THE BROKEN FAMILY
"Every social ill involves the enslavement of individuals. Freedom
is that phase of the social ideal which emphasizes
individuality.--All mankind acknowledges kindness as the law of
right intercourse within a social group.--The ideal of service
goes with the sense of unity.--A likeness of spirit and principle
is essential to moral unity. The creation of a moral order on an
ever-growing scale is the great historical task of mankind, and
the magnitude of it explains all shortcomings."--CHARLES H.
COOLEY, in _Social Organization_.
"The sanctity of oaths
Lies not in lightning that avenges them,
But in the injury wrought by broken bonds
And in the garnered good of human trust.
'Tis a compulsion of the higher sort,
Whose fetters are the net invisible
That holds all life together.
'Tis faithfulness that makes the life we choose
Breathe high and see a full-arched firmament.
We may see ill
But over all belief is faithfulness
Which fulfils vision with obedience.
No good is certain, but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good;
'Tis that compels the elements, and wrings
A human music from the indifferent air."
--GEORGE ELIOT.
"Genuine government is but the expression of a nation
Good or less good; even as all society
Is but the expression of men's single lives--
The loud sum of the silent units."--E.B. BROWNING.
"There is no other genuine enthusiasm than one which has travelled
the common highway--the life of the good man and woman, the good
neighbor, the good citizen."--THOMAS GREEN HILL.
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom."
--SHAKESPEARE.
=The Problems of Divorce.=--Having treated in some detail the subject
of "Problems of Marriage and Divorce" in a former book, _Woman's Share
in Social Culture_, and also in articles published in _The
International Journal of Ethics_, _The Harvard Theological Review_,
_Harper's Weekly_, and other magazines, this chapter, to avoid
repetition, will simply rehearse in brief outline the points of view
previously expressed.
In the valuable and suggestive treatment of the family by Professor
Ellwood in his book, _Sociology and Modern Social Problems_, he says
that "divorce is but a symptom of more serious evils that in certain
classes of American society have apparently undermined the very
virtues upon which the family life subsists." If that be so, then no
tinkering with the laws which aim at preventing divorces will reach
the seat of the difficulty. The treatment must be more radical, and
the character of individuals be made more noble and strong, if the
family is to be made more stable and marriage more successful.
=Frequency of Divorce in the United States.=--The first point to be
noted in any discussion of the broken family is the frequency of that
social tragedy in the United States. The pioneer study by Professor
W.P. Willcox, made in 1885 and reported in his volume entitled _The
Divorce Problem_, showed the fact that we had in this country at that
time more divorces per year than were recorded in all the other
so-called Christian countries put together. For 1905, statistics show
nearly 68,000 divorces in the United States as against the highest
number from Germany, which is only a trifle above 11,000, and from
France, 10,860, and running down rapidly to the number of 33 in
Canada. In England, in 1905, there was but one divorce to 400
marriages. In the United States, in the same year, one divorce to
every 12 marriages. Since that count was taken, there has been no
evidence of a halt in the tendency of the United States to lead the
rest of the Christian world in this matter of separation of those once
joined together by marriage vows. In some of the States, the showing
is more pronounced on the side of free divorce than in other States,
since in Washington, Oregon, and Montana one divorce to every five
marriages is reported, in Colorado and Indiana one to every six, and
in Oklahoma, California, and Maine one to every seven marriages. We
need not accept the doleful suggestion of Professor Willcox that if we
go on this way, "by 1950 one-fourth of all marriages will be
terminated by divorce, and by 1990 one-half so terminated," for it is
not necessary or likely that we shall "go on" in this particular.
Already, movements toward the strengthening of family ties and the
better training of youth to responsibility, movements that tend to
make marriage less brittle, are inaugurated.
=Cannot Now Make Family an Autocracy.=--There are several points that
all must agree upon if we are to stay the rush to the divorce courts
and yet not attempt the futile task of turning the family order back
to the patriarchal or the monarchical types. In those types there was
little or no legal divorce, it is true, but in them inhered social
evils that often killed the spirit of marriage, and doomed the
children of enforced unions to physical weakness, mental
defectiveness, moral taint, and affectional suffering.
First of all, it should be noted that, although the divorce statistics
are serious indictments of American life and bode ill to American
society, they are not wholly a testimony to bad conditions. They are
also a testimony that he who runs may read, to the determination of
men, and especially of women, to exact a higher reality of mutual
love, mutual respect, mutual service, and mutual coöperation within
the marriage bond.
=New Standards of Marriage Success.=--When it was decided to
investigate the causes for the backwardness of school children, why so
many "failed to pass" and were "retarded" in the march from grade to
grade in the elementary classes, the first inquiry took no note of the
exactions of the grade standards. All who failed to move on at the
scheduled moment for "promotion," in any school examined, were listed
as "backward." Later, it occurred to the investigators, that the first
thing to find out was whether or not a given grade standard was one
that true pedagogy would approve, and second, whether there was a
serious discrepancy in that grade standard between the different
schools from which the children came for examination.
In much the same way the first inquiries as to the evil of frequent
divorce seemed to take for granted that all who sought divorce were in
circumstances that might have been socially and usefully continued
within the marriage bond. We know better now. We know that the first
question to ask about a broken family is: What was its condition
before the break? Did justice, and a fair estimate of the quality of
the union and its effects upon the man and the woman involved, and
their children, demand that the family hold or be held together, or
was there a condition that made society more interested in the ending
than in the continuance of that union?
If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of
society that men and women should marry who are so physically
diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them
injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many
cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family;
and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in
social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family
circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent
their doing more harm to family life?
Whatever may be thought by many who view all divorce with horror,
there is a tendency within that movement toward free divorce, toward
the freeing of the currents of generative life from evil influence,
from despotism, from degenerative tendencies, and from the worst forms
of social wrong-doing. There is, also, of course, in that movement, a
testimony which should make all earnest lovers of their kind learn
how to urge socially therapeutic treatment, a testimony to human
weakness, to a lack of the sense of responsibility, to a love of
personal pleasure at any cost to moral obligation, and to a need for
social control of the whole family relation.
The causes, in our country, for which more than 90 per cent, of the
divorces are granted, are the serious ones of adultery, cruelty,
imprisonment for crime, habitual drunkenness, desertion, and neglect
to provide for the family. This indicates that in most cases there has
been a failure on the score of basic family requirements from husbands
and wives, and from fathers and mothers, before the court was called
in to break the legal bond. Does this also indicate that such failure
of character has increased among our people to the extent of its
increased legal recognition in divorce? We can not think so. There are
special reasons why all bonds of intimate association are strained in
modern life, with its separate industrial, social, and educational
affiliations for each individual. But that all of us are going
downward, or most of us, is not a provable contention and should not
be an undemonstrated inference.
=Dangers of Extreme Individualism in Marriage.=--The primary fact is
that we have allowed individualism in marriage to go beyond limits
which are socially safe, just as in the economic order and in the
administration of political affairs, we have supposed that the
"let-alone-policy" would work social good. No other civilization has
been able to secure successful family life without some support,
supervision, control, and aid to the married couple and their
children, from without. We cannot return to the collective family of
other days. We must learn how to make society in general work toward
the ends of stability and social order in the family, as in other
social institutions, and by methods that reverence and secure personal
freedom and fit well into a democratic state.
=Free Love Not Admissible.=--Professor Ellwood says that "while
material civilization is mainly a control of the food process, moral
civilization involves a control of the reproductive process, that is,
over the birth and rearing of children." He argues from this that
social organization "precludes anything like the toleration of
promiscuity or even of free love." Most students of social history
will agree with this statement. We may, therefore, say that the
attitude of law, of custom, and of social standards, must be that of
demanding legalization of permitted sex-relationship, and the effort
to make legal sex-relationship permanent where possible without
sacrifice of the substance of family life to its outward form.
=Must Work Toward Desired Permanency in Marriage.=--This means a quite
new approach to the problems of marriage and divorce. It means the
inauguration of legal and educational mechanisms in the interest of
making people want to stay married, rather than toward an effort to
make people stay wedded when they wish to separate. In this, more,
even than in any other field of social effort, we should take heed to
and obey the advice of Dr. Lester Ward "to use attractive rather than
compulsory methods of reform."
=Needed Changes in Legal and Social Approach to Divorce.=--What are
the main points of change in our legal and social approach to the
divorce situation, which the modern need for social control through
democratic measures demands most clearly and strongly? They are,
first, a longer period of delay between reception and granting of the
request of a man and a woman for a license to marry. Several State
legislatures are now considering statutes which require an "interval
of three days" between the application for and the granting of
marriage licenses. This is certainly a short enough time in which to
find out if either of the parties is likely to commit bigamy if the
license is granted, if both of the parties are really of adult age
claimed, if either of the parties is afflicted with an infectious
disease that would make marriage dangerous to the other party, if
either of the parties has been a resident of a criminal or pauper
institution, if either or both of the parties are competent to
financial support of the twain, if there is any "just cause or
impediment" against the legal union. We may find it wise to return to
the old "three weeks publishing of the banns" in order to know what
the state is about in granting and what two people are about in
demanding a marriage license. In the second place, there are limits
outside of which society should not allow legal marriage to receive
its sanction. During the legal interval required there may develop
knowledge of facts that make it a social crime for one or the other or
both parties to be allowed to start a new family. This is matter for
serious and long-continued study, and the experimentation of our
different Commonwealths in determining the useful or necessary
restrictions upon legal marriage is not without value. The main thing,
however, is for society to recognize that there are just restrictions
upon marriage and that this is proved by the actual social burden
which unfit persons place upon their fellows when marrying and
bringing forth after their kind. The third point, which must be
emphasized more strongly than has been the case heretofore, is the
need of making the state, through its courts, the ally, not the enemy,
of marriage permanency. As it is now, the Divorce Court exists to
secure divorces. Its very existence invites to its use. The court
procedure in all cases of marital unhappiness which has become acute
enough for legal freedom to be sought should be a court procedure that
aims at arbitration, at "trying again," at winning harmony by just
concessions from either or both the parties, a court procedure
consciously and definitely set to the task of making more marriages
successful even when they have developed difficulty of adjustment,
rather than one allowed to act as a means of easy separation of even
fickle, selfish, and childish people on grounds of superficial
difference.
=Prohibition of Paid Attorneys in Divorce.=--_The absolute abolition
of any paid service of any attorney in the interest of getting anyone
a divorce, is a primary social demand._ The establishment of a
"Divorce Proctor" service in a Domestic Relations Court, with sole
jurisdiction over applications for divorce, is a second vital social
demand. Some form of legal provision which would make judges of a
special and honored class the paid representatives of society's demand
for marriage to be as permanent as individual justice will allow is
essential to any genuine divorce reform. The often highly-feed
advocate of personal wish of two dissatisfied people, the agent that
deals with divorce problems as a lucrative trade, is one cause of the
prevalence of divorce among the idle and pampered rich. Those who have
greater social opportunity than they have brains or conscience to use
them aright, and who can pay lawyers so extravagantly, give us a heavy
total of marital separations and of remarriage of divorced persons in
the United States.
Judges, the best and the wisest, must sit on all cases where the
breaking up of a family is the issue, and all privately paid attorneys
(in other kinds of social arrangement and difficulty also a hindrance
rather than an aid to justice) must be banished from every divorce
court and from every divorce proceeding, both of the richer and of the
poorer classes.
=Divorce Proceedings Should be Heard in Secret.=--Newspapers should
not be tempted or allowed to gain advantage from the weakness, the
folly, or the vice of any member of any family which may be revealed
in such divorce proceedings. The fact of whether or not a divorce
applied for is granted, the fact of whether one or the other party or
both have received freedom, the fact of whether one or another was
pronounced guilty of treason to the marriage bond--these are all
subjects for news. The reasons for these decisions of wise and good
judges should not be given to the public in detail. The main
objections to the present publicity of divorce proceedings is, first,
that publicity is generally in proportion to the wealth of the
parties, as is also the prolongation of the proceedings; and second,
that such reports are generally of a demoralizing nature for the
public to read; and third, and not least, that few if any couples
seeking a divorce are without fathers or mothers or relatives,
children, or near friends, to whom the public revelation of the
marital unhappiness or the personal wrong-doing of the parties
involved is a pain and a shame.
=Earlier and Better Use of Domestic Relations Court.=--Another way by
which society should undertake to supply in newer and more democratic
forms the supervision, the control, and the support to the individual
married couple and their children, which the older collective family
organization sought to supply, is an earlier and a better use of the
Domestic Relations Court, or of some advisory agency to prevent the
breaking up of families. There should be something analogous to the
old "family council," some body of advisers well known and well
equipped for actual service, to help the bewildered and the unhappy.
The religious ministry should be able to supply such help. It often
does do so. The circle of friends may sometimes contain those of
wisdom and understanding who give needed aid toward a resumption of
broken relations on a higher and more enduring plane. There is
needed, however, something between the court to which people go for
relief from bonds, and the solitary struggle with difficulties before
that relief is sought, something which, if related officially to the
Domestic Relations Court, would be of a more flexible and private
nature than most of its proceedings. We need more an aid to avoidance
of marital rocks than a rescue, as from a life-boat, after the
shipwreck.
There are many forms of advice and help which the teachers and medical
practitioners in mental hygiene are now developing and offering which
may be used later on, when we are wiser, in this work of preventing
families from breaking up. Regularly constituted "social doctoring"
for the prevention, even more than for the treatment of social disease
as it manifests itself in family life, is surely called for.
=The Children to be Affected Society's Chief Care.=--Above all, we
must place the children affected by any decision that gives society a
broken family in the front rank of interest and of protective care. If
the paid attorney were eliminated, divorces would certainly be
lessened in number. If publicity were avoided in all divorce
proceedings, much of the harm to children arising from separation of
married couples would be avoided. If, in addition, there were advisory
aid to the confused and unhappy, many now drifting to complete
division of interest and affection would be enabled to start on again
toward better realization of married opportunity. If, in further
addition, the Domestic Relations Courts were changed with the
supervisory care of all children whose parents were legally separated,
and the well-being of those children made the chief legal concern even
if it required the complete separation from both father and mother,
more fathers and mothers would hesitate to place themselves where
their parental control and their parental influence would be so
minimized. Yet who doubts that among the rich as well as among the
poor such judicial protection and care of the children, whom the
broken family leaves without true parental care, is needed? To give
children into the hands of either parent alone is in many such cases
no fitting substitute for the normal home influence. In any case,
there should be an external conscience and an external solicitude
enlisted in the interest of every child whose parents have made such a
failure of marriage and the home that the divorce court is the only
refuge.
This does not ignore the fact that many couples separate to the
advantage of the children, that many parents are quite innocent of any
cause for the broken family, that many times there is a rehabilitation
of the family life on other lines that means full nurture and
development for the children. The fact remains, however, that the
average child of divorced parents has to meet difficulties and face
disadvantages in life which the child of permanently united fathers
and mothers does not suffer, and, for such, some exterior protection
and supervision should be provided.
=A Uniform or Federal Divorce Law.=--Many persons deeply interested in
lessening the number of divorces in the United States place much
dependence upon a "Uniform Divorce Law" for the whole country, as
giving a basis for wise legislation. Recently, Senator Jones, of the
State of Washington, introduced in the Senate a resolution proposing a
new amendment to the Federal Constitution by which, if it passed,
Congress would have power "to establish and enforce by appropriate
legislation uniform laws as to marriage and divorce." The fact that a
couple may be legally married in one state of our Union and illegally
practicing bigamy or adultery in another state gives a plausible
reason for such a Constitutional Amendment. And perhaps the searching
investigation and discussion which would precede such a definite
change in our national law, if such change were made, would be of
great use in clarifying the public mind, and securing a consensus of
opinion as to what should and what should not be allowed in this
matter. Yet it is doubtful if such a law would, in itself, bring down
the number of divorces, now estimated by those advocating the law as
"one in every eight to ten marriages," or prevent the ratio of
increase in divorces to increase in population (now estimated "as
increase in population in a given period, 60 per cent., and increase
in divorces in the same period, 160 per cent."), or really mend our
family ills. The dependency upon Constitutional amendments and upon
legislation of every kind has, many believe, reached the utmost limit
of social serviceability in this country. The deeper question in all
such propositions is this: What, under the Constitution as first
affirmed and later amended, is proper subject for Federal legislation,
and what should be left to state and local action? We have not reached
a political unity as to the basic elements of just and effective
political method in the division of social control between the nation
and the various states. The habit of rushing to the National Congress
for Federal legislation with no plan or logical aim in relation to
such division, is one that may well be curbed.
=Education Our Chief Reliance.=--Meanwhile, all must insist that
education, character-training for strong, unselfish, noble
personalities, is our main dependence, and must ever be in the effort
to make family life more stable, and more socially helpful. Men and
women must be made competent to self-control, and steadied with a
sense of obligation to others, and animated by an ideal of
faithfulness to contract, and of devotion to securing mutual rights in
a mutual plan of life together. Such education for character, must be
our chief dependence in efforts to lessen divorces, as in the effort
to do away with all social evils. There is no magic in marriage, there
is no magic even in parenthood, to make weak, and selfish and
superficial and ignorant and stupid and despotic people into guardians
of the best interests of home. A man or a woman is successful in the
family order, only on the same basis as is demanded in all other
relations of life, the basis of justice, good sense, right feeling,
and an honest effort to realize high ideals.
=Helps Toward Family Unity.=--What remains for society to do, after
general moral training has worked its full service of individual
preparation for good intent and wise choices and competent mastery of
family arrangements, must be done or attempted on the basis rather of
helps toward permanence, than of prohibition of release from marriage
mistakes and wrongs.
We have left undone much we should have done to make it easier for
young people to find their true mates, to start right in married life,
and to bear the burdens of parenthood without stumbling on the way.
Let us not add mistakenly to the duties left undone the attempt to do
things we should not, namely, to overbear instead of aiding the
personal life.
There is nothing that works more tragedy of suffering than broken vows
in marriage, whether the fact of the actual separation be publicly
acknowledged or not. How many a disillusioned man or woman has felt
with the poet:
"To look upon the face of a dead friend
Is hard; but there is deeper woe--
To look upon our friendship lying dead
While we live on, and eat, and sleep--
Mere bodies from which all the soul has fled,
And that dead thing year after year to keep
Locked in cold silence on its dreamless bed."
=Shall Society Favor the Remarriage of Divorced Persons?=--Now that
the moral sense of most people allows another trial on Love's Rialto,
there are many individuals who can leave "that dead thing" to find its
own grave, and in the light of some new and dearer affection go on to
a renewed promise and joy of life. Can we think that wrong? Who shall
dare to say that alone of all mistakes of youth, a mistaken choice in
marriage shall be for all life a sentence of doom? Who shall dare to
limit the power of rehabilitation of the family order, even when what
has failed is the central heart of married love? Our gospel of hope
and courage, and renewal of opportunity, and rebirth of affection must
know no limits if we would rightly trust the spirit within our being.
But for the shallow, and the selfish, and the pleasure-seeker without
reverence for the right way of life, and for the scoffer at all high
moods of feeling and of ideal aim, there can be little to justify his
flitting about on the very outmost limits of true love. For such, some
check must be had in ordered rules and legal bonds, in order that the
race-life shall go on in safety and in social health. Meanwhile,
although there is much to give us pause and to demand serious study
and earnest and wise social work in the situation revealed by the
divorce court statistics, there is nothing that need give hysterical
alarm lest the home is being destroyed and the family abolished. On
the contrary, there probably was never a time when so many people were
really happy, each and every member of the family, in the home
relation; and hence never a time when it was clearer that to keep the
home stable and permanent, and make marriage successful in the vast
majority of cases, we have only to get better and wiser people in
larger proportion.
To understand the real reason for marital unhappiness and for family
instability, to know that such reason inheres primarily in personal
character and not in any statute, is to begin work for the real cure
and prevention of such unhappiness and instability. The broken family
may be a sad necessity, alike for individuals concerned, and for the
well-being of society. To prevent that tragedy is a social duty than
which none is more pressing or more open to social effort.
=Turning From Compulsory to Attractive Methods of Reform.=--To
undertake that social task, the psychology of social effort must be
turned from compulsive methods of prevention of legal divorce, when
such divorce is sought, to ways of making marriage choices wiser,
marriage experience more sane and better balanced by sense of
obligation to the nearer and more remote of social relations, and by
putting at the command of all, the helpful sympathy and the social
guidance that can alone hold to firm and noble lines the wavering and
the weak.
QUESTIONS ON THE BROKEN FAMILY
1. Is the admitted increase in divorce wholly a testimony to
moral degeneracy? If so, what can be done about it? If not,
what else does it indicate?
2. What are the main points to work for in order to reduce the
number of divorces, and to remove the social evils of which
divorces are only the symptom?
3. Should the social psychology be directed principally toward
preventing people from getting divorce or from remarrying after
divorce, or toward making marriage so generally successful that
fewer people want to separate?
4. What is specially needed in education both of youth and the
adult in the United States in the interest of family stability
and family success?
5. Make a list of causes that in your opinion justify legal
separation or divorce and find out whether or not these causes
are named in the statutes of your State. If they are not, what
should be done about it?
6. What is done for and with the children of legally separated and
divorced persons in your State?