The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual
impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us,
at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our
neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even
the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little
direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who
read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they
tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they
persisted, they would be fed by force.
Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of
beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and
ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and
dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of
gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we
attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves. If one
could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would
ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.
In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a
career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life
in the building up of the family institution. To-day, however, family
life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to
prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an
independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is
exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much nobler to care
for other people's children in a social settlement, or in a school, than
to care for one's own in a home? Why should women mass themselves
together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as
suffragettes? We hear of women's work, of women's careers, of women's
clubs, associations and parties, of women's interests, movements,
causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested
in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest
of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?
Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of
the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the
second is the nature of the institution of marriage.
A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. Sexual love
is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic--in a
word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human
unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a
new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say
that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it
respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a
woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its
own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves
than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who
compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one
soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this
organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher
forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman
carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the
father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years
they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek
its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.
From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the
major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its
complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds
the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new
organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.
Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past,
it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man
or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than
common race and the same general social position. With simple
personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.
But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and
self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general
class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of
individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of
physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live
strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each
other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common
attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions,
industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the
days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of
the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount
thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their
absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy
for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her,
qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a
score of his personal needs in another personality.
In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she
was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a
life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger
that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove
dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions
at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we
must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the
present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times
which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on
living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.
A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in
the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers
are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of
their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of
mediæval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for
peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken
fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism,
culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.
They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in
peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy
the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and
ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of
men and women who wished to live together and rear children.
But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which
the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their
limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further
development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords;
even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat
down the older political institutions with their swords. Finally the
movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us
into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The
guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the
industrial institution which shall give us freedom and security in our
work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious
ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.
Of all these older institutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only
one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the
most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to
make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of
the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this
institution and strengthened its resisting power. The church
increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only
protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble
mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for
regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the
family and made it the standard for respectability.
Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its
lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its
frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its
determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible
to students of institutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us
to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have
licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced
people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and
action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the
application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be
able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage
between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of
seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New
Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of
an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148
feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]
[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. GODDARD, New York:
Macmillan Company, 1912.
Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to
love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other
should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were
no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul
and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence,
her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she
toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the
year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order
for legalized rape, under the name of restitution of marital rights?
Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items
stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women
are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediæval institution. So
far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital
heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically
denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.
Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a
church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be
changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great
vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this
problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President
Eliot has called "the conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex"
must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with
Ellen Key that "In love humanity has found the form of selection most
conducive to the ennoblement of the species."[51]
[51] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Marriage._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911
In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the
older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of
knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that
under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to
marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be
allowed to live together unless they are unsexed.[53] Justice to future
generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.
[52] See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society, especially
files of _The Eugenics Review_, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London.
[53] Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New Jersey has
just added the same to her statutes.
Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and
near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open
question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and
the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions.
Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken
old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for
two young lovers to live together outside them.
As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife
should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view,
still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany
and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He
does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the
whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should
provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the
home, pray and wait.
This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a
hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and
fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually
grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the
older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch
together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not
know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of
promise.
In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown
up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers
did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that
the peasant of the family, the _Hausfrau_, shall join with them and
dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities
together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution
has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political
revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their
equal share of opportunity.
But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete,
and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of
physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political
lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly
or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set
them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there
was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there
was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life,
the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only
would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its
deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.
In their reactions against old abuses, writers like Mrs. Gilman or Olive
Schreiner try to create a world for women alone, on the political
analogy. Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure political
freedom, these leaders would turn to that nebulous creation of social
reformers, the state; and it should subsidize the mothers in their
periods of need. But there are only two ingredients out of which a
nation can be formed: one is women; the other is men. Shall woman in
her time of need turn to a state made up of other women, or to a state
made up of men? Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is to depend
on men, she might as well depend on man. No, in the political
revolutions we broke up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations; but
in this domestic revolution we are breaking up and must readjust the
fundamental unit of life.
Men and women must live and work together in the domestic unit, and they
cannot do the same things. Nature has specialized their functions and
each must supplement the other. Even in Germany, the _Hausfrau_ is not
going back to an exclusive service of children, cooking and church; nor
in America will man continue to be merely the breadwinner and the father
of children. With the enlightenment that is on the way, we shall see
that husband and wife can have no antagonistic differences. Each profits
in all that really benefits the other; and slowly we shall shape a new
institution based on absolute equality, and at the same time on
complementary service.
In this adjustment, legal forms can help or hinder; but they cannot
prevent nor compel the final action of human beings. Sex instinct is
stronger than any human law. The law can, however, help us in regulating
conditions of marriage, in settling disputes about common property and
children, and in determining how the contract may be set aside when that
becomes necessary.
The right of the church to sanction or regulate the family, rests in a
belief that marriage involves spiritual changes and obligations that
make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable, and to be administered
only by the church, like the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief
resting not in eugenic considerations, nor in the human needs of the
persons involved, but in theological dogmas with which this chapter
cannot deal. Hence we shall maintain that the church has no more right
to control matters of marriage than it has to interfere in business or
political relations.
The state, on the other hand, meaning by the state the whole community,
must concern itself with the marriage of its individuals. The
commonwealth must have future citizens, and these should be strong and
intelligent; hence it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If parents
die, or fail in obligations, the community must care for the children.
In case of disagreement between married people, the courts of the
community must settle disputes about children and property; hence the
state must know when a man and woman determine to live together. The
regulation of marriage certainly belongs to the state, that is, to all
of us.
Marriage should therefore always be a matter of definite and open record
in the archives of the community. It should also be advertised, through
the public record, for a considerable time, preferably six months or a
year, before consummation, that the past experiences of contracting
parties may be looked up by interested friends or officials, and the
marriage of the unfit prevented; and so that mere caprice and passion
shall have time to realize their mistake and turn away. The form which
the final ceremony of marriage will take can well be left to the tastes
and traditions of the contracting parties.
The question of rights in children, or in property acquired after
marriage, should be settled by the state; and it is hard to see how it
can ever be settled satisfactorily except on a basis of equal
partnership. No man should be contented with a woman to bear and train
his children, and create a social atmosphere for his home, who is not
worth half of what he makes; and the same holds true of a woman. So with
regard to children, while one parent or the other may, under certain
conditions, be given the direction of the child's life, it is hard to
imagine any circumstances that would justify society in refusing either
father or mother the right frequently to see his child.
Since marriages must be contracted in youth and since inexperienced
people must make mistakes and the wisest must sometimes change, it will
sometimes happen that men and women must face the possibility of
separation. The problem of divorce is very difficult.[54] In less than
twenty years, from 1887 to 1906, 945,625 divorces were granted in the
United States; so that probably to-day there are nearly one million
divorced people in this country. Generally speaking, the divorce rate
increases as one goes westward. In 1900, the State of Washington led the
country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole
country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. Japan alone leads us
with 215, while England and Wales had only 2. England grants divorce
only for infidelity; and on the man's side it must be accompanied by
cruelty; all divorce cases must be tried in London, and the expense,
never less than two hundred dollars, is prohibitive for the poor.
Meantime, England grants many separation orders; and it seems sure that
the Royal Commission, which has been taking evidence for the past three
years, will favor a freer system of divorce.
[54] See _Statistics of Marriage and Divorce_, prepared by the Bureau of
the Census, beginning in 1906, and published in 1910.
While divorce is increasing steadily all over the world, and most
rapidly in the most intelligent and progressive sections, the subject is
so bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices that it is difficult to
secure any intelligent thinking on the subject. Thus, most people think
Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, are places of free
divorce, but the fact is that twenty-one other States have a higher
divorce rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a higher rate than
Nevada. So, too, the impression that divorces spring from hasty action
is certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those for which we have
records there had been a separation of more than three years before the
divorce was granted. The idea that people generally seek divorces that
they may marry some one else seems also unfounded, since in the cases
for which we have records, less than forty per cent. remarry within a
year.
There are three main objections which one hears urged against free
divorce. The first is that organized society rests on the family, and
with free divorce anarchy would ensue. In reply, it is pointed out that
the same argument was used to support kings, aristocracies and a
universal church. All these have been set aside, in many parts of the
earth, and society seems even more stable than before. The love of men
and women is probably more powerful and less in need of adventitious
support than either patriotism or religion.
In the second place, it is claimed that children will suffer when
parents separate. It is replied that this is true, but they were already
suffering when parents had ceased to love each other. The fact that
children are involved in only two out of five divorces seems to indicate
that children hold parents together when the opposition is not too
strong; and when a separation occurs, those who favor divorce claim that
a child is better off with either father or mother alone than with both
if love is absent.
In the third place, it is pointed out that often only one desires the
divorce and that this brings tragedy to the other life. In reply it is
claimed that many of the tragedies of life have always gathered around
the love of men and women, that when marriage is declined tragedy often
follows, and that compelling a person to live with some one whom he does
not love, and may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.
In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim that their proposals are
profoundly conservative, that they are seeking to bring marriage back to
its eternally binding realities. They say that under our present
conditions of restricted divorce, we have wide-spread prostitution,
constant irregularities that are tolerated and condoned, and a million
divorced people, some prevented from remarrying and all socially
ostracized, so that the whole group is a dangerous element in our midst.
These advocates claim that with free divorce, granted some months after
the determination to separate had been registered in the public records,
the love of men and women and their mutual love for their children would
be free to bind families together in permanent trust and open honesty;
and that with all excuse for irregularity absent, the unfaithful man or
woman would sink to the level of unfaithfulness in business or political
life. With freedom to readjust their lives, if they preferred to keep
what they had and get what they could, they would simply take their
place among thieves and liars, and most of them would disappear.
All transitions are hard, and this one in which we are involved is most
difficult of all; but no one can study the conditions around him without
seeing that change is inevitable and that we are not going back to our
earlier ideals. At the same time, no one can read the singularly
scholarly and fair-minded presentations of Ellen Key[55] without feeling
that she has a vision of the future.
[55] _The Century of the Child._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.
_Love and Marriage_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911. _Love and Ethics._ New
York: B.W. Huebsch, 1911.
With regard to the nature of the material plant in which the family
should live, there are also two widely different ideals struggling for
favor in the public mind, and for realization in practice. The one
ideal, while recognizing the changes necessitated by modern conditions,
would still seek to retain those features which have been supposed to
make for family privacy, the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. The
other would frankly accept our changed conditions, and pass on to the
larger groups of socialized buildings, with common kitchens, day
nurseries, and parks.[56]
[56] See _Woman and Economics_, by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, Boston:
Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; and the writings of H.G. WELLS.
This question has been discussed in the chapter on industry, and it will
be considered again in the following chapter. Meantime there can be no
doubt that love is reticent so far as the outside world is concerned;
and domesticity must always demand a large measure of privacy. It still
remains to be proved that this can be secured, in the absence of a
private kitchen, nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to need the
personal care and constant love of mothers, and women seem to need a
long period of loving and caring for a family to round out a deeply
significant life.
To summarize this chapter we may say that the realization of romantic
love, under conditions of domesticity, is necessary for men and women,
and for the well-being of the race. Our present marriage system is
defective, and needs to be corrected through the creation of a eugenic
conscience. It should be taken out of the hands of the church and made
more difficult by the state. Women's property rights should be defined
and safeguarded, and men and women should never live together when they
are repugnant to each other.
X