The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the
real significance of their lives while they are still living. Life's
values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily. If not
nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one
can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and
significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis
philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which
the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers
us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure,
which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed
from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always
held before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own justification.
We have maintained throughout this volume that complete
self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and
women, when either lives alone. On every side of their natures they are
complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family
composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of
their love. "There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it." It
is in this unit, under the stress of sexual passion and maternal love,
that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin.
Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to
the home as their source.
But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the
antagonistic interests of men and women. There can be no real rivalry
between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between
man and woman. The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the
incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life.
And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when
two trade one must lose. The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer
and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate in it
rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we
call men and women. In agreement, association and coöperation lies
strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and
competition lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid
and fickle.
In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for
men and women alike. The political life was the family life; each family
was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family
maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity. But,
because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments
of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted.
Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have
seen, to define and secure all our later institutions until it has
become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and
industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed
to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost
always considered from the point of view of national and industrial
efficiencies.
To-day men and women are confronted by two tempters which constantly
lure them away from the complete living of the family; one is work, and
the other is comfort. With the majority of people in our modern
industrial democracies work uses up the hours and the energy of life. We
have passed into a time when our habitual material needs are great, and
the products of work are shamelessly diverted to the excessive uses of
comparatively few individuals and groups. Hence millions of workers
march along the narrow dark roads that lead through factories and farms
to the grave. Only little patches of their nervous systems are ever
used, but all their energy flows through these sections day after day,
leaving their lives dull and empty.
Marriage for these workers means decreased earning power for the woman,
with increased needs for the family, especially when the children come.
As one watches the procession of young factory and shop women, with
Sunday finery and some leisure, passing over into draggled factory
mothers, with no finery and no leisure, one marvels at the strength of
the forces with which nature drives them to their destiny. And yet, even
with these hopeless workers, marriage and children mark the heights of
life.
With others, who are economically freer, work has become an obsession. A
Charles Darwin or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces to
shaping facts into science; our industrial leaders mint their hours into
dollars; our reformers give up their lives that social conditions may be
changed; our society leaders trade life for triumphs. Meantime we all
know, or would know if we stopped to consider, that we are here to live
life fully and significantly day by day. But domesticity takes time and
effort, and so the hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of
success until he or she becomes a machine for manufacturing
generalizations, for painting pictures, for performing surgical
operations or for merely getting money. The richest woman in America
said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.
As industry drives the mass of workers and specialists away from life's
deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically
and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many
of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of
great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more
abundantly comes only at the price of vigorous living; and love travels
always in company with anxiety. It would be well, says Cicero, to have
children, were it not for the fear of losing them. Let a man apply this
principle to wife, friends, possessions and enthusiasm in general and
life sinks into utter worthlessness.
The love of ease among women is in a measure independent of the
emancipation movement, but the entry of great numbers of young women
into lines of independent livelihood has placed them in a condition
where the ideals of a materialistic and commercial civilization appeal
to them with great force. Many of them have been liberally educated and
are living lives of independence. They lodge in flats or boarding houses
where they have no responsibilities for the routine work connected with
daily living. They carry their own latch-keys; and no one interferes
with their friendships or their pleasures. They read the books they
like, attend the theaters that appeal to them, and avoid people who bore
them. One can easily understand why these young women hesitate before
abandoning their easy conditions for the uncertain economic position of
wife and mother, with a man whose career lies in the future. And yet
here, as everywhere, one must lose one's life to gain it.
What then does daily association of a man and woman who belong together
do for them? It gives gladness and peace, and these are fundamental
conditions for all good and healthful living. It gives incentive to
effort, for a man or woman dares not fail before the one he or she
loves; but, in case of failure, it gives comfort and support, for love
understands and credits intent and effort as highly as achievement. It
complements the powers, for it gives four eyes, four hands and two minds
with but one aim. And in this it does not simply multiply by two, but
the blended powers are far more than two times one. It calls into
activity all the gracious, artistic and altruistic powers of the soul.
Surely these are gifts for which we may well forego some material
comforts, may well work, and even face anxieties unafraid.
Each part of the human unit must educate the other to a realization of
the fulness of life. This education is not entirely dependent on
physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes
the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the
wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A
woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive
creature, whether he be a mediæval saint, or she a militant suffragette,
or they both be simply commonplace egoists.
Because married life is so perfect when it finds its highest levels, it
is capable of sinking to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and
cynicism when realization fails. The God to whom noblest souls aspire in
hours of deepest exaltation, is the God invoked by the ribald drunkard
when he curses his comrade. The family life we are discussing is the
subject of most of the vulgar and indecent jokes of the disappointed and
the unfit. The earth which nourishes the nations, merely soils the
boots of the boor who unthinkingly lives on her bounty.
On the working side the life of the family has an evil record for
pettiness and monotony, but much of this is due to wrong comparisons. A
woman who does her own housework would presumably have to work in any
case. Is the work of the family more petty or monotonous than the work
of the factory, shop or office? Surely the woman who spends her days
looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of
providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for
children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and
shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends,
neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the
factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required for teaching
or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will
relieve the routine of housework. And if the family has means to hire
help, the wife has a position from which she can exercise social and
political power superior to that of the foot-loose celibate.
Meantime, the housework grows steadily simpler and less exacting, even
with the growing complexity of our modern life. Most of the primitive
industries have left the home, and products come from the factory ready
to use. Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved cooking conditions
and many domestic inventions of our day are keeping housework well
abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.
The fact that domestic servants are scarce and unwilling to do general
housework, in no way disproves the soundness of these conclusions. The
wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing no others, is working
for those she loves, under conditions of free initiative. The general
servant is working for those who will not even admit her right to
participate in their social life, and instead of freedom in her
industrial life, she must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices
of an untrained mistress. Well-trained mistresses, who know how to work
themselves and who have a democratic sense of human values, seldom have
trouble in securing able servants, even in this transition time when the
shops and factories are calling so loudly to working girls.
No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the
handling of a family. Women spend most of the household money to-day, at
least in lower and middle-class homes. To use wisely the family
pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order. Problems
in economics, sanitation, food-values and æsthetics confront the
housewife at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave need not work
as a slave;" and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest
woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.
But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who
seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the
consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or
the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if
she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it.
Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are
seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as
successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers.
To the man, family life, of the kind we are considering, brings a vital
connection with the past and the future. Reputation, possessions,
friends, all become deeply significant when a man becomes a link in the
generations of men. In establishing his material home, and modifying it
to the changing conditions of the family; in building up a social
setting for the group; in projecting his work and his service into the
future, he is held to highest standards by the fact that he is working
with the partner of his choice, and for interests that are in harmony
with the constitution of the universe.
Of the greater physical health of married people there can be no doubt.
Statistics all show the greater longevity of married people, and
insurance companies recognize it. The celibate type of physical
degeneration is so well differentiated that it can generally be
recognized even among strangers, at least after forty.[57] On the moral
side, too, very few criminals are found among married people.
[57] ARNOLD LORAND, _Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old Age and its
Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures._ F.A. Davis Co.,
1911.
If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even
intellectual life may shift to a higher level than was before possible.
With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized.
The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant
life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and
interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or
pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over
the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived
it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.
No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day
find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites
Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the
path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and
understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden
and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world
of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the
intellectual life as growing up with one's children.
On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all
the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods,
vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection,
undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and
libraries--everything that touches the social well-being--touches him
vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away.
The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted
his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people
who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through
friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life
is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills
it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the
old and the young.
Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of
extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders
among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in
the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom
bear them gaily along. Generally better educated than the men of their
own class, habituated to a personal expenditure which would correspond
with a large family expenditure, their intelligence prevents their
falling desperately in love with the men whom they might marry. But in
the thirties they have visions of the future which are deeply
disturbing; and in the forties they face the tragedy of a lonely old
age. Some men and women there must always be whose lives lack the
fulfilment of family life because of ill health or the accidents of
personal relations. But most women, if they are willing to pay the same
price for a significant family life that they so gladly pay for
professional success, will find the way open to live all of life. Why is
it that women count it an honor to work and starve for an art, but
dishonor to undergo privations for their children? All that is here said
of women may be said of men, but the man's period of family life is
longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely old age with him seems
less overwhelming.
The old plea that we must have an army of celibate women because in
civilized countries there is a preponderance of females does not hold at
present in the United States. The census of 1910 shows an excess of
2,691,678 males in this country. Nor is this entirely due to
immigration. More boys than girls are always born in civilized lands;
and of native white people born of native parents in the United States
there were, in 1910, 25,229,294 males and 24,259,147 females, a
difference obviously due to natural causes. New England alone in America
has a preponderance of females; and the excess there, as also in England
and Germany, is needed all along the frontiers of civilization. With the
industrial and social freeing of women now going on, we may reasonably
hope that the communities of old maids left behind, through the
emigration of young men, will be broken up.
Of course, it will be pointed out that many men and women who do marry
fail to realize the ideal presented in these pages. Every form of living
is dangerous and not every one can hope to be a successful husband and
father or wife and mother. Even devotion to religion furnishes many
inmates for insane asylums; athletic contests leave a line of cripples
behind them; and railroad disasters fill thousands of graves annually.
The institution of marriage has had no such intelligence applied to its
improvement during the past years as has been given to perfecting
railroads; and since founding a family is a more difficult undertaking
than making a journey, one need not be astonished at the number of
fatalities. Even if the institution of marriage were as intelligently
and carefully brought up to date as railroad systems are, it would still
remain dangerous to live either in or out of marriage.
And yet the danger could be greatly reduced by proper education of
youth. At present we are educating 10,000,000 girls in the state schools
of America, and as many boys. They are spending eight to twelve years,
under the direction of celibate women teachers, sharpening their
intelligence. Their most important work in life is to be the making of
homes, but they are supposed to master this art through imitating the
homes in which they grow up. Many of these are unworthy of imitation,
and they are all in process of transition.
Every girl should be thoroughly trained in handling an income and in
spending money wisely. She should have a general knowledge of household
sanitation, of water-supply and sewage, of foods and their preparation.
She should know about clothes, their cost, wearing qualities and
decorative values. She should have a sense of the family and its
significance in life; of at least the social relations that husband and
wife must maintain toward each other if their partnership is to be happy
and effective. She should have the beginnings of a eugenic conscience
established in her, and she should know something of the care of
infancy. All this should be given in the school, if it is not definitely
given in the home, and no girl who goes through the eighth grade should
escape it. Before the girl is married, she should have wise counsel from
mature women who have lived and learned the art of living. Boys should,
of course, also be trained in comparable directions for this great part
of their lives.
Something is already being done in this direction through the
establishing of special courses in domestic science, and allied branches
in our schools. The fact that educational leaders are awake to the need
was shown by the applause that followed Superintendent Harvey's plea for
this training in his paper on the education of girls at the
Superintendents' Association in St. Louis in February, 1912.[58] The
leading educators of the country greeted his plea with an enthusiasm
called out by no other paper of the session.
[58] See _Report of the Department of Superintendence of the National
Education Association_, 1912.
Every woman, then, and every man, not debarred by disease or accident
and not specially dedicated to a work which precludes marriage, should
spend his life in a family group, not that the state may have more
soldiers, or factory employees, but that he may realize the deepest
significance of his life. In this life the woman should be as free as
the man, an equal financial partner, and should share in all the social
and political opportunities of the community. When she bears children,
she should have special protection, support and reverence; and support
should come from the father of her children. If he fails her, then the
group, in its capacity as a state, should care for her honorably. But to
justify this protection and reverence, she should bring to her special
functions as mother of the generations a strong body, an intelligent
mind, a eugenic conscience and an absolute devotion to the children born
of her love.