THE FATHER
"Who plants his soul in stalwart sons and daughters keeps on giving
His life and vision to his fellow men;
His power grows like leaven.
"His children strive to take his spirit up and keep it living;
They share with all the love he gave his own, as he had shared,
And lives, his love has served, all call him father."
From the Tribute, _To My Father_,
by HORNELL HART.
"To dwell in the wide house of the world; to stand in true
attitude therein; in success to share one's principles with the
people; in failure to live them out alone; to be incorruptible by
riches or honor; unchangeable by poverty; unmoved by perils or
power--these I call the qualities of a great man."--MENCIUS.
"For the man who is such as no longer to delay being among the
number of the best is like a priest and minister of the gods,
using the deity that is planted within him, that which makes a man
uncontaminated by any pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by
any insult, feeling no wrong, a fighter in the noblest fight, who
cannot be overpowered by passion, one dyed deep with justice,
understanding that only what belongs to himself is matter for his
activity, yet remembering also that every human being is his
kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to mans
nature."--MARCUS AURELIUS.
"'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
The governor who must be wise and good.
Wisdom doth live with children round her knees;
Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
Of the mind's business; this is the stalk
True power doth grow on."--WORDSWORTH.
=Historic Background of Fatherhood.=--The father seems to have had a
precarious attachment to the family in earlier forms of life. As Le
Tourneau well says, "The animal family is especially maternal;
although father birds often share parental duties, many mammals are
less developed in duration and strength of affection." Fathers,
mothers, and their offspring are not closely grouped in lower life.
The relation of the sexes, even when the human was reached, seems not
to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of
parenthood. "Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John
Lubbock. The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of
such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other
elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation,
made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men
to learn that babies take two parents to give them birth.
When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a
mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to
many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which
proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom
to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order
to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his
make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive
consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very
exciting.
The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so
many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function
and how he linked it with the god-idea. The "religious dedication of
women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of
ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything
earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with
sex in its relation to religion. This idea of the sacrifice of
sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual
celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed
to be better served by monks and nuns than by fathers and mothers.
In the family relation the experience of fathers, after they knew
themselves to be such, has been widely varied and not along any single
line of development. To quote Le Tourneau again, "There has been no
strict relation between intellectual development and the form of
sexual union. Even among monkeys, as in men, we find both polygamy and
monogamy; and bees and other forms of lower life show a high degree of
social organization and division of labor without the institution of
the family at all." The relation of the sexes has always been a deep
concern of human society even in most primitive forms of social order,
but after men knew the connection between the gratification of
sex-instinct and the procreative function, they began to reason about
and to make more definite the customs that outlined permitted
marriage. The varieties of social expression in these ancient customs
is witness alike to economic pressure, the effect of climate and
immigration, political struggle and the institutions of war and of
private property.
=Purchase and Capture of Wives.=--Purchase and capture began early to
run a race in the supply of wives. Purchase, which kept the twain
together in nearness to one or the other side of the family line, was
usually best for women; especially when, as often happened, it gave
her the protection of her own blood relations. Capture, on the other
hand, made woman not only the possession of her husband in a peculiar
sense as separating her from all who might, through the working of
natural affection, act as her helpers in time of need, but made it
possible for the slavery of the wife to the husband to take on more
cruel forms. Although, it must be said, even capture gave a few women
of superlative charm a chance to take precedence of common wives
gained in the usual manner.
Two influences, one from the custom to allow marriages only within a
certain blood bond, and one to allow marriages only outside that
family relationship, have worked in the first instance to preserve
certain racial traits from extinction, and in the second place to mix
the common elements of human nature to the enrichment of the common
stock. This balancing regard for the known and allurement of the novel
has also worked to give manifold forms of family association, since
those customs were superseded.
It would seem that not only were "trial marriages" for individuals an
ancient, not at all a modern device, to see how the twain could get
along together, but varying trial forms of marriage for racial,
tribal, and national groups have made all manner of experiments to see
what on the whole would serve best the social need in the family
relationship.
That process of wide experimentation at last settled into the ideal
and practice of one father-head, at least, even if still allowing more
than one wife and mother within its bond. That father-head seems to
have found his place only on condition of grant from society of
complete authority over wife and children.
=The Patriarchal Family.=--The patriarchal family, which Sir Henry
Maine described so well, but which he mistakenly supposed to be the
first great type of familial association, placed firmly at the centres
of social order the power and responsibility of the man. Doubtless
that power and responsibility drew their chief sanction from the idea
of man as the real source of being. After man learned that he was as
much a parent in being father as woman was a parent in being mother,
nothing seemed to have contented him but spiritual supremacy in
parenthood. The classic picture and interpretation of this phase of
family development is contained in the great drama of the Greeks, the
trilogy of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, and the
Erinnyes. Here we see how the mother-side of life, once so powerful as
representative of tribal unity, was set aside and overborne by the
father-side, as Apollo proudly claims all generative power for man and
relegates the mother to the position of an underling nurse. It will be
remembered, however, that Athena, although, as Apollo said, "having a
father only," makes the mothers still invaluable as guardians of the
family altar and as those who can bless or blight both the fruitage of
the earth and of the marriage bed.
The Greeks, by virtue of their superior self-consciousness when
passing through radical social changes, and by virtue also of their
power of literary portrayal of experience, have set down for us, for
all time, the way by which man attained his unlimited power over woman
and over the family order.
We need not accept in full measure Dr. Lester Ward's picturesque story
of the manner in which women were made subject to men, _i.e._, that
female sex-selection so overdid the business of rewarding with favor
the strength, the fighting quality, and the cunning which grew to
mental power in the male, that when human men and women were reached,
woman found a master ready-made by her subhuman sisters. We may,
however, find a most suggestive indication of the real reasons for
that masculine supremacy in Doctor Ward's testimony to the way in
which the female sex, when it had the power of special selection of
the kind of mates it wanted, set a fashion in masculine attainment
which did work later against her own command of the sex-relation.
Women did not become subject to men because of physical weakness. The
savage woman does continuous work heavier and more strength-demanding
than that assigned to the savage man. It was not even that the
primitive woman had always to carry the child as she worked, and had
therefore a double burden, although that greatly helped men in gaining
supremacy. It was rather that the larger leisure of primitive man and
his consequent development of thought and imagination enabled him to
secure religion and statecraft as allies to his physical claims. The
intellectual side of the male development was doubtless greatly aided
by female selection, and when man was reached he already knew how to
outwit other men and most women in the race for power.
=The Three Chief Sources of Influence.=--It has been well said that
the "three great sources of influence in barbarous as in civilized
countries are religion, military power, and money." All these
influences became masculine monopolies ages ago.
The ancient woman was sometimes a priestess and often a healer in her
simple fashion and in all ages has acted as nurse in illness and
care-taker of the aged and the feeble when these have received care.
She has been mistress of the ceremonials of birth and death and
marriage when these have been parts of the family ritual, and
courtship has been largely in her charge. All the customs that relate
to intimate household experiences have been shared by women as ritual
and rule of life.
Men, however, took over the simple elements of religious feeling and
social requirement in which women bore so great a part and made of
them religious cults and theologies, and they then became a masculine
monopoly. Men also took over the simple healing of gifted women and
made it first the prerogative of the "medicine man" and at last of the
medical profession, from which women were barred until very lately.
The social customs which women once had power to enforce in so many
ways became the "law," made and executed solely by men. Art, science,
literature, grew to great proportions as man acquired the opportunity
and the skill to concentrate his intelligence upon specialties of
effort; and from all the walks of educational preparation and of
professional achievement women were debarred. Hence, in the family
order, in which the first and obvious place of women had been
relatively high, man took the position of mastery by right of
religious priesthood, by right of legal supremacy, and by right of
monopoly of the money power.
Back of all this lay the assumption of the superior relation of the
father to the spiritual life of the child.
Man gained his larger leisure first by the use of women as slaves when
individual women became the property of individual men, and later by
conquest over other men through which process he secured more slaves,
and finally by the military systems that in various forms gave some
men a chance to work at what they liked and from which they could gain
advantage in the growing complexity of increasing social organization.
Man's larger leisure, which gave him money power or its equivalent in
earlier forms of exchange, could not have been secured by him had not
woman been socially and by religious sanction set to the constant task
of the family service and the more peaceful occupations of primitive
agriculture.
=Ancient Military Training of Youth.=--Doubtless man's military
prestige and power gave him the greatest advantage over woman and was
the source, more than anything else, of her subjection in the family
order. This came about not only because military success gave the
women of conquered tribes into the absolute power of the conquerors,
and broke for such the social bond of remaining mother-right, but
because of the special training of boys and young men which the
military systems of all ages have initiated. "The ancient
fraternities," and the manner of education which separated those who
would be "braves" from the family life in early youth, the strong bond
of a common purpose made appealing to youthful imagination by mystic
ceremonials and burnt into the consciousness by painful "initiations,"
all combined to teach men how to work together for common ends and in
a way unknown to the training and opportunity of women.[4] This it was
which gave a consistency and a power to man's collective life which
woman could not gain in the past, and exclusion from which enabled man
to become her legal and economic master even within the home.
The economic power which man acquired through specialization of labor,
made possible for him by social excuse from exhausting personal
service within the family; the political power, made possible for him
by military achievement, from which women for the most part were
strictly barred by the "Trade Unionism" of war preparation; the
intellectual power, made a sex-monopoly in education and professional
use and opportunity; and the religious sanction of priesthood and
theology, which fastened all these to law and government, secured the
complete subjection of mothers to fathers and gave woman in the family
the status of her infant children.
=Ancestor-worship.=--This triple influence of money, military power,
and religion, gave the definite basis for ancestor-worship, which has
been so widespread and so influential in the setting of social
customs. Ancestor-worship, with its separate family ceremonials, for
which the wife must learn her husband's family ritual, led to
child-marriage, and that in turn to the slavery of the wife not only
to the husband but to the older women of his family. Child-marriage
led also to many tragedies of racial decay before it was seen to be
inimical to strength and power of achievement. When child-marriage was
not a part of marriage customs, however, and a suitable age was
demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the
father secure. He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the
family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the
children yet to be. The Greek poem before referred to shows in the
pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain
Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and
her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid
for peace of the dead and the service of the living yet to be born,
shows vividly how religion made firm and binding the father's place in
the family.
So deeply did this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the
social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man
could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social
opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth
who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is
praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and
give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully
says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for his
ancestors," pictures vividly the sense of responsibility to the family
life once almost universal.
This feeling, bred by ancestor-worship, has persisted long after the
church in its various forms has superseded the ancient family worship.
We find it as late as in Colonial times in Protestant New England,
where the bachelor was fined and subjected to humiliating community
supervision and the spinster, almost unknown above twenty years of
age, if persisting in her single life was treated as an exception to
be held in social tutelage.
=The Double Standard of Morals.=--The triple bond of money, military
power, and economic supremacy, which made men masters in the family
life, made them also able to free themselves from exclusive devotion
to one wife, whether under the law of polygamy or professed monogamy;
as it has been possible for men to divorce their wives for slight
causes, while wives often received the death penalty for even supposed
infidelity. It has also instituted and maintained for ages a double
standard of morals by which the same act mutually shared by men and
women has been for men a slight peccadillo and for women a deadly sin.
Chastity has been made almost the sole virtue of women, invasion of
which even by resisted force has destroyed her "honor," and voluntary
rejection of which has made her a creature of social ostracism. Man,
on the other hand, has been forgiven all manner of slips from the
straight and narrow way of marital fidelity, provided he could achieve
something of importance in the world of thought or action.
This double standard of morals has reacted upon the family not only in
preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for
their own best development and that of their children but has thrown
over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its
cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood.
=Basic Needs for Equality of Human Rights.=--When women as mothers
have no power of guardianship of their own children; when they as
persons have no power of self-defense against cruelty and outrage of
their own fathers or husbands; when as members of society they have no
contract-power but must suffer all manner of injustice unless highly
fortunate in their male representative; when as citizens of a
so-called democratic state they have no voice in either law or its
enforcement, then they are indeed a subject class. Any subject class
dependent upon privilege or special favor for all the order and
circumstance of life is clearly not a fit part of modern democratic
society. It is, therefore, of tremendous social importance to the
family, as truly as to all other inherited institutions, that women
are now rapidly emerging from that subject condition of perpetual
minority under the law to the individual responsibility and
self-protective power of the legal adult. This passage "from status to
contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the
affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of
government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body
politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps. To-day
the ideal of equal rights between the sexes and in relationship of men
and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of the
enlightened. What is before us is the slow and in some respects
difficult task of working out that ideal in social adjustments. While
at work on this task it behooves us to go over the past experience
more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal
family gave to society and through society to wife and children as
well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife
and children.
=Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.=--It seems not
too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first
attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of
religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from
particular men. In such period and condition the sex-relationship
itself had not attained its present spiritual quality. There was
apparently required the sense of ownership on the part of one man to
safeguard those women most generally desired from exploitation by all
men. Some legal order in the oppression of women by society had to
precede, apparently, the abolition of oppression of women itself; just
as to-day the effort is to "humanize war" before we can become wise
and strong enough to abolish it. No social device that the imagination
can conceive could be so well fitted to protect motherhood, in an age
before justice could give power of self-protection, as was that of the
patriarchal family. The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the
political aspect of the building up of great families from which the
state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the
industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the
patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social
order and the chief heir of social privilege. It seems apparent,
therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the
father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and
the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the
economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange
of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from
the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship
of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all,
and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of
Heaven.
"Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but
social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition
of equality of personal rights within that order. The great lady of
the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month
after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and
her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and
only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new
owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery,
realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in
appropriate social conditions.
To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family
and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and
mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the
thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked
at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject
condition in the past. We have to remember, however, that social
history seems to indicate that no system of human association has
grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its
dominant features. The protection of wife and child, which rested for
so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from
outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages
of the world.
The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of
forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to
persist after the need for them has ceased. This hindrance has been
shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power
of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by
ethical and humane considerations. A form of family relationship
entrenched in institutions of age-long prestige and supported by the
triple influence of money, military power, and religion, lived on
after its work in securing social order had been accomplished and long
after its usefulness was entirely ended. After the father-headship
ceased to express the highest ideals of either sex-relationship or
parental devotion, its retention produced social evils and personal
wrongs which made a conscious and determined movement for "Woman's
Rights" necessary, and still makes necessary close and definite
attention to the equalizing of opportunities.
=The Social Value of the Patriarchal Family.=--It is well, however, to
consider not only the negative but the affirmative side of the social
inheritance of the patriarchal family, in which has grown up and
developed the ideal of monogamic marriage. What did the father gain,
intellectually and ethically, from that patriarchal order, and what
did he give, not only in protection of wife and children but toward
their moral development in social life?
The effect of unlimited power over another is generally worse for the
one who wields than for the one who is subjected to that power, and
the faults of men have their deepest origin in the family order that
gave all its members into his complete control. Man's faults of
dogmatism, of selfish domination, of sacrifice of personal life to
further desired political or economic ends, have roots in the
patriarchal family. Man's careless misuse of his own moral ideals for
purposes of ambition was certainly fostered by this sense of ownership
of women and children with legal power to use them for pleasure or
profit.
Something else, however, came to man in and through the patriarchal
system. Society, that gave him liberty to rule the family, rigidly
required of him that such rule should be in the social interest, as
that interest was then understood.
It was obviously for the interest of society that women should be
chaste, in order not only that a man might know his own children but
that the family line and inheritance should be preserved from
insecurity. A man's infidelity to the marriage vow might seem to do no
perceptible harm if practised outside the family circle, but woe to
him if he trespassed upon the family ownership of another man.
There might be more than one wife acknowledged as secondary in status
or a mere concubine slave to help in domestic duties while giving
pleasure to the head of the family, but there was early a social
demand for one chief wife whose offspring should inherit the family
power. Although even in this fixed demand there were loopholes of
"legal fiction of adoption" by which some favorite child not of the
actual line of inheritance might be given the place of honor and
control. Again, if the father under the patriarchal system was the
recognized economic master he was also legally held to the financial
support of wife and child. In the collective family life his
obligation extended far through the line of kinship and of alliance by
marriage, and to-day in many Oriental countries the father may be
bound to poverty as the responsible support of a large company of
dependent pensioners. It must also be remembered that if the ancient
father, as head of the family, held the permission of society to
discipline wife and child even to severity of corporal punishment he
was also charged with the task of insuring their obedience to whatever
social laws were in force and was himself legally liable to punishment
if he did not keep his family law-abiding. That moral responsibility
for the behavior of his family, early outlined in detail, was
increasingly eased by the growth of personal relationship of women and
youth to society. That was shown in the laws that defined the extent
of punishment allowed the father-head. Although he might be secure in
his legal right and duty to bestow on wife or apprentice "moderate
castigation," an old Welsh law limited him to "three blows only with
a broomstick on any part of the person except the head;" and another
ancient law allowed the use only of "a stick no longer than the
husband's arm and no thicker than his middle finger" in the case of
the wife; while Blackstone's well-remembered restriction was to "a
stick no bigger than his thumb."
The moral responsibility of the father for his children, carrying with
it as it did the liability of prison or even death for the misbehavior
of sons, was governed by various statutes which show in the Middle
Ages a growth toward freeing children from parental control and
placing upon them when "of age" a definite and personal legal bond and
penalty.
For example, we read that the Anglo-Saxon law held many children at
the age of ten responsible for some acts which were forbidden, but
that most youth were legally minors until the age of fifteen. Until
the early period of the eighteenth century it was still possible for a
parent to legally sell his children, "a girl up to fourteen, a boy
under seven." And after that period a wayward or troublesome son or
daughter, or any of the offspring, when the parents could be proved
financially incapable of their care, could be sent to convent or
monastery.
The ability to bear arms seems to have been the criterion for legal
coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in
tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of
light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of
twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when
he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could
swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were
released from liability to punishment for their sons' misdemeanors.
On the other hand, after the tenth century, no child under ten could
be punished for his father's crimes unless it could be shown that he
was a party to them, and the custom of carrying family autonomy so far
as to wipe out innocent and guilty alike, when a treason or crime of
any sort angered the powers in command, was practically ended.
When the beginnings of the modern industrial order appeared and
burghers shared with knights and yeomen the social responsibility, "a
burgher's son acquired freedom and legal responsibility when he could
count and measure broadcloth." The wife gained a growing and perilous
freedom from laws which increased her direct relationship to the
state. She attained the power of being punished even by the death
penalty for broken laws far earlier than she attained the slightest
influence in the passage or enforcement of those laws. It was
generally thought, however, until very recently, that if a wife "did
not behave" it was the husband's fault and right that he should suffer
the consequences.
=The Responsibility of the Ancient Father Commensurate With His
Power.=--Again, it must be remembered that if the ancient father was
by virtue of his military training and activities separated from the
domestic interests which he so often and with full social permission
sacrificed to war and preparation for war, he was at the same time
under perpetual conscription by the community of which he was a part
to serve as protector of his own family and the families of those of
the same social group. The social pressure upon the father-head of the
family was therefore severe and unremitting, since he was in so many
ways responsible for, as truly as master of, his household. It was no
light task to be a worthy head of a patriarchal family in all the ages
when growing law was superseding custom and advancing civilization was
increasing the complexity of social life. This task when well achieved
gave to man a serious sense of his duty as well as a firm conviction
of his power.
We see the fruits of that ethical training in family responsibility in
many of man's noblest traits; preëminently in his recognition of the
duty of protection of the weak and young, and in his devotion to his
own, against the world if need be.
The vast outreach of man's intelligence toward the organization of the
state, of the industrial order, of the church, of the formal educative
process, of the means of transportation, of the systems of finance, of
the development and application of scientific knowledge, and even of
the arts and of literature, all reveal the effect of his early
schooling in the representative responsibility of fatherhood to
society.
We speak to-day of the "father of modern invention" in this or that
particular. We have not ceased to praise the "good provider" or to
esteem him highly who has a well-ordered home.
=Moral Qualities in Women Developed by Masculine
Selection.=--Moreover, we are all now recognizing the fact that we owe
to the ownership of woman by man a secondary sex-selection of
inestimable value. It may be an extreme statement to say, with at
least one sociologist, that the ages of woman's subjection to man was
not too great a price to pay for the gift to the race of feminine
beauty and charm. We can assert, however, that some moral values which
men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what
at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of
service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often
difficult conditions.
Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of
thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution,
organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the
life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness
of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure
until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and
suffering.
The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of
most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and
led to their mediation between every institution and the personal
life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could
choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters,
placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the
life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most
easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of
the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to
allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which
masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the
essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of
manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and
competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social
system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the
ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation,
combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.
Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in
order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident
to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great
social use in the modern state.
The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made
him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied
itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge
and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that
even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded
by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation
of the value of feminine personality.
While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the
old order of the family, led her to understand the value of
personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the
individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good,
the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an
increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social
forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to
his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us
on."
=The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.=--Throughout this many-sided
discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal
of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the
central thought in many religions.
The "Heaven-father" is an old picture. The Father in Heaven persists
in the effort to bring the Supreme near to the human heart. A law of
obedience unquestioned, a rule of conduct making an actual Way of
Life, a power unlimited and yet a loving-kindness that marks the
sparrow's fall and has regard for the prodigal as for the upright
son--surely there must have been uncounted fathers of goodness and
wisdom passing praise to have made the name the easiest one by which
to call the Divine!
Meanwhile, the average life has been working, often unconsciously,
toward a condition in which the patriarchal father is out of drawing
with his own industry, his own political system, and his own theology.
To-day we give the wives and potential wives contract-power, private
ownership of property, opportunity for economic independence,
vocational training, entrance to all higher educational institutions,
adult responsibility under the law, and the franchise on equal terms
with men.
In the light of these accomplished facts vain is the effort of such
writers as Devoe, in his _Studies in Family Life_, to show that "the
Christian family" still makes women "subject" and holds "all goods in
common" in the husband's name.
=Incomplete Adjustment and Equality of Rights in the Family.=--There
is, however, great confusion of mind as to the extent of change in the
father-office which the new independence of wives and mothers should
effect. Take, for example, the matter of the financial responsibility
of the husband and father. If a married woman has independent
property, shall she not be liable as well as her husband for the
support of the children? If so, what becomes of the suits at law
against "Family Deserters" heretofore applied alone to husbands and
fathers? A study of this class of offenders under the law, published
in 1904, shows that in New York alone something over $100,000 was
collected in one year in "alimony from men, two-thirds of whom were
deserting husbands." In these cases the duty of providing financially
for wife and child pursued the husbands and fathers after they had run
away from home. In the 591 cases of "Family Deserters" especially
studied two-thirds were men and one-third women, showing not only that
the law deals more severely with men than with women, even when women
are held to be responsible for any sort of family support, but that
desertion is for the most part a masculine offense. If it can be shown
that fathers are or should be relieved from the age-long financial
responsibilities of family support, will the showing in "Family
Desertion" be different?
There seems to be a consensus of opinion that in present conditions
that family is likely to be in the best economic condition, in which
the chief, if not the entire, income is supplied by the husband and
father, leaving the wife and mother to be specially responsible for
the translation of that income in terms of family comfort. That is
admirably indicated in Mrs. Hinman Abel's book, _Successful Family
Life on the Moderate Income_. Does that condition still carry with it
the sole economic responsibility of the husband and father for the
wife as well as for the children? Or shall the phrase now beginning to
be used in laws passed against family desertion apply to the wife only
when it is proved she is "in necessitous circumstances" without her
husband's provision? For the children the newer laws say "him" or
"her" when providing penalties for "any person," either father or
mother, "who wilfully neglects or refuses to provide for the support
and maintenance of minor children."
The claim, then, of the wife seems to be increasingly one of either
invalid "conditions," or "necessitous circumstances," or "lack of
other means of support," when defaulting husbands are brought to
court; and the claim of children upon parents is increasingly extended
from father to mother whenever there are means at hand from either to
supply the children's needs.
In respect to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the
husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong
movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of
automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if
carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one
shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in
itself would make some confusion in cases where international
marriages give separate national interest.
In respect to man's responsibility for national defense in the
interest of home and native land, he is alone conscripted to-day, as
of old, for fighting service on the battle-field, but all manner of
social demands, almost as imperative as a governmental draft, now call
women to special service in war time. In peace, the taxes know no sex,
and the rules of the business game are not amenable to chivalry.
In the matter of professional and vocational training and opportunity,
men and women are largely on an equal footing, in the United States,
at least. And apparently for the first time in human history a man and
a woman, both eminent in their line of work, may seriously ask which
of the two earns the larger salary, and hence it may be which of the
two can do more toward family support.
The full consequences of women's moral acts now fall wholly upon her
in the case of disobedience to law. There is still, it is true, in
some parts of the civilized world respect for "an unwritten law" that
excuses a man for killing a rival in his wife's affections, but for
the most part she stands on her own feet and he on his when there is
question of crime or misdemeanor.
=The Marriage Question To-day the "Husband-problem."=--The whole
situation is changing in so many ways as relates to the mutual
obligation of men and women in family life that Havelock Ellis is
right when he says "the marriage question to-day is much less the
wife-problem than the husband-problem." That is to say, the single
headship of the family is invaded and yet the methods of adjustment of
two heads are not yet clear in either law or custom. As the Bishop of
Hereford said at the meeting of his brother Bishops, in which the
resolution to omit the word "obey" from the marriage service of the
Church of England was withdrawn (on the ground that if presented it
would be successfully opposed), "It is obvious to every one that it
would not be convenient to have two heads to a family."[5] There are
already two heads in every up-to-date family in the United States! The
real difficulty now is to see how best to adjust mutual
responsibilities toward each other and toward the children involved,
and to write a consistent and uniform set of statutes into the law.
That law respecting marriage and the family, partly inherited without
change from the patriarchal order, partly altered in particulars in
obedience to some popular demand based on cramping conditions made by
the law whenever it was enforced, after it was already outgrown, needs
careful revision. Ignored so often by the moral and intellectual
élite, inconsistently set aside by new measures passed without regard
to what is already established as precedent, all laws respecting
marriage, the family, and the parental relation which have come down
from the past, need thorough overhauling and the best wisdom should be
exercised in full revision and codification.
The husband and father, meanwhile, many times holds firmly to his
old-time fine chivalry and adds justice without spoiling his
relationship to the family. The wife keeps her inherited aptitude for
loving care of husband and children, and adds a new independence of
thought and action without danger of confusion of ideal or function.
=Can Women Have All the New Freedom and Also All the Old
Privileges?=--Some women, however, are trying the absurd and dangerous
experiment of seeing how much they can take from men in the old lines
of "support" and how little they can give in the old lines of service;
how much they can gain in the new freedom and how little they can pay
for it in individual work. These are the women who are willing that
the family property shall be in their name for the purpose of cheating
creditors, and at the same time acknowledge no obligation to support
the children from a common family fund. These are the women who demand
their liberty to achieve and deny their duty to help. These are the
women who take "alimony" from a man with whom they will not live and
have married for their own convenience. They are the women who have
independent incomes from inheritance or from vocational success and
yet excuse themselves from any responsibility toward even invalid
husbands, and never see the parental bond as now binding both fathers
and mothers alike.
Many men are struggling in some confusion of mind as to the outcome of
this new tendency to equalize rights and opportunities, and to the
credit of most of them, be it spoken, they want to do the right thing.
It is now for women to preserve the father, the best of him, and for
men to still call for the mother, the noblest of her, in the new
adjustments that wait for full realization of the new democracy in the
family.
Here, again, we need not wait for perfect consistency in law, or full
understanding of social tendencies and their outcome, to find our way
in life. Love shows the way--love between intellectual and moral
equals, who, in trying to adjust their own lives to a higher law in
which "self-reverencing each and reverencing each," settle all
problems on the higher levels of thought and feeling.
=New Social Advantages for Fathers.=--Meanwhile, again, the
father-office stands out in actual living function as never before.
The fathers that now show what fatherhood was meant to be--they are
legion. Holding the wife and mother in her place of sacred honor, they
are to their children the Supreme Court of appeal in grave questions
of discipline, the highest functionary of the family in the
distribution of honors and rewards, the best comrade in fun, the most
delightful companion in games, the strongest challenger in effort, and
the symbol of knowledge and power of the community life.
With the new partnership of men and women in the family the father has
a chance to be a companion and friend as never before. He has an
opportunity to show his children that side which the ancient father
often failed to develop, the side of friendship and understanding. To
the boy a clear picture of what he would be, to the girl a declaration
of the kind of man she would marry, the modern father of the highest
type makes possible a modern mother who shall show her son what
womanhood may become in freedom, and who can lead her daughter to be,
like herself, the flower of all the best of the past.
QUESTIONS ON THE FATHER
1. What, in general, have been the social demands upon husbands
and fathers, and how have these been met in the past?
2. What effect has the new freedom of women had upon the autonomy
of the family and the legal obligations of the husband and
father?
3. Should the relation of men and women to family life be
identical? If not, why not? If so, what new agencies can or
should be developed to secure what husbands and fathers are now
legally obligated to provide?
4. What ideal of fatherhood should we now secure and maintain?
5. In Minnesota, recent bills presented to the Legislature
"relating to and regulating marriage" include among the items
"prohibition of marriage within six months after a divorce has
been granted from a former spouse; and forbidding of marriage
between persons either one of whom is epileptic, imbecile,
feeble-minded, insane, an habitual drunkard, affected with a
venereal disease, or addicted to the use of opium, morphine, or
cocaine." This indicates the trend of newer laws regulating
marriage. Is this trend justified? If so, how do the laws of
your own State compare with others in this particular?
6. Doctor Devine says, "Home is not a boarding-house, but a
complex of relations, physical and spiritual, which were never
more beautiful, more enduring or more ennobling than in the
modern family." Is that true? If so, what contribution must the
father continue to make to family success?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] See "Education of the Australian Boy," by A.W. Howitt, in his book,
_Native Tribes of Southeast Australia_, showing the Initiation
Ceremonies that separated the youth from family influence.
[5] Since that decision a General Convocation of the American
Protestant Episcopal Church has voted to eliminate the word "obey" from
its marriage service.