THE FAMILY AND THE HOME
“The ideal which the mother and wife makes for herself, the
manner in which she understands duty and life, contain the fate
of the community.”—_Amiel’s Journal._
There are some who hold that the family rests on a trembling quicksand,
and state that its supporters are compelled to weave a network of lies to
sustain its foundation. We hear much wild talk, and a great deal is said
about the restrictions imposed by the family, and very little about its
duties and its joys. There is, and I think its existence must be faced,
a growing tide of discontent which would seem to render the stability
of the home more and more precarious—the faint-hearted cry to us that
everything is coming to an end. It is not so, but rather, everything is
about to be renewed.
Institutions as vital to life as the family will continue. From the most
distant period of life, among the animals as among mankind, the history
of the family has been a long series of regenerations. We have found
witness to this again and again in the past records of pre-human and
primitive human parenthood. And, indeed, the most important result we
have gained from our long inquiry is the abundant proof it has furnished
of the indestructible character of the family.
Wherever the individual family (the lasting union of the male with the
female for the protection of the young) has been departed from for
some other and perhaps freer form of sexual association a return has
followed. Special conditions have called forth experiments, new family
arrangements, but in no case have they become universal and permanent.
We cannot argue against all that the past teaches us. And assuredly the
history of the family turns into foolishness many reforms that, in our
blindness, we are seeking to-day. We believe they will bring progress
and freedom to women. But what sure ground have we for such a belief? In
truth we have much to learn.
Institutions have this in common with rivers, they do not readily flow
backwards. If they sometimes seem to retro-grade, it is generally only a
mere appearance, and though tributary streams break away in experimental
courses the main river flows on. You will see what I mean by this. The
changes that will take place, and have for long been taking place, have
been changes not affecting the fundamental qualities in the ideal of the
family—its permanence, the fidelity of its partners in thought and deed,
its sentiments and its obligations of joyous sacrifice in united parental
care. Attacks have altered (and it is well that they have altered) the
dominance of the male. The patriarchal customs of proprietary ownership
are gradually disappearing both for the wife and for the children. The
family has broadened. The feeling of hostility to the outer world, the
self-centredness—much that limited the family is being changed. But the
idea of the family, and its value as one of the most essential forms of
social life, remains unaffected.
And mark this: _No ideals whatever have been produced by even the most
progressive and enlightened persons to replace the family group._
The wild reforms contemplated by some among us, who talk, but fortunately
do not act, are fog and nonsense.
The home, in particular, has been spoken of with contempt. Thus, Bernard
Shaw, who in the reforms he advocates fails so frequently to see the real
human needs of life, cries: “Home is the girls’ prison and the woman’s
workhouse.” Again, W. L. George in _Women and To-morrow_ (a “To-morrow”
which, by the way, I trust I may never live to see) states: “The home is
the enemy of Woman. Purporting to be her protector, it is her oppressor.
It is her fortress, but she does not live in the state apartments, she
lives in a dungeon.”
Mr. H. G. Wells, in a much more recent utterance, wherein he professes to
forecast “What is Coming,” speaks even more strongly, and all the present
conditions are estimated. He states: “_Now, to be married is an incident
in a woman’s career, as in a man’s._” (The italics are mine.) “There
is not the same necessity of that household, not the same close tie;
the married woman remains partially a freewoman and assimilates herself
to the freewoman. There is an increasing disposition to group solitary
children and to delegate their care to specially qualified people; and
this is likely to increase, because the high earning power of young women
will incline them to entrust their children to others.”
And again, at the conclusion of his article on “The War and Women,” Mr.
Wells sums up the situation as follows: “To sum all that has gone before,
this war is accelerating rather than deflecting the stream of tendency,
and is bringing us rapidly to a state of affairs in which women will
be much more definitely independent of their sexual status, much less
hampered in their self-development and much more nearly equal to men
than has ever been known before in the whole history of mankind.”
Now, if these two late pronouncements of Mr. Wells are compared with
what he wrote a few years back, with the quotation from _Mankind in the
Making_ which I have placed before this section of my book because it
so well expresses my own views, I think the harm that of late years has
been working is strongly evident; harm that is incredibly active in our
consciousness.[68]
Such talk of my sex as “freewomen” and of a liberation from the sexual
life, as if that could be possible, fills me with impatience. I would
not wait to notice it did I not believe that the hurt done to women had
been deep and far-reaching. It has increased for them the difficulty
of unifying life. And this uncertainty of desire is, as I believe, the
modern disease which has worked such havoc in the souls of women. I
would like to silence all useless, impious negators; those who, seeking
to be clever, really are blinkered, and unable to see the results that
would follow from their destructions. The error in all these outcries
is the error of blindness, of getting into a condition of confused
intellectual excitement, and because some women are dissatisfied and
have been unhappy, saying, therefore, and usually with passion, that
they would be more satisfied if all the sex were freed from its own
duties. As if freedom were ever gained by running away. The intellectual
reformer is so very far from understanding the real human needs. There
is, for instance, a significant omission in the quotations I have
given—no mention is made of the results of all this to the child, and
no suggestion is offered except that it should be trained and cared for
by experts and apart from its parents. The home is to go because it
restricts the liberty of women and will hinder their earning power, as
if this were all that had to be considered. I can hardly find a more
striking example of how far the apparently simple and elemental things
escape the attention of the intellectual reformer.
In the society in which we are living, the only use that can be made of
modern progressive teaching about the family—the only ounces of practice
to be derived from pounds of precept—will lead, as I believe, to a very
undesirable course of action. The programme for the abolition of the home
has been outlined for us by reformers of both sexes. Communal houses and
kitchens, and the intervention of armies of experts, are to solve the
problems which now keep women tied in the individual home. The parents
are to be supplanted by “born educators.” Successive institutions are
planned for the bottle-period, kindergarten, school age, and so on.
The children are to stand on visiting relations to the individual home
and their parents, while their bodies and souls are to be cared for by
specialists. And we are asked to believe that this will be a gain to
the child! “It is the trained hand that the baby needs, not mere blood
relationship … personal love is too hot an atmosphere for the young
soul.”[69]
Now, if I wanted a general term to express the state of mind of these
reformers, I do seriously think the word _inhuman_ would be as near to it
as any. Some people talk as if there were no emotional quality to decide
these questions; they are dry-minded and quite unable to grasp the true
values in life.
And the essence of all such folly is an insupportable egoism. The whole
argument against the home is based on the claim of woman to lead an
independent life. Independent of what? It is not easy to answer. It is
asserted that the ideal of the home as the special care of woman has tied
her to material things; it is urged that her emancipation from the fetish
of the home is essential for her soul’s freedom. The feminists ask us to
make the wage-earning woman our ideal, instead of regarding her, as I do,
as the unfortunate victim of industrial life and industrial ideals—and
this is a very dangerous attitude and one which cannot fail to affect
very seriously the fate of the home in the future. It is this that causes
me such grave fear. The ideals that we set before us do exercise an
influence greater than we know.
Now, I am not much moved by this modern cry for liberty. What is this
freedom for which women have been clamouring? In what tyranny are they
held other than that in which their womanhood holds them? Is the new
liberty to be found as sweated workers? Will it come even now when
women’s industrial work is being sought for and well paid? Can it ever
come from the fevered effort to live the same lives as men live and do
the same work that men do?
But this kind of view is of a most superficial sort, and one that,
comparatively speaking, is new. Before the coming of industrialism the
ideals of women were far different and were centred in the home. The
family was then firmly established on the patriarchal system.
I have just read a Russian book[70] which gives a perfect picture of the
patriarchal home. The scene is described by a child: the head of the
house has died and the new male-head comes from the death-bed. He is thus
received by the women of the house—
“Suddenly the door opened, and my father came in. He looked
thin and pale and sad. Instantly all rose and went to meet him;
even grandmother, who was very stout and could not walk without
some one supporting her, dragged herself towards him, and all
his four sisters fell down at his feet and began to ‘keen.’ It
was impossible to catch all they said and part I now forget,
but I remember the words, ‘You are our father now: be kind to
us poor orphans.’ My father with tears lifted them all up and
embraced them; when his mother advanced towards him, he bowed
to the ground before her, kissed her hands, and vowed that
he would always submit to her authority, and that no changes
would be made by him.… They then sat down to eat so heartily—my
mother did not—that I watched them with astonishment. My Aunt
Tatyana helped fish-soup out of a large tureen, and, as she
put bits of roe and liver on the plates, she begged all to do
justice to them: ‘How poor father loved the roe and the liver!’”
Now, to the self-assertive, feminist mind, imbued with industrial ideals,
this scene may make no appeal. Its peace is too quiet. Here is none of
the modern unrest, the boredom, the moving about in worlds unrealised.
But I do not think this will be noted. The one suggestion that will leap
to the thoughts is the dependent position of the women. This is true, but
it is equally true that the power of the women is far greater than it is
in any industrial home. And we find that such power is not exercised by
the young women and on account of any sexual attraction, in the way to
which we are accustomed and have come to expect, but the power is held by
the mother, whose desires through life are a law to her son. I can hardly
emphasise too strongly this power and influence of the mother at all
times when the family is firmly established. I think it must be granted
that the mother has lost her position of influence in the home wherever
industrial views of life have penetrated. She has little power over her
grown-up sons or even over her daughters. Self-assertion is also the
desire of the children; they want to break away from the mother. Perhaps
this is inevitable, and maybe it is right. It is very difficult to be
certain.
I will not dwell on this question. I would, however, ask you to keep
fixed in your attention this hesitation that has entered as a disease
into our modern consciousness. We are without purpose, and have no
absolute standard of conduct. And the result for most of us is a life
of confused aims, restless and seeking, achieving by accident what is
achieved at all.
There have been, of course, many separate causes and influences uniting
to bring this unrest, but the disorganisation of the patriarchal home,
with the change in the ideal and desires of women, has acted very
strongly as a disturbing force. We have lost, especially, that harmony in
life which woman alone is able to create.
Within the patriarchal family-group women lived a life that was complete
in itself, the home was self-contained because it included all the
elements necessary for the carrying on of a useful and healthy life.
True this home life, complete as it was in itself, was not life in the
fullest sense of living, for it lacked some of the larger elements that
only freedom of action can give. It was for women a restricted, and, in
later times, even a stunted life: in the end it came to be a parasitic
life. But for long it was a natural and satisfying life and it was always
entirely feminine, because motherhood embraced it all, inspiring every
motive and guiding every act.
What we want is the family reconstructed, with all its historic bonds of
unity and sanctity preserved and yet fitted to meet modern needs. It must
be a home where life can be lived in its fulness and its depth. It is
clear that this reconstruction is not going to be easy. Such a task must
even be held to be absurd, if we view life from the modern standpoint,
which can only be that of the doctrine of self-assertion. Where the Self
is so insistent, there can be no consciousness of duty as something fixed
and of life as being purposive, consecrated to an end, which may not be
left or taken up. And the first thing necessary is to break through the
separate aims that cause such confusion in women’s thoughts and desires.
No standard of action can be fixed until we know what we want. Separation
must arise from self-assertion. Nothing worth doing can be done until
the collective consciousness of women has found itself and regained a
unifying ideal.
Life at the moment is in a state of too violent instability for any
attempts to reconstruct the home to be of any avail, and, in any case,
it is difficult to believe that any new form of the family can in modern
times exercise the sway that the patriarchal system wielded in times gone
by. And yet some standard we must have, or the confusion in women’s lives
will go on, and all feminine idealism must perish through the very number
of its varieties.
Now, it may be that the forces which acted against the family in its
past history are acting again to-day. Communal living and group homes
have been tried already in the beginnings of civilisation. They were
developed on account of conditions of danger which threatened the
primitive family-groups, forcing them to unite with one another for
mutual protection and help.[71] To-day again the home is threatened.
Industrialism has steadily undermined its foundations, and changed the
desire of women. Industrial workers have departed far indeed from the
ideal of absolute self-dedication and service to the home that once was
the supreme conception of woman. And now a further step has been taken.
War has made necessary conditions that industrialism first taught women
to desire. For the first time in our industrial history a demand has
arisen for women’s labour as pressing and large as the supply. Hundreds
and thousands of women and girls have been called from their homes to
carry on the necessary work of the country. There are already 195,000
women employed in munition work, while 275,000 more women are engaged in
industrial occupations.[72]
Women have shown that there is hardly any work of men that they cannot
do. They are driving motor-lorries, they are working on the railways,
acting as conductors on trams and buses; they are doing the postman’s
round and carman’s deliveries; they are ploughing and sowing the
land; they are standing long hours at the mechanic’s lathe. Women are
everywhere.
And day by day the country is calling for more, and yet more women
workers. They are wanted on the land, they are wanted in the factories,
they are wanted in the shops, in offices, in schools, they are wanted in
every kind of industry. Women will answer the call; they will take the
places of those who have gone to fight, for their patriotism is as strong
as the patriotism of men. That women should work to-day is unavoidable:
it is war.
Yet necessary as this working of women is for the duration of war, it is
equally necessary that the conditions of their labour should be regulated
to meet the special needs of their feminine constitution. In all cases
where women are doing men’s work they should work shorter hours, have
longer rests and more holidays. Do we understand what the results of
overwork may be? It is racial suicide to allow adolescent girls and young
women, who are, or who will be, mothers, to do work which may break into
or overstrain their reserve strength, using up now what ought to be given
to the next generation. A nation’s wealth and future depend directly on
the health and nerve reserve of its women. It is deplorable that these
forces of life are being used so wastefully. I know well that in the
confusion of the times it is not easy to get public attention for the
needs of women workers. Yet the importance of this matter is such that
delay may be disastrous.
A further consideration arises, and one, too, that is vital. After the
war, what will happen? Peace is the normal state of the world and we
shall return to it—some day. Are these conditions of continuous work for
women to go on then? There is much to cause grave fear. Women—and I have
spoken to many of them on the subject—seem to regard this taking on of
men’s work, not as a temporary thing forced on them by the necessities
of war, but as the gaining of a goal for which for long they have been
fighting.
Here is some of the talk that I have heard at women’s meetings or read
in recent articles by feminist writers: “New fields of action lie open
to women on all sides, the opportunities are coloured with splendid
possibilities”; or “The need for workers is woman’s opportunity, and as
such she recognises and will use it.” Again, “The path lies open and
clear before women, their hour has come to establish a rooted and solid
foundation for the woman worker of the future.” And yet again, “Woman has
done more than any man could have imagined to win this war. At the same
time she has won a new station for herself.”
Now to me all such talk is the visible sign of the deplorable failure in
women’s lives. Feminists tell me that the breaking up of the individual
home with the institutional rearing of children will liberate women.
By this plan of reform they will be free, able to have children and
also to devote themselves to gainful work. They will gain the economic
independence for which they are so loudly crying. Motherhood will be but
a short interruption in the professional or industrial career—mother-care
a superstition of the past.
What can I say to show how misplaced and how mischievous is the outlook
of those who thus turn away from the long experience of the past? It is
not so that the problems of the future can be solved. The past gives
us proof enough that woman’s creation, the home, has been her great
contribution to civilisation. No transitory needs or seeming personal
gains can counterbalance the loss that must come to us as a people
from woman’s neglect of positive duties. There has been neglect under
industrial conditions. Escape was impossible. And in our homes there
has been urgent need for reform. Here I am in agreement with those who
discredit the value of the home. I, too, am certain that our family and
home life, in many directions, have been as bad as they could be. A
radical change is needed, but I hope it will be in the opposite direction
from the plan of institutional upbringing of the children, and the
substitution of the communal dwelling-house for the individual home.
I know well, as every woman must know, that the creating of the right
kind of home is no easy task, but one that demands the continuous
presence of the mother, with an unceasing giving of herself in body and
in soul.
And the trouble is that under industrial ideals of restless discontent
and of pulling down the barriers, the majority of women have become more
and more unfitted for efficient home-making. Of one fact I am certain.
Things cannot go on as before. Here is the reason. The supervision of
the home and the maintenance of any true form of family life is not
compatible with the regular outside occupation of married women. Such a
duplication of a woman’s energies can be undertaken only by her using
for herself and her work the reserve of physical, mental, and spiritual
energy that should be stored and given to her children. To deny this is
foolishness. Are women possessed of inexhaustible stores of energy? Do
the ordinary rules of arithmetic and subtraction not hold good in their
case? It would seem so. For women are maintaining that to divert so large
a proportion of their energies in fresh directions will not involve any
diminution of the strength available for their own affairs. Women are
oddly blind.
Yet modern experience makes it daily more evident that to do any
work well requires the employment of one’s whole time with a complete
concentration of attention. Now the woman is rare who can put the best of
herself both into professional work and into her home. One or other must
suffer, and since the standard required in the outside work is fixed and
cannot, as a rule, be lowered, if the position is to be retained, it is
the home that is certain to suffer. A wife’s and a mother’s duties cannot
be accomplished in stray hours snatched from professional work. I speak
from my own experience. I know that the attempt to do this results too
often in failure, together with an intolerable overstrain.
The case is much worse with the industrial worker, the conditions of
whose existence make any kind of home life impossible. What, then, is
the remedy? The answer that will be given by many is the raising of
women’s wages to the same level as the wages of men and the improving
of the conditions of labour. This will do something, but it will not
do what I want. Conditions that at bottom are continuously wrong need
revolutionising, not patching up. The change must be a different one, if
the ideal of the home for which I am pleading is to be saved. There is
one way out, and only one. The socially wasteful, racially suicidal, and
body and soul withering consequences of the working of mothers outside
the home must cease.
I know well the difficulties. Self-centred professional women, worldly
women who have never found their souls, cultured intellectuals chasing
the new, dreamers who think to reform society—all these and many other
women are preaching the doctrine that the economic independence of woman
is essential for her own well-being and equality with men. This, as I
believe, is a profound mistake that is dependent on industrial values.
But on this question I have spoken already, and I shall speak again in a
later chapter.
Let us clear our thoughts absolutely, or at least as far as we humanly
can, from personal standards of value. The home is not a bygone
contrivance to be given up as useless in the march of humanity. Each home
that is established in love will burn in its children an ineradicable
impression that no folly from those who have missed its protection will
be strong enough to destroy.
The demand that women shall prepare for competition with men at all
costs will fall into foolishness under wiser conditions of life. This
must surely be. For women’s qualities and capacities are different
from those of men. What is paramount in woman is secondary in man; her
dominant qualities are not the same as his, but different. And by using
her subordinate qualities, as she must do, in competition with man,
she is up against the dominant qualities in him and will be beaten by
him: on the other hand, if woman develops her dominant qualities with a
wise education in youth and afterwards by training herself in the right
performance of her own work, she cannot fail increasingly to occupy a
position of power. And this is only another way of saying that woman can
achieve her highest position only as a woman. As a worker she has at all
times and in all races occupied a secondary place, as woman she is the
strongest force in life. We cannot escape from nature, and no matter how
seemingly urgent it is for women to train themselves to act like men on
account of prevailing economic conditions, it is always wrong at the
bottom to yield to those conditions: the results will not fail to bring
evil in the future.
Let us know where we are going.
War conditions have rushed women forward at a racing speed on the paths
which their desire previously had made them seek. If after the coming of
peace the desire of women is not turned back to family duties and the
home, if it still seems better and happier to them to do men’s work than
to do their own—then the individual home may be swallowed up and replaced
by some form of communal living. This may be necessary; it can never be
an ideal.
And further, let us remember that it will not be a step forward in
progress; rather will it be a sign of failure, a step made necessary by
the confusion and conflicts of our industrial civilisation. We delude
ourselves for want of knowledge when we think that we are thus advancing
to something that is new. The long houses of Iroquois Indians, the joint
tenement houses of the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico and Arizona, and
the village communities common among the Panang Highlanders of Sumatra
are a few instances of the many early experiments in communistic life.
Even Garden Suburbs have been tried by the Creek Indians of Georgia,
where the natives live together in groups of associated dwellings.[73]
Did I not tell you that many of the reforms we are seeking in the belief
that they are new discoveries, giving proof of our progress, are really
worn-out forms that are as old as mankind? They are even older. I would
recall the curious experiments in co-operative child-rearing made by the
Adélie penguins, noted in Chapter V. These pre-human parents would seem
to be troubled with a strongly developed egoism. Craving liberty for
play, they pool their families in what I may perhaps call “the primordial
co-operative nursery scheme”—a plan of child-rearing much advocated by
advanced feminists. Among the penguins the results are not satisfactory.
True, the penguin mothers have liberty to play with the penguin fathers,
but the price thereby paid is an excessively high mortality among the
young birds.[74]
I recognise that co-operative nurseries and proposals for freeing mothers
to work outside the home have interest for some women, and consequently
have their use: they will help, no doubt, those women who while desiring
and physically fit to bear children, yet have no capacity or wish to care
for them. There are many such women to-day. I regard this as a great evil.
It has been left to modern intellectual women to fail utterly to
understand the primary value of the home. Its first service is to immerse
the child in a _protective environment of its own_. I wish to emphasise
these five concluding words. They will make clearer why I believe so
firmly in the patriarchal individual family. Each child needs to feel in
personal connection with its surroundings—that what is nearest to him
belongs to him and is his own. And this connection can be established
only by love, and maintained by a lasting tradition of duty on the part
of both the parents bound to each other in service to the child.
It is often objected that children are happier and healthier away from
their parents, and that no conditions could possibly be worse than those
which exist in countless homes. I know this. But it is no indictment
against the home as an institution, rather it is an indictment of the
kind of home and of the mother and the father.
I can hardly express too strongly my own want of faith in the expert
child-trainer. I have found always that they regard the child, mainly, if
not entirely, as something to be improved and instructed on a definite
plan. The expert is never human, and the child has need of all the
human element that it can get. It has absolute need of a mother and of
a father. And it is impossible to be parents in the complete and right
sense apart from the individual home. All experience shows us that the
home, with its sympathetic relationships of mutual affection, cannot be
replaced. We must insist on conditions of society that will make home
life possible. The child has to accept the arrangements we make as a
sacred thing, that is why this question is of such immense importance. If
the matter could be fixed by the will of children, I should have no fear.
The child has not lost the true values of life.
We have grown careless of the home under the blighting effects of
industrialism. And the problem of the child is much more difficult
in the case of modern mothers, who have few children and no strong
traditions—no fixed standard of child training and of home life. Each
mother is continually making personal experiments, a course of conduct
that is not only harmful to the individual child, but one that must lead
to collective confusion. Under such conditions excessive ardour may be as
dangerous as neglect. One of the most unfortunate children I have known
was an idolised only child with most conscientious modern parents, who
kept a record in many large volumes of its every act and every saying.
This child was trained out of childhood. There may be too much care and
attention given by the parents as well as too little.
Motherhood in theory much praised, poetised, and hailed as a wonderful
thing, often in actual expression is the strongest deterrent influence
in the life of the child. The mother cannot realise the young life that
has come from her life apart from herself. The child is too near to her.
And it follows from this that her instinct and her love are not primarily
concerned with the child, rather she is interested in it chiefly as its
mother, that is, the birth-giver and possessor of the child. Most mothers
bind their children to them much too closely with an egoistic love which
is the most poisonous form of selfishness. Therefore the mother often is
the real enemy in the home, the most self-centred and conservative member.
There are, of course, exceptional mothers who have the knowledge and the
will to avoid such danger; mothers who as need arises are strong enough
even to push their children from them at any personal cost; who insist
on the freedom of each child, and see it has the opportunity to grow up
harmoniously, unhampered and unspoilt, and according to its own nature.
But such wise mothers to-day are few. And the average mother is like the
hen with her brood, for ever fretting about her chicks if they venture
away from her. In such conduct there is a terrible infringement of the
personal rights of the child. Indeed, the mother too often enslaves with
kindness, a bondage harder to bear and even more difficult to escape from
than the brutal fist of a father.
Now, this mother-egoism will not be changed easily. It is a quality that
reaches far back before human parenthood, and is instinctive and not
conscious. You will recall that I referred to this in Chapter VI,[75]
where I tried to find an explanation. We saw then the manner in which
the maternal instinct was fixed and strengthened. The mother became
chief parent, as soon as the early stages of mother-care were changed
from an external to an internal process. This strengthened immeasurably
the relation of the mother to the offspring, who now became an extension
of her life. Before, the mother’s relation to the family was not very
different from the relation of the father, and was dependent on parental
sacrifice and the amount of care bestowed. And one result of the change
was a deepening of egoism—of the self-feeling, if I may so call it—in
the mother’s love, a quality which has a much deeper significance that
is commonly recognised. In my opinion it is stronger in the love of
the mother than it ever is in the love of the father. Mother-love is
not quite the unselfish thing we have been accustomed to believe. Even
the care which is bestowed so lavishly upon the child is often but the
outward sign of a self-fussing anxiety, and serves no true purpose, but
is a hindrance to the child’s health and happiness.
I would emphasise this difference between the two parents, a difference
which may be marked in the father’s attitude to and affection for the
child. It seems to me to be of great importance. It is the popular
view among women who are too idle to think—it saves them the trouble
of detecting their own faults—that all good women have an instinctive
understanding of a child and of its needs. This is very far from being
true. And, indeed, there are good grounds for believing—though I own I do
not like to acknowledge it—that the father’s guidance and sympathy are of
even greater importance to the spiritual well-being and happiness of the
child than the excessive care and too-absorbing love of the mother.
Here, then, is yet another reason why we must regard with profound
mistrust the modern movement to break away from the tried and fixed
institution of the patriarchal home. We have seen again and again in our
examination of the past history of parenthood, that wherever the father
has been cut off from the family and the duties in caring for the young,
a deterioration has followed. The development of the individual family
is most intimately connected with patriarchy. It was under this system
that the father’s position in the family and his right to his children
were established. Nature sees to it that the tie between the mother and
the child cannot be set aside; the case is different with the father, and
his position in the family has to be made secure in another manner. We
need to remember the degradation of fatherhood which must be connected
with any matriarchal programme. And my own faith in the patriarchal
family-group and the individual home, a faith that has only recently been
fixed and made strong, is based upon this: I am convinced that it is the
natural and, indeed, the only way of securing the loving care of both
parents for the upbringing of the children.
In these days of destruction and of the pulling down of barriers, the
home is exposed to peculiar danger. Much, incalculably much, depends
on women’s attitude. The maternal instinct, or what I would call the
mother-sense, has surely lost in quality. When I think about this, I feel
as if I would like to found an order for motherhood. Everything to be
truly done must become a religion. And motherhood should have its ritual
no less than faith. There is not a single act of duty in the home and in
care given to the child which the mother may not make into a spiritual
exercise of her soul. The child should be the mother’s creation. She is
the potter with the power to mould the clay, and she should know the
rapture of the artist. I want to bring back to motherhood the quality it
has lost.
The home awaits a fresh inspiration to turn back and hold the desire of
women. We have to find again the right way. If we get our ideal fixed, it
will be translated later into the acts of our life.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER IX
MONOGAMOUS MARRIAGE AND WOMAN
The false view of woman’s being instinctively monogamous—The
Adam and Eve myth and what it symbolises—Woman’s inevitable
power over man—The beginnings of marriage—The maternal form—The
personal relationship in marriage dependent on patriarchy—Its
advantages in fixing the father to the family and the service
of the home—Polygamy the most ancient form of marriage under
father-right—Polygamy tends to disappear as social life
develops—Monogamy the permanent form of marriage—Its supreme
advantage over all other marriage forms—Our preference for
monogamy goes beyond laws and religion—It is the best way
we have yet found of men and women living together—The
stupidity of profligacy—False intellectual views of life and
of right and wrong—The sexually masterful lover—Misuse of the
word love—The function of passion—Women regard love from a
standpoint of unreality—The Christian view of marriage too
materialistic and too ascetic—How this has reacted disastrously
on marriage—The immense disturbing power of the sex emotions—We
need the limiting safeguards of legal marriage—The ideal of
faithfulness—The refixing of moral standards.