“consideration” for the wife, all these attitudes are matters of
status, not of personality, and to personality, not to status, love
must look, since love is an art, not a formula. It often seems that
in American culture, whether in marriage or out, little or no place
is open to this patient, ardent, and discerning art, and that lovers
are invariably put to flight. Even if they make good their escape,
their adventure is without social significance, since it is perforce
surreptitious. Only when adventurers and artists in love are tolerated
enough to be able to come out from under cover, and to be at least
allowed to live, if only as variants from the commonplace, may they
contribute of their spirit or art to the general culture.
ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS
THE FAMILY
The American family is the scapegoat of the nations. Foreign critics
visit us and report that children are forward and incorrigible, that
wives are pampered and extravagant, and that husbands are henpecked
and cultureless. Nor is this the worst. It only skims the surface by
comparison with the strictures of home-grown criticism. Our domestic
arbiters of every school have a deeper fault to find: they see the
family as a crumbling institution, a swiftly falling bulwark. Catholic
pulpits call upon St. Joseph to save the ruins and Puritan moralists
invoke Will Carlton, believing in common with most of our public
guardians that only saints and sentimentalism can help in such a
crisis. Meanwhile the American family shows the usual tenacity of form,
beneath much superficial change, uniting in various disguises the most
ancient and the newest modes of living. In American family life, if
anywhere, the Neolithic meets the modern and one needs to be very rash
or very wise to undertake the nice job of finding out which is which.
But one at least refuses to defeat one’s normal curiosity by joining
in the game of blind-man’s buff, by means of which public opinion
about the family secures a maximum of activity along with a minimum of
knowledge.
A little science would be of great help. But popular opinion does not
encourage scientific probing of the family. In this field, not honesty
but evasion is held to be the best policy. Rather than venture where
taboo is so rife and the material so sensitive, American science would
much rather promote domestic dyes and seedless oranges. It is true
that we have the Federal Census with its valuable though restrained
statistics. But even the census has always taken less interest in
family status and family composition, within the population, than in
the classification of property and occupation and the fascinating
game of “watching Tulsa grow.” In no country is the collection of
vital statistics so neglected and sporadic and the total yield of
grab-bag facts so unamenable to correlation. Through the persistent
effort of the Children’s Bureau, this situation has been considerably
improved during the past ten years; so that now there exist the
so-called “registration areas” where births, marriages, and deaths
are actually recorded. For the country as a whole, these vital facts
still go unregistered. The prevailing sketchiness in the matter of
vital statistics is in distinct contrast to the energy and thoroughness
with which American political machinery manages to keep track of the
individual who has passed the age of twenty-one.
One of the tendencies, statistically verified, of the native family
is its reduction in size. In the first place the circumference of the
family circle has grown definitely smaller through the loss of those
adventitious members, the maiden aunt and the faithful servant. The
average number of adult females in the typical household is nowadays
just one. The odd women are out in the world on their own; they no
longer live “under the roofs” of their brothers-in-law. Miss Lulu
Bett is almost an anachronism in 1920. The faithful servant has
been replaced by the faithless one, who never by any chance remains
long enough to become a familial appendage, or else she has not
been replaced at all. Even “Grandma” has begun to manifest symptoms
of preferring to be on her own. Thus the glory of the patriarchal
household has visibly departed, leaving only the biological minimum in
its stead.
In the dwindling of this ultimate group lies the crux of the matter.
The American grows less and less prolific, and panicky theorists can
already foresee a possible day when the last 100 per cent. American
Adam and the last 100 per cent. American Eve will take their departure
from our immigrationized stage. It is providentially arranged--the
maxim tells us--that the trees shall not grow and grow until they
pierce the heavens; but is there any power on the job of preventing
the progressive decline of the original Anglo-Saxon stock even to the
point of final extinction? This is a poignant doubt in a country where
the Anglo-Saxon strain enjoys a prestige out of all proportion to its
population quota. The strain may derive what comfort it can from the
reflection that the exit of the Indian was probably not due to birth
control.
Still, birth control is not new. If it did not originate with the
Indians, it did at least with the Puritans. As the census books
and genealogy books show, every succeeding American generation has
manifested a tendency to reduce the birth-rate. The new aspects of the
situation are the acceleration of the tendency and the propaganda for
family limitation by artificial methods. In the birth registration
area, which includes twenty-three States, the number of births for the
year 1919 compared with those for 1918 showed a slump of seven per
cent. Also the current assumption that children are more numerous on
farms, where they are an economic asset, than they are in cities, where
they became an economic handicap, has recently received a startling
correction through a survey made by the Department of Agriculture.
Among the surprises of the study, says the report, was the small
number of children in farm homes:--“Child life is at a premium in
rural districts.” The farm is not the national child reserve it has
been supposed to be. As far as the salaried class is concerned, it
has stood out as the national pace-setter in family limitation. The
editorial writer of the New York _Times_, who may be trusted for a
fairly accurate statement of the standards of this group, justifies
its conduct thus: “Unless the brain-worker is willing to disclass his
children, to subject them to humiliation, he must be willing to feed,
clothe, and educate them during many years. In such circumstances, to
refuse parenthood is only human.” It therefore remains for the manual
worker, who cannot obtain from his Church the same absolution that the
suburban resident can obtain from his _Times_, to produce the bulk of
the population. This, as a whole, is not yet stationary; the recent
census estimates an annual excess of births over deaths throughout
the United States amounting to about one per cent. What will the next
decade do with it?
A peculiar feature of the American propaganda for birth control is its
specific advocacy of artificial methods. The defenders of this cause
have been compelled, it appears, to define a position which would be
self-evident in any society not incorrigibly Puritan. People who regard
celibacy as a state of grace and celibacy within marriage as a supreme
moral victory are still growing, it would seem, on every bush. This
unwholesome belief must have its effect upon the birth control methods
of the married population. It is a matter of speculation how many
marriages succumb to its influence, especially after the birth of a
second or third child; but there is reason to believe that the ascetic
method is by no means uncommon. You cannot hold up an ideal before
people steadily for forty years without expecting some of them to try
to follow it. This kind of rigorous negativism passes for morality in
America and finds its strongest devotees among the middle-aged and the
heads of families. Such people are greatly shocked at the wild conduct
of the young who are certainly out of bounds since the war; but the
most striking feature of the current wave of so-called immorality is
the exposure of the bankruptcy of ideals among the older generation.
There are thirty million families in the United States; presumably
there are at least sixty million adults who have experimented with
the sexual relationship with the sanction of society. But experience
has taught them nothing if one may judge by the patented and soulless
concepts which still pass for sexual morality among people who are
surely old enough to have learned about life from living it.
The population policies of the government are confined to the supply
through immigration. A few years ago, an American president enunciated
population policies of his own and conducted an energetic though
solitary campaign against “race suicide.” But no faction rallied to his
standard, no organization rose up to speed his message. His bugle-call
was politely disregarded as the personal idiosyncrasy of a popular
president who happened to be the proud father of six children. Mr.
Roosevelt was evidently out of tune with his own generation, as, no
doubt, Mr. Washington was with his, for exactly the opposite reason.
But the more retiring nature of our first president saved him from the
egoistic error of regarding his own familial situation as the only
proper and desirable example. The complete failure of Mr. Roosevelt’s
crusade is significant. There are clerical influences in America which
actively fight race suicide, but with these obscurantist allies the
doughty son of a Dutch Reform family had too little else in common.
Among the men of his own class he stirred not an echo. Is it because
the American husband is too uxorious or too indifferent? I have heard
a married man say, “It is too much to expert of any woman;” and still
another one explain, “The Missis said it was my turn next and so we
stopped with one.” Or is there any explanation in the fact that the
American father tends more and more to spend his life in a salaried job
and has little land or business to bequeath? Whatever the reason, the
Business Man is in accord with the Club Woman on the subject of birth
control, in practice if not in theory.
So far as relative distribution of income is concerned, the families
of the United States fare much as those in the industrial countries
of Europe. In 1910, the same relative inequality of wealth and income
existed in feudal Prussia and democratic America. The richest fifth of
the families in each country claimed about half the income while the
poorest two-thirds of the families were thankful for about one-third.
The same law of economic relativity falls alike on the just American
and the unjust Prussian. But the American family, it appears, is
in every case two or three times better off than the corresponding
family in Prussia. You must multiply Herr Stinnes by two to get a
Judge Gary and the wealth of a Silesian child labourer is only half
that of a Georgia mill-child. This economic advantage of our American
rich and poor alike is measured chiefly in dollars and marks and not
in actual standards of living. It is apparently difficult to get real
standards of living out into the open; otherwise the superior fortune
of American families of every estate might be less evident. Some of us
who may have visited middle-class Prussian people only half as well
off as ourselves probably did not commiserate the poor things as they
deserved. My hostess, I recall, had eight hundred dollars a year on
which she maintained an apartment of two rooms, bath, and kitchen;
kept a part-time maid; bought two new suits’ a year; drove out in a
hired carriage on Sunday; and contributed generously to a society
which stirred up women to call themselves Frau instead of Fräulein.
Any “single woman” in an American city of equal size who could have
managed as much in those days on fifteen hundred a year would certainly
have deserved a thumping thrift-prize.... And then there were all
those poor little children in a Black Forest village, who had to
put up with rye bread six days in the week and white bread only on
Sundays. Transported to America, they might have had package crackers
every day and ice-cream sandwiches on Sunday. One wonders whether the
larger income of the American family is not largely spent on things of
doubtful value and pinchbeck quality.
According to theory, the income of the family normally belongs to the
man of the house. According to theory, he has earned it or derived
it from some lawful business enterprise. “The head of the family
ordinarily divides income between himself and his various dependents
in the proportion that he deems best,” says Mr. Willford King.
The American husband has a peculiarly unblemished reputation as a
provider--and probably deserves it. Certainly few husbands in the world
are so thoughtful of their widows; they invest extensively in life
insurance but rarely in annuities against a period of retirement. Trust
Companies remind them through advertisements every day to make their
wills, and cemetery corporations nag them incessantly to buy their
graves. “Statistics show that women outlive men!” says the promoter
of America’s Burial Park. “They show that the man who puts off the
selection of a burial place leaves the task to the widow in her grief.
For the man it is easy now--for the woman an ordeal then.” The chivalry
of the business man leads him to contrive all sorts of financial
mechanisms for his widow’s convenience and protection. His will, like
his insurance policy, is in her favour. Unlike the European husband, he
hates to leave the man’s world of business and to spend his declining
years in the society of his wife. After he is dead, she is welcome to
his all, but so long as he lives he keeps business between them.
Though in life and death a generous provider, he is not a systematic
one. Financial arrangements between husband and wife are extremely
casual. As the dowry hardly exists, so a regular cash allowance is
very rare. He loves to hold the purse-strings and let her run the
bills. This tendency is known in the outside business world, and the
American wife, therefore, enjoys a command of credit which would amaze
any solvent foreign housekeeper. She has accounts on every hand. She
orders food by telephone or through the grocer’s boy and “charges it.”
The department store expects her to have a charge account, and gives
her better service if she does. For instance, the self-supporting woman
who is, for obvious reasons, more inclined to pay as she goes, finds
herself discriminated against in the matter of returning or exchanging
goods. In numerous ways, the charge account has the inside track. This
would not seem strange if credit were limited to the richest fraction.
But that is not the case; almost every housewife in the country has
credit, from the Newport ladies to the miners’ wives who “trade at the
company store.” The only difference is that, in the case of these two
extremes--Newport and the company store--longer credit than ususal
seems to be the rule. In the meantime, the preaching of thrift to the
American housewife goes on incessantly by apostles from a business
world which is largely organized on the assumption that she does not
possess it and which would be highly disconcerted if she actually
developed it. American business loves the housewife for the same reason
that it loves China--that is, for her economic backwardness.
The record of the American husband as a provider is not uniform for
all classes. In Congress it is now and then asserted with appropriate
oratory that there are no classes in America. This is more or less true
from the point of view of a Cabin Creek vote-getter, who lives in a
factitious political world, where economic realities fail to penetrate;
to him middle-class and working-class are much the same since they
have equal rights not to “scratch the ticket.” But the economist finds
it convenient, as has been said, to classify the totality of American
families in definite income-groups corresponding to the Prussian
classes. As one descends the income scale one finds that the American
husband no longer fulfils his reputation for being sole provider for
his family. According to Edgar Sydenstricker, “less than half of the
wage-earners’ families in the United States, whose heads are at work,
have been found to be supported by the earnings of the husband or
father.” The earnings of the mother and the children are a necessary
supplement to bring the family income up to the subsistence level. Half
the workingmen, who have dutifully “founded” families, cannot support
them. According to the latest figures published, it costs $2,334 a year
to keep a family of five in New York. Have the young Lochinvars of the
tenements never heard of those appalling figures? Very likely they have
a premonition, if not an actual picture of the digits. In any case they
have their mothers to warn them. “Henry’s brought it on himself,” said
the janitress. “He had a right not to get married. He had his mother
to take care of him.” If he had only chosen bachelorhood, he might
have lived at home in comfort and peace on his twenty-five a week. But
having chosen, or been chosen by, Mrs. Henry instead, it is now up
to the latter to go out office-cleaning or operating, which she very
extensively does. It is estimated that since the war fully one-third of
all American women in industry are married.
Going back up the scale to the middle-class wife, we find new
influences at work upon her situation. Custom has relaxed its
condemnation of the economically independent wife, and perhaps it
is just as well that it has done so. For this is the class which
has suffered the greatest comparative loss of fortune, during the
last fifteen years. “If all estimates cited are correct,” writes Mr.
Willford King, “it indicates that, since 1896, there has occurred a
marked concentration of income in the hands of the very rich; that
the poor have relatively lost but little; but that the middle class
has been the principal sufferer.” It is, then, through the sacrifices
of our middle-class families that our very richest families have
been able to improve their standard of living. The poor, of course,
have had no margin on which to practise such benevolence, but the
generous middle-class has given till it hurts. The deficit had to be
relieved, the only possible way being through the economic utilization
of the women. At first daughters became self-supporting, while wives
still tarried in the odour of domestic sanctity; then wives came to
be sporadically self-supporting. The war, like peace still bearing
hardest on the middle-class, enhanced all this. Nine months after the
armistice, fifty per cent. more women were employed in industry than
there were in the year before the war.
In America, we have no surplus women. The countries of western Europe
are each encumbered with a million or two, and their existence is
regarded as the source of acute social problems. What shall be done
with them is a matter of earnest consideration and anxious statecraft.
America has been spared all this. She has also no surplus men--or none
that anybody has ever heard of. It is true that the population in 1910
consisted of ninety-one millions, of whom forty-seven millions were
men and forty-four were women. There were three million more men than
women, but for some reason they were not surplus or “odd” men and they
have never been a “problem.” The population figures for 1920,--one
hundred and five millions,--have not yet been divided by sexes, but the
chances are that there is still a man for every woman in the country,
and two men apiece for a great number of them. However, no one seems to
fear polyandry for America as polygamy is now feared in Europe.
The situation is exceptional in New England where the typical European
condition is duplicated. Beyond the Berkshire Hills, all the surplus
women of America are concentrated. In the United States as a whole
there are a hundred and five men for each one hundred women, but in
New England the balance shifts suddenly to the other side. Within the
present century, a gradual increase has taken place in the masculine
contingent owing to immigration. But the chances of marriage have not
correspondingly improved, for matches are rarely made between New
England spinsters and Armenian weavers or Neapolitan bootblacks.
In America only the very rich and the very poor marry early. Factory
girls and heiresses are, as a rule, the youngest brides. It is
generally assumed that twenty-four for women and twenty-nine for
men are the usual ages for marriage the country over. Custom varies
enormously, of course, in so polyglot a population. Now and then an
Italian daughter acquires a husband before the compulsory education
law is through with her. In such cases, however, there is apparently a
gentleman’s agreement between the truant officer and the lady’s husband
which solves the dilemma. At the opposite extreme from these little
working-class Juliets are the mature brides of Boston. As the result
of a survey covering the last ten years, the registrar of marriage
licenses discovered that the women married between twenty-seven and
thirty-three and the men between thirty and forty. Boston’s average
marriage age for both sexes is over thirty. This does not represent
an inordinate advance upon the practice of the primitive Bostonians.
According to certain American genealogists, the Puritans of the 17th
century were in no great haste to wed--the average age of the bride
being twenty-one and of the bridegroom twenty-five. The marriage
age in the oldest American city has moved up about ten years in a
couple of centuries. The change is usually ascribed to increasing
economic obstacles, and nobody questions its desirability. Provided
that celibacy is all that it seems to be, the public stands ready to
admire every further postponement of the marriage age as evidence of an
ever-growing self-control and the triumphant march of civilization.
In the majority of marriages, the American wife outlives her husband.
This is partly because he is several years older than she and partly
because she tends to be longer-lived than he. Americans of the second
and third generation are characterized by great longevity,--the
American woman of American descent being the longest-lived human being
on earth. Consequently the survivors of marriage are more likely to
be widows than widowers. In the census of 1910, there were about two
million and a half widows of forty-five or over as compared with about
one million widowers of corresponding age. Nor do they sit by the
fire and knit as once upon a time; they too must “hustle.” Among the
working women of the country are a million and a quarter who are more
than forty-five and who are probably to a very large extent--though
the census provides no data on the subject--economically independent
widows. As was said before, “Grandma” too is on her own nowadays.