weak and young, and in his devotion to his
own, against the world if need be.
The vast outreach of man's intelligence toward the organization of the
state, of the industrial order, of the church, of the formal educative
process, of the means of transportation, of the systems of finance, of
the development and application of scientific knowledge, and even of
the arts and of literature, all reveal the effect of his early
schooling in the representative responsibility of fatherhood to
society.
We speak to-day of the "father of modern invention" in this or that
particular. We have not ceased to praise the "good provider" or to
esteem him highly who has a well-ordered home.
=Moral Qualities in Women Developed by Masculine
Selection.=--Moreover, we are all now recognizing the fact that we owe
to the ownership of woman by man a secondary sex-selection of
inestimable value. It may be an extreme statement to say, with at
least one sociologist, that the ages of woman's subjection to man was
not too great a price to pay for the gift to the race of feminine
beauty and charm. We can assert, however, that some moral values which
men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what
at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of
service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often
difficult conditions.
Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of
thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution,
organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the
life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness
of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure
until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and
suffering.
The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of
most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and
led to their mediation between every institution and the personal
life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could
choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters,
placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the
life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most
easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of
the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to
allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which
masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the
essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of
manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and
competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social
system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the
ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation,
combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.
Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in
order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident
to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great
social use in the modern state.
The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made
him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied
itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge
and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that
even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded
by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation
of the value of feminine personality.
While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the
old order of the family, led her to understand the value of
personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the
individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good,
the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an
increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social
forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to
his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us
on."
=The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.=--Throughout this many-sided
discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal
of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the
central thought in many religions.
The "Heaven-father" is an old picture. The Father in Heaven persists
in the effort to bring the Supreme near to the human heart. A law of
obedience unquestioned, a rule of conduct making an actual Way of
Life, a power unlimited and yet a loving-kindness that marks the
sparrow's fall and has regard for the prodigal as for the upright
son--surely there must have been uncounted fathers of goodness and
wisdom passing praise to have made the name the easiest one by which
to call the Divine!
Meanwhile, the average life has been working, often unconsciously,
toward a condition in which the patriarchal father is out of drawing
with his own industry, his own political system, and his own theology.
To-day we give the wives and potential wives contract-power, private
ownership of property, opportunity for economic independence,
vocational training, entrance to all higher educational institutions,
adult responsibility under the law, and the franchise on equal terms
with men.
In the light of these accomplished facts vain is the effort of such
writers as Devoe, in his _Studies in Family Life_, to show that "the
Christian family" still makes women "subject" and holds "all goods in
common" in the husband's name.
=Incomplete Adjustment and Equality of Rights in the Family.=--There
is, however, great confusion of mind as to the extent of change in the
father-office which the new independence of wives and mothers should
effect. Take, for example, the matter of the financial responsibility
of the husband and father. If a married woman has independent
property, shall she not be liable as well as her husband for the
support of the children? If so, what becomes of the suits at law
against "Family Deserters" heretofore applied alone to husbands and
fathers? A study of this class of offenders under the law, published
in 1904, shows that in New York alone something over $100,000 was
collected in one year in "alimony from men, two-thirds of whom were
deserting husbands." In these cases the duty of providing financially
for wife and child pursued the husbands and fathers after they had run
away from home. In the 591 cases of "Family Deserters" especially
studied two-thirds were men and one-third women, showing not only that
the law deals more severely with men than with women, even when women
are held to be responsible for any sort of family support, but that
desertion is for the most part a masculine offense. If it can be shown
that fathers are or should be relieved from the age-long financial
responsibilities of family support, will the showing in "Family
Desertion" be different?
There seems to be a consensus of opinion that in present conditions
that family is likely to be in the best economic condition, in which
the chief, if not the entire, income is supplied by the husband and
father, leaving the wife and mother to be specially responsible for
the translation of that income in terms of family comfort. That is
admirably indicated in Mrs. Hinman Abel's book, _Successful Family
Life on the Moderate Income_. Does that condition still carry with it
the sole economic responsibility of the husband and father for the
wife as well as for the children? Or shall the phrase now beginning to
be used in laws passed against family desertion apply to the wife only
when it is proved she is "in necessitous circumstances" without her
husband's provision? For the children the newer laws say "him" or
"her" when providing penalties for "any person," either father or
mother, "who wilfully neglects or refuses to provide for the support
and maintenance of minor children."
The claim, then, of the wife seems to be increasingly one of either
invalid "conditions," or "necessitous circumstances," or "lack of
other means of support," when defaulting husbands are brought to
court; and the claim of children upon parents is increasingly extended
from father to mother whenever there are means at hand from either to
supply the children's needs.
In respect to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the
husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong
movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of
automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if
carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one
shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in
itself would make some confusion in cases where international
marriages give separate national interest.
In respect to man's responsibility for national defense in the
interest of home and native land, he is alone conscripted to-day, as
of old, for fighting service on the battle-field, but all manner of
social demands, almost as imperative as a governmental draft, now call
women to special service in war time. In peace, the taxes know no sex,
and the rules of the business game are not amenable to chivalry.
In the matter of professional and vocational training and opportunity,
men and women are largely on an equal footing, in the United States,
at least. And apparently for the first time in human history a man and
a woman, both eminent in their line of work, may seriously ask which
of the two earns the larger salary, and hence it may be which of the
two can do more toward family support.
The full consequences of women's moral acts now fall wholly upon her
in the case of disobedience to law. There is still, it is true, in
some parts of the civilized world respect for "an unwritten law" that
excuses a man for killing a rival in his wife's affections, but for
the most part she stands on her own feet and he on his when there is
question of crime or misdemeanor.
=The Marriage Question To-day the "Husband-problem."=--The whole
situation is changing in so many ways as relates to the mutual
obligation of men and women in family life that Havelock Ellis is
right when he says "the marriage question to-day is much less the
wife-problem than the husband-problem." That is to say, the single
headship of the family is invaded and yet the methods of adjustment of
two heads are not yet clear in either law or custom. As the Bishop of
Hereford said at the meeting of his brother Bishops, in which the
resolution to omit the word "obey" from the marriage service of the
Church of England was withdrawn (on the ground that if presented it
would be successfully opposed), "It is obvious to every one that it
would not be convenient to have two heads to a family."[5] There are
already two heads in every up-to-date family in the United States! The
real difficulty now is to see how best to adjust mutual
responsibilities toward each other and toward the children involved,
and to write a consistent and uniform set of statutes into the law.
That law respecting marriage and the family, partly inherited without
change from the patriarchal order, partly altered in particulars in
obedience to some popular demand based on cramping conditions made by
the law whenever it was enforced, after it was already outgrown, needs
careful revision. Ignored so often by the moral and intellectual
élite, inconsistently set aside by new measures passed without regard
to what is already established as precedent, all laws respecting
marriage, the family, and the parental relation which have come down
from the past, need thorough overhauling and the best wisdom should be
exercised in full revision and codification.
The husband and father, meanwhile, many times holds firmly to his
old-time fine chivalry and adds justice without spoiling his
relationship to the family. The wife keeps her inherited aptitude for
loving care of husband and children, and adds a new independence of
thought and action without danger of confusion of ideal or function.
=Can Women Have All the New Freedom and Also All the Old
Privileges?=--Some women, however, are trying the absurd and dangerous
experiment of seeing how much they can take from men in the old lines
of "support" and how little they can give in the old lines of service;
how much they can gain in the new freedom and how little they can pay
for it in individual work. These are the women who are willing that
the family property shall be in their name for the purpose of cheating
creditors, and at the same time acknowledge no obligation to support
the children from a common family fund. These are the women who demand
their liberty to achieve and deny their duty to help. These are the
women who take "alimony" from a man with whom they will not live and
have married for their own convenience. They are the women who have
independent incomes from inheritance or from vocational success and
yet excuse themselves from any responsibility toward even invalid
husbands, and never see the parental bond as now binding both fathers
and mothers alike.
Many men are struggling in some confusion of mind as to the outcome of
this new tendency to equalize rights and opportunities, and to the
credit of most of them, be it spoken, they want to do the right thing.
It is now for women to preserve the father, the best of him, and for
men to still call for the mother, the noblest of her, in the new
adjustments that wait for full realization of the new democracy in the
family.
Here, again, we need not wait for perfect consistency in law, or full
understanding of social tendencies and their outcome, to find our way
in life. Love shows the way--love between intellectual and moral
equals, who, in trying to adjust their own lives to a higher law in
which "self-reverencing each and reverencing each," settle all
problems on the higher levels of thought and feeling.
=New Social Advantages for Fathers.=--Meanwhile, again, the
father-office stands out in actual living function as never before.
The fathers that now show what fatherhood was meant to be--they are
legion. Holding the wife and mother in her place of sacred honor, they
are to their children the Supreme Court of appeal in grave questions
of discipline, the highest functionary of the family in the
distribution of honors and rewards, the best comrade in fun, the most
delightful companion in games, the strongest challenger in effort, and
the symbol of knowledge and power of the community life.
With the new partnership of men and women in the family the father has
a chance to be a companion and friend as never before. He has an
opportunity to show his children that side which the ancient father
often failed to develop, the side of friendship and understanding. To
the boy a clear picture of what he would be, to the girl a declaration
of the kind of man she would marry, the modern father of the highest
type makes possible a modern mother who shall show her son what
womanhood may become in freedom, and who can lead her daughter to be,
like herself, the flower of all the best of the past.
QUESTIONS ON THE FATHER
1. What, in general, have been the social demands upon husbands
and fathers, and how have these been met in the past?
2. What effect has the new freedom of women had upon the autonomy
of the family and the legal obligations of the husband and
father?
3. Should the relation of men and women to family life be
identical? If not, why not? If so, what new agencies can or
should be developed to secure what husbands and fathers are now
legally obligated to provide?
4. What ideal of fatherhood should we now secure and maintain?
5. In Minnesota, recent bills presented to the Legislature
"relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items
"prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has
been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage
between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile,
feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a
venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or
cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating
marriage. Is this trend justified? If so, how do the laws of
your own State compare with others in this particular?
6. Doctor Devine says, "Home is not a boarding-house, but a
complex of relations, physical and spiritual, which were never
more beautiful, more enduring or more ennobling than in the
modern family." Is that true? If so, what contribution must the
father continue to make to family success?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See "Education of the Australian Boy," by A.W. Howitt, in his book,
_Native Tribes of Southeast Australia_, showing the Initiation
Ceremonies that separated the youth from family influence.
[5] Since that decision a General Convocation of the American
Protestant Episcopal Church has voted to eliminate the word "obey" from
its marriage service.
CHAPTER IV
THE GRANDPARENTS
"From my grandfather I learned good morals and the government of
temper. From my great-grandfather to know that on education one
should spend liberally. From the reputation and remembrance of my
father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and
beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but from evil
thoughts; and, further, simplicity in way of living. To the gods I
am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good
sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and
friends."--MARCUS AURELIUS.
"Honorable age is not that which standeth in length of years, nor
that is measured by number of years; but wisdom is the grey hair
unto men and an unspotted life is old age. The multitude of the
wise is the welfare of the world; and the righteous live
forevermore."--THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON.
"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a
matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a temper
of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the
emotions; it is the freshness of the springs of life.
"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over
timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. We
grow old only by deserting our ideals. In every heart there is a
wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope,
cheer, courage and power from other men and women, and from the
Infinite, so long is every one young."--SAMUEL ULMAN.
"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made."
--BROWNING.
=Relative Increase of the Aged in Modern Life.=--The outstanding fact
concerning the aged is that they increase proportionately to
population as civilization increases. Easier conditions of living make
for longer life. Public sanitation, private hygiene, good heating
arrangements in each house, good water and plenty of it, sidewalks
and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing
made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts
of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the
preservation of life after middle age is reached. They also tend to
keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and
prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to
hardships in early youth. Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared that "the
best insurance of a long life was to acquire an incurable disease when
young;" while the average of robust health in all modern communities
is certainly lowered by the modern methods of preservation of the
delicate and the aged.
=Savage Treatment of the Old.=--In the annals of savage life we find
many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of
the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the
art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple
left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food
saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty
hoard that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting,
the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly
ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/20645