THE GRANDPARENTS
"From my grandfather I learned good morals and the government of
temper. From my great-grandfather to know that on education one
should spend liberally. From the reputation and remembrance of my
father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and
beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but from evil
thoughts; and, further, simplicity in way of living. To the gods I
am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good
sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and
friends."--MARCUS AURELIUS.
"Honorable age is not that which standeth in length of years, nor
that is measured by number of years; but wisdom is the grey hair
unto men and an unspotted life is old age. The multitude of the
wise is the welfare of the world; and the righteous live
forevermore."--THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON.
"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a
matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a temper
of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the
emotions; it is the freshness of the springs of life.
"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over
timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. We
grow old only by deserting our ideals. In every heart there is a
wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope,
cheer, courage and power from other men and women, and from the
Infinite, so long is every one young."--SAMUEL ULMAN.
"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made."
--BROWNING.
=Relative Increase of the Aged in Modern Life.=--The outstanding fact
concerning the aged is that they increase proportionately to
population as civilization increases. Easier conditions of living make
for longer life. Public sanitation, private hygiene, good heating
arrangements in each house, good water and plenty of it, sidewalks
and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing
made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts
of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the
preservation of life after middle age is reached. They also tend to
keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and
prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to
hardships in early youth. Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared that "the
best insurance of a long life was to acquire an incurable disease when
young;" while the average of robust health in all modern communities
is certainly lowered by the modern methods of preservation of the
delicate and the aged.
=Savage Treatment of the Old.=--In the annals of savage life we find
many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of
the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the
art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple
left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food
saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty
hoard that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting,
the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly
ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the
old.
=The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for Aged Men.=--Two
things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social
esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life
developed toward civilization. One was ancestor-worship, which made
the father and the grandfather a link, indispensable and therefore
honored, in the chain of blood relationship which carried on the
generations. This type of religious belief and practice did not,
however, work to ease the lot of old women. If the young wife did not
have a child, especially a son, she could be repudiated often, and
lose her standing in the family relation and hence be subjected to
hardships that made her early old and often ended her life while still
in middle age. If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might
attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her
servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best
intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details
of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has
yet lived who could manage unassisted a group of women, such as legal
polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to
get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of
her children.
=The Position of Chief-mother in Ancient Family.=--These facts often
made the position of the chief-mother in a family one of such
importance that they became her insurance against want and
ill-treatment. The position of the chief-mother in the collective
family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to
adjust the family system to modern ideas. The father's power is so
much a delegated responsibility and the relationship between the
lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother
than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that
of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students
in an American university has drawn up include such as the following:
"Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the
future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the
authority of the mother-in-law?" The mother-in-law in such cases being
usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the
grandmother-in-law.
=Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.=--The position of aged
men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the
dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious
social existence before literature was born. The aged man who had been
an important member of some military order or "fraternity" and
remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be
sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who
desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious
cult thus expressed. Also those who remembered vital tribal
occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehearse the same
with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older
they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital
seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished.
Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could
make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the
group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged
woman in the periods before written literature. There were, however,
as we can clearly see, traditions and customs, taboos and permitted
familiarities so many and varied that old women with good memories and
a personality that commanded attention must have had some accepted
value within the inner circles of family experience. We get from
folk-lore some clear intimations of this prestige and power of the
ancient old woman in intimate social relationship.
The power of old men received a great accession when political and
religious orders and legal rules began to make social organization
more definite and precise. "Old men for council; young men for war"
had an early meaning. "The venerable Senate" is not a modern phrase.
The "reverend father of the church" is an ancient allusion to the
respect for and leadership of the aged in religious circles. The Popes
of to-day begin their high service at an age that is in many positions
a "dead line." The hardening of the social arteries in religion,
government, politics, and law, however, while making old men more sure
of their place in life, made old women less valued and worse treated.
The ages of mediæval experience and of the feudal order, until
chivalry began to affect the sex-relation, show almost unbelievable
cruelty toward many aged women. The idea of the church fathers that
women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often
assumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence
from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers.
And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches
compact with Satan. Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard
conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely
old but also given to nervous prostration (before that title appeared
in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned,
drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems
almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in
history.
=Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.=--The young woman, being
necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on
of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill
treatment. The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not
only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were
at all "highstrung" or "meddling." Hence the natural conception, in a
time of superstitious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with
those spirits made her seem a danger to society. The history of the
witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that
delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that
nightmare of human ignorance.
Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved
and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and
the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their
sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found
useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of
experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members
of the family circle. Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these.
The waste of old age in women, however, is, as has been indicated
elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time
began. The idea that women were serviceable only for the procreative
function and the hardest drudgery of family service, and that they
lost all social value when they ceased to be attractive to the senses
of men or ended their personal ministrations to their own little
children, long obtained. This idea is responsible for the further
conception of old women as not only useless but a disagreeable burden.
Hence, while old men rose during many ages in social regard and
protection and care, old women became more and more miserable and
ill-treated where the collective family was superseded by the newer
type of individualistic bond between one man, one woman, and their
children. In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest
mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made
the social fashion by what is called Christian civilization, the aged
woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and
sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks,
was the victim of the change from one system to the other. The fact
that women, if well-developed and well-treated, are younger at seventy
than are men and that more women than men live to be aged than when
the conditions of living were less favorable to the weak and delicate,
gave early in our civilization what must have seemed far too many old
women.
While women had the constant burden of a "steady job" within the home,
harder and more continuous than men had in their handicraft labor, yet
men were killed in battle in large numbers, and were physically able
to dangerously overdo in some labor "spurt" and hence more women than
men lived to be old. Hence, again, there were far more grandmothers
than grandfathers in the family in all mediæval life. This led to many
cruelties to old women who were deemed "superfluous." While, however,
the actual experience of common people made conditions so hard for
grandmothers, the idealism within the religious field was favorable to
the mother of any age. The same church fathers who shunned marriage as
a cowardly concession to the body, and who wrote flaming
animadversions upon women in general, gave the Virgin and Child their
adoration and made a place of honor and of comfort to those women who
chose the religious vocation outside the home.
=Older Women in Religious Vocations Honored in Middle Ages.=--These
women, the Ladies of the Abbeys and the special servitors of the
Church, reached the first independent places of distinction which
women in Christian civilization attained and to them, at least, age
added power and veneration. Hence, even while they ignored their
relationship to common womanhood, they often allayed superstitious
cruelty toward other old women.
Whenever any subject class develops within it a genius or a quality of
talent or a specialty of activity that gives personal prestige, that
class as a whole gains recognition. The Carlisle Indian who beats at
the game of football; the Afric-American artist whose works claim
admiration; the representative of the backward nation who shows power
of achievement formerly supposed to be the sole accomplishment of the
conquering peoples, not only makes a place for himself, he opens the
door to wider opportunity for his class. So the woman of the religious
orders, when of scholarly achievement and of commanding intellect,
showed these qualities in increasing example as she grew older and
more experienced, and so worked to make a place for the older woman in
every sphere of life.
Slowly it began to dawn upon the common consciousness that the
individualistic family of one young couple and their children needed
props from within if it had lost those from without--those ancient
props which sustained as well as controlled young fathers and mothers
in the collective family. Hence grandmothers, and grandfathers, as
well, became of recognized use in the care and upbringing of children.
The picture of the grandmother by the fireside holding the youngest
baby and the grandfather coming in with a gift for the young mother,
who is manifestly pleased, with the young father in the background
delighted at the family welcome for his offspring, is not only old but
the theme of many of the world's best-loved paintings and stories.
=To-day Comparatively Few Really Old at Seventy.=--To-day there has
come about a wholly new condition in the most advanced centres of
social life in respect to the aged. In the first place, there are few
"old" grandmothers left. There are grandmothers, but they are
sprightly and give little token of being passée or laid on the shelf.
There are few old men left. There are those who have passed the
allotted term of threescore years and ten, but they well know and make
all others understand that this was a mistaken limit to human powers.
They look forward to usefulness until eighty, at least, and now are
encouraged to feel that one hundred years is the natural span of life.
There are, it is true, few really important studies of how to keep
people from growing senile and really old before the time now set for
failure of powers. Such studies, however, are prophesied in a small
"endowment for the study of diseases of the aged" already given, and
more in the statement of appeals for increase of such endowment. The
tendency now is setting strongly not only toward the lengthening of
life but toward the lengthening of the mental and physical power that
alone makes long life desirable.
We shall see more and more of this interest as medical science reaches
out further and further toward lessening all the ills that flesh is
heir to.
Meanwhile, what is the actual condition in the various strata of life,
in our own country, for example, in respect to the protection, the
care, the comfort, the happiness, and the general welfare of the aged?
In the first place, the speeding up of machinery has made many manual
workers prematurely old. The worst thing, perhaps, about child-labor
has been that, owing to premature "laying off" of the fathers, the
children have been set to earn money for family needs, and have
acquired, with their pay envelope, a contempt or disrespect for the
father in ways that have reversed the natural relationship and given
society much use for the Children's Court. This disrespect shown the
father, even when he is only of middle age, passes on in increased
measure to the grandfather who has been pushed aside from self-support
and family support while still comparatively young and has never been
able to again catch on to the wheels of industry. The fact that he
eats and does not work; that he takes space in the crowded tenement
and does not aid in paying its rent; that he has no light employment
that can give his fading mental powers an impulse toward ambition and
energy, all make the position of the grandfather in many homes of
struggling poverty a most unhappy one. In such homes the grandmother
is often still seen to be really useful. She may make it possible for
the young mother to earn outside the home. She may, if skilled in
sewing, ease the expense of ready-made clothes. She may, at least, and
usually does, relieve the mother of much care of the babies. There are
several reasons why more aged men are sent to public institutions for
final care than aged women of the same general type of family, but the
most important reason is that most women have skill in domestic
matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many
unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help
of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the
income.
In the circles above the poverty line there is much variety in the
estimation and in the treatment of grandfathers and grandmothers. The
ideal picture of a family always has in its background, if not in the
very front, an old man and an old woman, benevolent and sweet-natured,
who can be depended upon to be more indulgent to the children than
even the father or mother and who appear always in family emergencies
to renew their youth of service in behalf of the younger generation.
What is thus ideally pictured is a fact in thousands of families. No
one can say that it is always best to have three generations under one
roof, but all who have had a happy family experience believe that the
grandparents should be "handy by," to use the Scotch phrase. The
grandparents' house in the country is best of all, where all family
and national holidays can be celebrated with due form and in
accordance with ancient tradition. The grandparents' house for the
city children is next best, if in a suburb near by where more space
and independence of movement are possible than in the city residence.
The grandparents' house or apartment in the same or a near-by city is,
however, not at all to be despised as a refuge when "Mother does not
understand," or "Father is so particular."
=Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families?=--Although the proverb
says, "No house was yet made large enough for two families," the
residence of one grandparent (oftener the mother than the father)
within the family circle has often proved highly successful if only a
few rules have been observed. One of these rules is that each adult
person shall have one place strictly his of her own. Another is a
rule, so difficult for some aged persons of both sexes to obey,
namely, that each person married is doubly entitled to individual
choices in action without interference even from parents, since each
such married person has to adjust his or her ideas to another person.
To work out full agreement between themselves is all that any married
couple should be expected to accomplish. Hence, in the nature of
things, the grandparents who are so near the new family that they know
and see everything have a far more difficult rôle to play than do the
grandparents who have their own home and simply visit and are visited.
It is, however, often a necessity of financial provision and often a
choice of ease in ministration to the needs of the aged, that brings
one grandparent or even two within the daughter's or son's household.
The time-worn jokes about the "mother-in-law" are based upon the fact
that it is more often the daughter than the son who is expected to or
needs to personally care within her own home for the mother. The son
is not so bound by social custom to take his mother in. Hence, more
husbands than wives have trials with their parents-in-law.
=Reasons Why Husbands Desert Their Families.=--The statistics of
deserting husbands, as compiled in a careful study made by Lillian
Brandt and Roger Baldwin, show that among the chief causes of "leaving
home" is "trouble with the wife's relations." In these cases it is not
only the grandmother, although she is often a member of the disturbed
family; it is also often other relatives--a sister, a brother, or a
first husband's people--who cause trouble. The wife's mother is,
however, often enough a member of the household the husband leaves
behind to give some point to the coarse and often unjust jokes
concerning the mother-in-law.
Where the feeling is right, and both generations reasonable and just,
there are still many problems of adjustment arising from an attempt to
bring either or both parents of the married couple into the same
household. The first problem is that of the financial support. It
ought not to be the case that any aged couple or any widowed father or
mother should be left wholly dependent upon their children. The demand
for better economic provision for the aged is one of the most vital
and pressing of social needs. The difficulty of taking care of the
father and mother when the children are coming on with pressing needs
of their own is felt acutely in cases of narrow income. The call is
almost universal to provide more adequately for grandparents. How can
we meet this call?
=The Financial Provision for Old Age.=--In the case of those whose
earning capacity is not equal to saving a sufficient old-age provision
while at work the claim for an Old-age Pension is growing. This may be
either a subsidy from the state, a joint pension from the state and
the employing business in which the man or woman has worked, or it may
be a threefold provision contributed to from the savings of the
laborer, the quota from the employer, and the state subsidy. Since no
insurance system that discourages thrift, or fails to encourage it, is
socially sound, the latter seems the best ideal. There may be, in
addition, or as a substitute, a family provision on the plan so well
suggested by Mr. Taber in his book, _The Business of the Household_, a
plan that calls for the definite setting apart of an "Old-age Fund,"
to which each child shall contribute in the years when he is earning
most, not as a gift but as a "deferred payment," as it were, for all
that the parents give in childhood. To this Old-age Fund any savings
of the father and mother may be added until a sufficient sum is
secured for comfortable care in old age. Mr. Taber indicates that at
least five dollars out of every twenty-five saved should be thus
assigned and invested only in the safest manner and held inviolate, no
matter what the temporary needs of the family may be, until the
work-time has passed. Whatever plan may be adopted, it is certain that
family well-being and the happiness of the aged alike call for a
better and more adequate old-age provision.
The laborers who earn less than the required sum for a decent standard
of life for father, mother, and children cannot, of course, make any
provision for their own old age or care for dependent parents. In such
families the public institutions or privately endowed and managed
"Homes for the Aged" offer the only and often a comfortable and
sometimes a happy place for the grandparents. The movement for this
social care of the aged has many phases. In some countries, as in _The
Danish Care of the Aged_, so well described by Edith Sellers in her
book of that name, there is a far more complete and generous use of
public funds than we have in the United States, a possibility of
careful grading of persons in appropriate groups, and a removal of the
crushing sense of public charity which those of English ancestry so
often feel when obliged "to go upon the town;" yet this leaves much to
be desired.[6]
In the grade of economic condition above that in which it is a dire
struggle to make both ends meet for the husband, wife, and their
little children, there are to be considered five ways in which the
care of the aged can be made adequate and not too great a burden upon
those of young and those of middle life.
=Needed Ways of Preparing for Old Age.=--First: There must be devised,
as indicated above, better and surer ways of insurance, savings, and
pensions, by which the grandparents can be made more or less
independent even in families of limited means.
Second: There must he measures established for the prevention of
premature old age, measures operating in health and in labor-power to
prolong self-dependence by means of individual earnings, to the
fullest extent possible.
Third: There must be for men, as for women, provision in vocational
training by which each person may have in reserve some light and
interesting form of activity, possibly of earning value, which may
serve as occupation when strenuous work is outgrown.
Fourth: There must be a clearer understanding of the mutual
obligations of parents and children so that the care of the aged may
seem more often, what it really is in most cases, not a charity from
within the family circle, to be passed around with jealous eye for
just distribution of family burdens within the group of children, but
a family debt, for the payment of which early and constant provision
must be made by all members of the family during the years of largest
earning power. If the grandparents have had a chance to save enough to
pay all their own share of the family expense to the end of life, well
and good. If, on the contrary, as is so often the case (now that the
social standard for child-care and child-education has risen to such
heights of parental requirement), the parents, now old, have spent so
lavishly on the schooling and marriage setting up of their sons and
daughters that they have not been able to save for themselves, then
the obligation of the children is clear and the grandparents should
never feel themselves pensioners.
Fifth: Actual old age, senility, failure of physical and mental power,
should be postponed in each case as long as possible by active
measures of mental and moral discipline consciously undertaken by
personal effort. "The making of mind" is not an art of youth alone. It
is an art of middle age and of the older years. Says William James:
"The man who daily inures himself to habits of concentrated attention,
energetic volition and self-denial in unnecessary things, will stand
like a tower when everything rocks around him and when his softer
fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast." Such a one also
will resist the decay of powers and be able to keep young when the
years tell of many birthdays.
To go over these points with greater detail: The first requirement,
namely, to make sure that all possible financial provision is made for
grandparents while they are yet young and capable enough in their work
to save, is one that is more and more recognized. Moreover, the
tendency in every country is increasingly toward state recognition of
the duty of society toward its aged members. The proposition of Victor
Berger, then the solitary socialistic member of the Congress of the
United States, to pension every person over the age of sixty is one
that will hardly be carried into effect. The objection, however, to
much existing pensioning by the state which this blanket proposition
was intended to offset is that its benefits are mostly for those near
the poverty line or below it and hence may be and often is a
discouragement to thrift and self-dependence rather than an aid to
individual effort.
=Pension Laws.=--For example, in Great Britain, the pension law made
all eligible to state aid who were over seventy years of age and whose
personal income did not exceed one hundred and five dollars per year.
Such were entitled to aid to the extent of $1.25 a week, and those
having incomes above that sum were entitled to receive a graduated
series of state benefits. This aid from the state has doubtless made
the condition of many aged persons far more tolerable and even happy
in families where, previous to the passage of that Act, the extra
expense involved in caring for the grandparents was the last straw
that broke the back of independency. In all cases where the addition
of a few dollars weekly to the family income is an actual and obvious
help to family comfort, state pensions for the aged have worked good
results in family feeling and good-will and affection. Where, however,
the state aid comes without any contributory savings from the
individual or his employer and where to qualify for its benefit all
must have an income of very small proportion, it is in effect a class
measure and obviously for the relief of the very poor.
The higher family interest demands that every system of insurance or
of subsidy, or of occasional aid to any member of the family, should
tend directly and powerfully toward and not away from thrift, work
capacity, and sound business principles. Society-at-large must now
make good in some makeshift fashion for many social failures of the
past, but its main currents of pressure upon the individual life
should be in the production of a line of normal and successful men and
women, rather than attempts to make all share alike, whatever their
personal quality, when old age comes on. This principle makes it
imperative that some larger and wiser plan than has as yet been
attempted shall make all systems of financial care of the aged a
positive aid toward self-dependence and social serviceability.
=Old-age Home Insurance.=--In this connection a radical suggestion is
offered, namely, a scheme for Old-age Home Insurance. It is a
well-known fact that the waiting list of most private Homes for the
Aged is long, and that men and women wait piteously for the death of
an "inmate" to give them entrance to the only place of comfort and
security life can offer them. It is also well known that there are
more aged persons who need the companionship of those of their own
generation, who need quiet and relief from the noise and excitement of
young children, than can now secure those requirements in the homes of
their daughters or their sons. It is again true, although not so well
recognized or understood, that most aged persons unable financially to
retain a personal home would prefer a choice between residence in a
child's family, however dutiful and generous that child might be, and
residence elsewhere. It is also true that the care of aged parents in
her own home is often too great a tax upon the time and strength of
the housemother when there are many young children. Again, it is true
that many aged people prefer a place they can call "home," even if it
is only one room, to which they can invite their friends and from
which they may pay visits to their relatives, even their nearest and
dearest, and return to their own small quarters at will. It is also
true that although most elderly persons live for years in quite good
health and need little actual nursing, they do profit by occasional
attentions which a nurse can give, and few such elderly people can
afford or obtain this occasional service in either a home of their own
or in one shared with a child.
These facts indicate a need for a larger and a more democratic
provision of homes for the aged, a provision that can be more easily
made by personal effort through the younger years of life, and one
that can receive social aid at less cost to personal dignity and with
less rigid rules of managing "Boards" than the present prevailing type
of Homes for the Aged supply. The boarding house sought by many aged
persons who prefer independence of life to living in the family of
their children, and sought also by many well-to-do elderly widows and
widowers who find that the personal home is too lonely or too
expensive to keep up for one alone--the average boarding house is a
sorry substitute for a home. For the young, who hope to escape it
soon, it is tolerable. For the aged, who need to feel settled, it is
often a most unhappy dwelling-place. Beside, any one who tries to find
a place for the elderly boarder will find that prices are often
prohibitive for all but the rich, and few boarding mistresses want old
people.
A state pension has often, as has been said, been proposed for all
aged people. Let us suppose that instead of this some scheme of State
Insurance for Old-age Homes be devised; a scheme in which after the
payment of a certain specified sum a share in a Boarding Home might be
secured. If the state or if any private Agency or Foundation could
provide the "plant," a suitable building and its repairs and
fundamental expenses of upkeep, with one salaried superintendent whose
character and ability could be guaranteed, the running expenses of a
Boarding Home could be met easily by the limited means of many who now
lack the security of an institutional provision and in consequence
lack also many essentials of old-age comfort.
A skilled budget-maker could determine the numbers required in each
household to make the board low and a sympathetic social worker could
suggest the coöperative features of management most likely to give
successful results in the composite home. The entrance age in such a
Boarding Home could be lower than that required in the usual type of
privately endowed Home for the Aged and thus a felt need be met for a
suitable home for those between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-five.
In these privately endowed Homes for the Aged the entrance fees range
from $100 to $1,000, and beneficiaries are required to give up all the
property of any kind of which they may be possessed when they enter
this permanent residence. This is not unjust, but it is often an added
trial to the independent nature. There is need of far larger provision
for the old in Homes for Aged Men, Aged Women, and Aged Couples. No
one can give anything but gratitude for the opportunities they now
offer or fail to hope for their increase. There is, however, a special
need for some social engineering which can initiate Boarding Homes for
the Elderly. Many of these are still strong and well, but need special
consideration in particular ways. Many others are not ill, but
delicate, and in need not of full-time nursing care but of occasional
good offices of trained helpers. One nurse, a "practical nurse" or a
trained nurse past in age and strength full service of her profession,
could easily give occasional service needed for twenty or more elderly
persons in usual health or for ten or more aged, in greater need of
care but not helpless, if all were under the same roof. The
coöperative plans that often fail in serving the family of father,
mother, and children, may be found exactly suited to special classes,
and among them the aged. The Social Settlements were started to serve
and have served the neighborhood needs of the poor and the immigrant.
They have also, incidentally, demonstrated the financial advantages of
coöperative housekeeping. A company of congenial people living
together in groups of twenty to forty can secure the essentials of
food, shelter, and necessary service at a cost per person far below
the average expense for boarding or private housekeeping. This does
not mean that families can combine easily in multiple households. The
personal equation counts for its greatest influence in the real family
group, of father, mother, and their children under eighteen years of
age. Few, if any, schemes of coöperative housekeeping have as yet
worked well for the combination of such groups.
The aged, especially the aged widow or widower, are not in the direct
family group. They belong to but they are not inside the inmost
circle. If one alone is left the life of the personal home is broken
for the elderly, however dear and kind the children may be. For such
there surely needs something easier than the attempt to maintain a
separate home with half its life gone. And also something more
independent and more secure than either enforced residence with
children or compulsory use of the ordinary commercialized boarding
house.
=To Prevent Premature Old Age.=--The second social demand, that
premature old age shall be more effectively prevented, is one that is
pressed upon this generation with new and imperative considerations. A
knowledge of health conditions shows that although infant mortality is
greatly lessened and infectious and epidemic diseases greatly brought
under control, the diseases of middle age, such as hardening of
arteries and kidney and digestive disorders, have increased
relatively, while insanity is much more frequent than of old. These
facts give us all deep concern. From the failure of health in middle
life comes the premature senility and the invalid weakness of old age.
The cause of the increase of middle-life diseases, relatively to those
of other periods of life, seems to be principally the pressure of
business and industrial life upon the worker. The high speed of
machinery, the extreme competition in business, the monotony of the
specialized manufacturing groups, the weight of great financial
enterprises and the struggle to make the family setting equal to the
family desires or even the family needs, all tend to make men in
middle life fail so often in health and so often leave behind their
better sheltered and more tenderly cared-for wives. There is a new
movement of great social importance, and one tending directly toward
the saving of one-half of the family circle, which is now taking a
front place in social interest; namely, the movement for annual
medical examinations. The work of the Life Extension Institute leads
toward this end and seeks the better adjustment of life and work in
the interest of simplicity and mutual service in the family and the
better health of all its members.
It is not, however, in the power of the wisest and most unselfish of
individuals to so manage the work-power as to insure against premature
old age from too great speeding and overstrain. There must be social
movement of the most thorough-going sort to prevent the waste of the
laborers in all fields. Social workers should remember that it is not
alone important to try to safeguard the health and strength of mothers
and of potential mothers by laws protecting women and girls in
industry. It is as vital a need to safeguard the health and strength
and perpetuate the work-power of fathers and potential fathers in
order that old age may be not a terror but a blessing to the family.
This is emphasized by recent indications that the increase of the
diseases of middle age is already checked and that we are gaining
ground in this particular.
A recent report of the Federal Department of Commerce through the
Bureau of Census shows that there has been a decline in the death-rate
for all age periods during the last decade. In the rate for infants
under one year of age a decline of twenty-six per cent., or from
13,804 per 100,000 in 1910 to 9,660 per 100,000 in 1920. The
death-rate for middle-aged and old people shows an encouraging
decrease, that of twelve per cent., in the period above seventy-five
years of age. This shows that we are gaining on disease and premature
death with every new advance in preventive medicine and the crusade
against bad living conditions. This, again, means that in the future
we shall have more aged persons in ratio of population than we have
had in the past, and indicates the great need of taking measures
betimes to make old age not only more mentally strong but more happy
and comfortable in condition.
=Check Extreme Requirements for Youth in Labor.=--There are many
requirements for youth in offered opportunities of training and of
work which are distinctly detrimental to respect for, and possibility
of continued service of, the old. Take, for example, the age limit in
many departments of business and manual labor. During the war we had
in the countries most denuded of young men a new sort of trial of the
middle-aged in positions where it had been thought youth was required.
What was the result? The trial made in Chicago by fifteen large
employers of labor under the leadership of Mr. Benjamin Rosenthal, was
distinctly, to use his words, "to upset the fallacious theory that men
between the ages of 45 and 65 are fit only for the scrap-heap." The
result of this experiment showed that in some phases of work the older
men did as much work in a given number of hours as the younger men; in
other departments they did as much in the week or month, from their
steadiness and devotion to their work, but not as much in any one day.
That is, the older men were less quick, but more steady and,
therefore, in the end accomplished as much. In some kinds of labor the
older men did better than the younger because usually more patient of
detail and less restive in monotonous toil. In the larger enterprises
older men are proverbially less speculative, more conservative, less
venturesome than the young. American business would, perhaps, not
suffer if a larger admixture of these qualities were found in all the
walks of commerce and business.
The fact that when a man is at the head of a concern, large or small,
he is valued usually more at sixty-five than at thirty-five, and the
further fact that thirty-five is often the dead-line for admission to
the lower ranks of the same industry or commercial position, is a
proof that this age-limit of the worker in lower position is not one
of definite knowledge of actual incapacity after forty years of age
but rather due to other conditions. Those conditions are, first and
foremost, the easier management of younger than of older subordinates.
It is hard for many men to "order about," in peremptory fashion, a man
older than themselves, and few men can command without abruptness or
sharp orders. It is still harder for most men to order about as office
assistant or clerk or secretary a woman older than themselves. And
fewer men can assume a respectful yet commanding attitude toward women
than can do so toward men in their employ. Some embarrassment has yet
to be worn off in business relations of the sexes. Moreover, the
tendency toward upspeeding of all mechanical manufacture is a part of
the rushing spirit of an age which has invented more fast-going things
than it has as yet mental power to use wisely or with social safety,
and it is true that fewer men over forty can rush in their work than
can do so below that age.
Youth is nimble; youth can be snubbed for errors of accomplishment
without hurt to a "gentleman's instincts;" youth, although so careless
as to often get injured by the swift-going machines, can yet exult in
their rapid swing; and, above all, youth is flexible and can be shaped
to any form of business requirement decided upon by those higher up.
Hence a fictitious value is assigned to youth in all departments of
work to-day. Hence, again, a special movement for actual trial of the
relative values of workers of different ages in special kinds of work
is necessary if we would know whether or not it is possible to prevent
that premature old age and tragical financial helplessness at
fifty-five or sixty, which makes the workless man or woman a burden
where many believe he or she might be still a help to the family
income.
We have been a nation of the young. We shall more and more balance the
different age-periods, as is already done in the older countries. We
should prepare, betimes, for this new aspect of the future's census,
by providing against preventable old age by the wiser use of all
laborers as long as work-power can be made available for
self-dependence.
=Need of Experience in Many Fields of Work.=--There are certain fields
of work on the higher side of social ministration in which the more
experienced are more needed than the young. Some one has said that "no
man is fit to be a pastor of a church until he has been something else
for several years and knows something of life." There is a very real
demand for any one, man or woman, who ventures to deal with the
spiritual life that he or she shall have more than youth can give of
sympathy and understanding. There is need also for larger experience
and greater breadth of view in professional social work of all sorts,
more than the young man or woman can give who has had college, plus
"School for Social Work," and nothing else; but who, because
"trained," feels expert. There could not be a greater social mistake
than is made by schools which attempt to train for child-care, family
visiting, rehabilitation of the dependent, aid to the "down-and-out,"
succor to the tempted and help to the weak, and yet deny the
opportunities of their classes to men and women over thirty-five. The
giving of "auditors' privileges," or "special courses for volunteers,"
or like makeshifts for regular student privileges is not what is
required; for such provisions carry with them the idea of less than
professional standing and usefulness. The initiation and maintenance
and increase of schools of training for social work is one of the
great educational and social achievements of the past quarter-century,
but the age-limit for entrance in many such schools is a huge mistake.
The very essence of true social service to individuals is experience
in life. The girl or boy who has had none or little may make a good
technician in many departments and may make a fine showing in work
that is not personal, and may collect material or knowledge about
groups of persons who need help. But the man or woman who is able to
be of great value as a "social doctor" is not only born to such
service but also is one who has not begun a specialty of social
technic too young to have learned something of the difficulty of
living. Young students? Yes. But many more who have come later in life
to a sense of their social responsibility and to a desire to learn how
best to serve society with all that they have gained in rich
experience. The psychology of social training must envisage a wider
range of years to be most effective.
=Prepare Vocationally for Old-age Needs.=--The third demand, that
every man and woman in early youth or in later youth shall be trained
in some light and agreeable occupation that can be pursued, perhaps to
economic return, in the days when strenuous labor can no longer be
carried on, is one that has as yet received little attention but which
should be a matter of deep concern. The fact that so many old women of
little physical strength and who require much personal care can yet
be useful and therefore actually wanted as helpers in many families is
indicative of the fundamental fact in industrial life that a general
training for general usefulness, such as the housewife has had through
the ages, has some advantages still.
Before Mrs. Perkins Gilman gets all women into some specialty,
alongside of the already highly specialized men workers, let us see to
it that men get a chance for a more general training! The restless
idleness of the man whose specialty of manual labor or definite type
of business interest is now beyond his strength or opportunity is a
sad thing to see. We have had to develop a special charity to furnish
a work-interest to aged men in public institutions. They were so
miserable and pathetic without that occupation. Women fare better in
this, as in many other elements of labor, for they can do so many
things, usually have to do so many things, most of them, in the
family, that some one sort of work, at least, is left to them for
special old age. "Mother's pies" or grandmother's cakes or needlework
or knack at dusting or baby-tending or what not keeps her young and
makes her actually a helper even when old. Grandfather's loss of his
job, of his specialty of effort, of his hold on the great industrial
machine, leaves him too often hopelessly at sea for the passing of
time still left to him.
Well-to-do women in the United States, moreover, have acquired through
the large leisure inherited wealth or their husband's means have
supplied, a social business that has not only delayed old age but
nearly obliterated its ancient signs and tokens. The Clubs, the
Leagues, the Alliances, the charitable agencies, the institutions of
care for the defective, the friendless, the infirm, the dependent
children, the countless societies and coöperative social organizations
for social serviceableness, in which women are leaders and chief
workers, bear witness that "grandmother" has found a place for her
energies after the children have grown and set up households of their
own.
If such a grandmother is a member of the daughter's family she is not
half so objectionable to daughter's husband as when mother-in-law had
a permanent place at the fireside, perhaps in the exact spot where he
wanted to put his easy chair, and had to be "taken out" if she ever
ventured into the great world. She now has her own interests, often so
many and vital that her day is more completely filled than when she
was younger. She has her own set of friends and her own use for the
energy and power of direction that often in the old days made her a
troublesome member of the family. If only she has a chance at her own
little cooking, and her own individual sitting room, and has her own
income, if ever so small, she may fit well into even a city apartment
and no other member of the family be the worse. The thing required for
old men and women alike is some work suited to slower motion and
lessened strength and greater need for quiet and independent thought.
This is a need which more women than men have met to-day, we repeat,
but it is one that must be understood and effectively satisfied for
men and women alike.
Edward Everett Hale said every man needed "both a vocation and an
avocation"--something by which he earned his living and something by
which he maintained his interest in activity. It is the avocation that
must be planned for. The vocation is often thrust upon one by
necessity or chance association. If every aged person had something to
do that made each day short and each night a welcome rest much of the
friction between the older and the younger members of families would
be avoided and life would piece the generations together more
perfectly.
=The Attitude of Mind Toward Old Age.=--Life calls upon us all to
prepare while yet young for the lessened power of old age. The removal
from the commanding place to the honorable but more difficult position
of the ex-leader and the chief-emeritus is a step that requires care.
The attitude of mind that can keep in harmonious touch with the
oncoming generation and yet not lose the value of its own day of
contribution to the social inheritance is an art to be acquired only
by effort and the exercise of moral and mental power. There was,
perhaps, never in the history of our civilization so great a gap
between the ideals and social practices of the grandparents and those
of the third generation. The parents even are feeling themselves too
far from the children; the grandparents often realize a vast distance
between themselves and the rising generation. The distance is not
always the measure of progress. It is not seldom the effect of rapid
changes in mechanical appliances, in material agencies and economic
conditions, in literary taste and in ideals of culture; an effect
which has unsettled youth in the inherited ways and not yet settled
them in well-considered new rules of living. The experience that might
aid in easing the process of readjustment is not always at hand and
not always used when it is attainable. The experience of age is too
often shown in dogmatic rules. The inexperience of youth is too often
the accompaniment of a childish conviction that everything that has
been is wrong and everything that promises to be is best.
There is, therefore, greater need, perhaps, than ever before for
wisdom and patience and sympathetic understanding of those from whom
one differs within the family life. It is for the grandparents to set
the fashion for these new adjustments. They have loved most because
they have given most. They have learned most, or could have learned
most, because longer in the school of life. And they have but a little
way to travel on the long road their children and their children's
children must go to meet their fate.
To the lasting credit of human nature be it said that the grandparents
of to-day measure as well for the most part as do the parents in these
difficult tasks of family adjustment to a rapidly changing social
order. It is often the grandparent who sees what the different life of
his or her children have meant to the still greater difference in the
condition of the grandchild, and can interpret to the latter the
reason for the restraint of the parent. It is often through the
tenderness and devotion to the aged called out by the grandparents
that the son and daughter learn the real depths of parental love. It
is often the partial affection of the grandparent for the grandchild
that makes a new tie in family love and enables that family love to
grow wiser as well as stronger. It may be, as quoted before, that no
house is large enough for two families. It surely is true that no
family living room is spacious enough for the continuous use of three
generations; but it is still more true that with new interests all
around the circle of family membership a more varied family life can
be managed without friction or loss of privacy for any member if only
there is the right attitude of mind. To-day the ideal of the
Heaven-father fastens itself as easily to the child's affection for
grandpa as on his dependence upon his father. To-day the ideal of
mother-love, never lessened even by wrong-doing of the child, is as
securely fibred upon the picture of grandma, ever ready to heal and
comfort, as upon that of the mother, whose daily ministrations make
the child comfortable.
=The Special Gifts of the Old to the Home and the World.=--In some
ways it is surely more easy to believe in goodness at the heart of
things because some aged man or woman, closely related by blood and
breeding, has been a living example of what must be revered. Moreover,
to the family, as to the world-at-large, old age brings a special
gift--if that old age is what it may be. Each period of life has its
own gift to make. Age should make a precious contribution, even the
central faith of life.
Youth, eager, responsive to all noble ambitions and touched by all
noble dissatisfactions with what is, makes its plan for what should be
on a strictly logical basis. His rejected Evil is wholly evil; his
chosen Good without a flaw. Children are all Calvinists; and youth,
for the most part, separates its ideas of good and bad as the sheep
and goats within its mind. Well that it is so. The law of growth in
life is so far from logical, so operative by inconsistent
fluctuations, that it is of the greatest social use for each fresh
generation of reformers to hew to the line and express that
intolerance of compromise which helps the struggling moral sense to
clarify the issues of each new day.
In middle life, if the individual worker for better things is not
merely a prophesier but has become an actual agent for the realization
of his ideal in practical achievement, he suffers many a disillusion,
not in respect to his ideal, but in respect to the ease of working it
into the body politic or into the compelling purpose of the social
mind. That is the time of danger; and how many lose heart and hope and
fall weakly by the way when they first learn that to state a truth
with power is not enough to insure its acceptance! That one should set
himself with courage and faith to the long, slow processes of actual
change of the social order after he has learned how difficult that is,
is to be indeed a hero--a hero of the actualization of the ideal, even
though he dies with the promised land hardly in sight.
In later life comes to many, and should to all, another gift. Not
alone the vision of youth, never lost and always dear; not only the
strength of open-eyed effort to achieve so much of the ideal, even its
very least atom, as the times and the conditions allow and not lose
heart that it is so little, but also the interpretative and
harmonizing spirit of those who see, beyond the personal ideal and
vision and far beyond the personal achievement, the upward march of
all mankind--not alone the leaders of that march; not alone those who
will and know the upward way, but all who feel the under-current
pressure "toward the better, ever onward toward the best," This
pressure even those feel who fondly imagine they are holding all life
to outgrown patterns, and they prove its power by their unconscious
response.
Another gift of insight they may have who grow old in the spirit of
youth. It is the gift of seeing in one picture those who have come a
long way up the path of progress and those who have but just entered
upon it. The harsh judgments of youth, so tonic and useful, that
measure moral actions by their exact position in ethical perception
(judgment so tonic and useful that youth without that element misses
its own gift to human progress) cease to serve in old age for purposes
of just discrimination. In later life may come the wisdom of
understanding those from whom one differs, the gift of seeing the
helpful interrelations of newer and older "mores" in normal human
development and the glad recognition that even defective moral vision,
though retarding needed changes, may be used by the powers that
balance our complex life to hold, its course steady in chaos of
change. These gifts may add patience and love, sweetness and light, to
the zeal of the reformer and yet not dull his ardor for the next
morning-hour of progress.
Not the old, then, because it is old, nor the new because it is new;
not the few who will hold no parley with that which to them is evil,
nor the many who cling to what they have inherited lest they lose
life's best treasures; not to those who call aloud in the market
place, "Behold the coming of the Lord!" nor to those who sit at the
fireside and cherish their own only; not on or to any one
manifestation of the life in which we have our being can the old, with
the spirit of youth, fibre their faith and trust.
In all the struggling, mistaken, weary, selfish, cowardly, alike as in
all the brave, heroic, unselfish and lovely, is manifestation that
makes "no good thing a failure, no evil thing success." This is the
testimony of a ripe and wise old age. In that they must trust who have
tested the real things of life in the real world of effort, nor lost
hope in the Onward Way for all.
QUESTIONS ON THE GRANDPARENTS
1. What have been the general tendencies in social treatment of
the aged?
2. What are some of the social needs in respect to public and
private health, vocational training, wages and standards of
living, family and personal insurance and educational
opportunities which must be met if old age is to be prolonged
as far as possible and made happy and comfortable to the end of
life?
3. What should be the aim of youth and middle life in respect to
preparation for old age?
4. Read _Old Age Support of Women Teachers_, by Dr. Lucille Eaves,
_A Study in Economic Relations of Women_, by the Department of
Research of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union of
Boston, Mass., and read "The Trade Union and the Old Man," by
John O'Grady, Catholic University of America, published in
_American Journal of Sociology_ of November, 1917. Are the
suggestions in these articles along needed lines?
FOOTNOTES:
[6] See _The State and Pensions in Old Age_, by J.A. Spender.