CHAPTER I

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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.