INSTITUTIONAL MARRIAGE AND ITS ECONOMIC ASPECTS
I
Marriage, by a strictly technical definition, is a natural habit; that
is to say, it is a relationship proceeding out of the common instinct
of male and female to mate, and to remain together until after the
birth of one or more children.[10] Organized society, on the other
hand, always makes it a civil institution, and sometimes a religious
institution. So long as man remained in the natural state, roaming
about in search of his food as do the apes today, it may be supposed
that marriage was based on personal preference and involved only
the selective disposition of the individual man and woman and their
common concern for the safety of their offspring. But as advancing
civilization enabled mankind more easily to obtain and augment its
food-supply, and consequently to secure greater safety and also to
satisfy its gregarious instinct by living in numerous communities, the
habit of marriage underwent a process of sanction and regulation by
the group, and was thus transformed into a civil institution. While
society remains ethnical, the family exercises supervision over the
sexual relations of its members, but always subject to the approval or
disapproval of the larger group--the tribe or clan. When the political
State emerges, this function continues to be exercised by the family,
but it is subject to sanction by the State and is gradually absorbed by
it. Yet even where the State has usurped almost all the prerogatives of
the family, custom continues to give powerful sanction to interference
in marriage both by relatives and by the community.
Where the tribal religion takes on the form of ancestor-worship,
or where much importance is attached to burial-rites, marriage and
reproduction take on a religious significance. “As the dead,” says Dr.
Elsie Clews Parsons, “are dependent on the living for the performance
of their funeral rites and sacrificial observances, marriage itself as
well as marriage according to prescribed conditions, child-begetting
and bearing, become religious duties. Marriage ceremonial not
infrequently takes on a religious character. Infanticide, abortion,
celibacy other than celibacy of a sacerdotal character, and adultery,
become sins. The punishment of the adulteress is particularly severe,
although in some cases her value as property may guarantee her against
punishment by death.”[11]
Thus there may be, and in most civilized societies there is, a fourfold
interference in marriage: interference by the family, by the community,
by the State, and by the Church. An old Russian song had it that
marriages were contracted
By the will of God,
By decree of the Czar,
By order of the Master,
By decision of the community,
--with not a word about the two persons immediately concerned. Nor is
this strange, for marriage is not generally conceived of among either
primitive or highly civilized peoples as a personal relationship. It
is an economic arrangement, an alliance between families, a means for
getting children. To allow so unruly a passion as love to figure in
the selection of a mate, is an irregularity which may under certain
circumstances be tolerated, but one which is nevertheless likely to
be regarded with extreme disapproval. As individualism makes progress
against group-tyranny, the preliminaries and the actual contracting of
marriage become less the affair of God, the State, the family and the
community, and more the affair of the two people chiefly interested;
but once contracted, the marriage can hardly be said, even in the most
civilized community, to be free of considerable regulation by these
four influences. The time which Spencer foresaw, when “the union by
affection will be held of primary moment and the union by law as of
secondary moment,” has by no means arrived. If the married couple be
Roman Catholics, for example, they may not free themselves from an
unhappy marriage without paying the penalty of excommunication; and
if they live in a State dominated by the Catholic Church, they may be
legally estopped from freeing themselves at all. Nor may they, save by
continence, limit the number of their offspring without risking the
same penalty. If they are Episcopalians or Lutherans they may divorce
only on the ground of adultery, and the guilty party is forbidden to
remarry. In communities where the influence of other Protestant sects
predominates, and where, therefore, divorce and remarriage are not
formally forbidden by the Church, the pressure of public opinion may
yet operate to prevent them. The State not only prescribes the form
that marriage shall take, but it may also either prohibit divorce--as
in South Carolina, for example--or forbid it save in accordance with
such regulations as it sees fit to make; and these regulations are
not only of a kind that make divorce prohibitive to the poor, but
they are often so humiliating as to constitute an effective barrier
to the dissolution of unhappy unions. The State of New York offers an
excellent illustration. Adultery is the only ground upon which divorce
is allowed, and even then it may be refused if the action is taken by
mutual consent. The couple who wish to be divorced must therefore,
if there be no legal cause, go through the demoralizing business of
making a case, which means that one or the other must provide at least
the appearance of “misconduct”; and even then they are in danger of
being found in collusion. But suppose one party to be giving legal
ground; then the other party, in order to get proof, is obliged to
resort to the lowest kind of espionage. Such disreputable methods,
however much they be in keeping with the nature and practices of
the State, are hardly becoming to civilized society, and civilized
persons are indisposed towards them. Their general effect is therefore
to discourage application for divorce in New York and encourage it
elsewhere.
It is significant of the unspiritual estimate generally put upon
marriage, that incompatibility is rarely allowed as a legal ground
of divorce. Violation of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies;
pre-nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; impotence; cruelty;
desertion; failure of support; insanity; all of these or some of
them are the grounds generally recognized where divorce is allowed
at all. This is to say that society demands a specific grievance of
one party against the other, a grievance having physical or economic
consequences, as a prerequisite to freedom from the marriage-bond.
The fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is seldom taken
into account. Yet there is no difficulty about which less can be
done. Infidelity may be forgiven and in time forgotten; the deserter
may return; the delinquent may be persuaded to support his family;
the insane person may recover; even impotence may be cured. But if
two people are out of spiritual correspondence, if they are not at
ease in one another’s society, there is nothing to be done about it.
“Anything,” says Turgenev, “may be smoothed over, memories of even
the most tragic domestic incidents gradually lose their strength and
bitterness; but if once a sense of being ill at ease installs itself
between two closely united persons, it can never be dislodged.” Modern
society is slowly, very slowly, coming into the wisdom which prompted
this observation. The gradual liberalization of the divorce-laws
which our moralists regard as a symptom of modern disrespect for the
sacredness of marriage, is in fact a symptom of a directly opposite
tendency--the tendency to place marriage on a higher spiritual plane
than it has hitherto occupied.
The State assumes the right either to allow artificial limitation of
offspring or to make it a crime; and it exercises this assumption
according to its need for citizens[12] or the complexion of its
religious establishment. It also fixes the relative status and
rights of the two parties. In several American States, for instance,
a married woman is incompetent to make contracts or to fix her legal
residence. The Virginia law recognizes the primary right of the father
to the custody of the child, yet it makes the mother criminally
liable for the support of children. On the other hand, the husband is
everywhere required by law to support his wife. Such laws, of course,
like most laws, are felt only when the individual comes into conflict
with them. The State does not interfere in many cases where married
couples subvert its regulations--for example, the law which entitles
the husband to his wife’s services in the home and permits him to
control her right to work outside the home, does not become binding
save in cases where the husband sees fit to invoke it. As a rule the
State forbids fornication and adultery.[13] In case of separation and
divorce, if the parties disagree concerning financial arrangements or
the custody of children, it exercises the right to arbitrate these
matters.
The sanctions of interference by the family, save in the contracting of
marriage by minors, are at present those of custom, affection, and (in
so far as it exists and may be made effective) economic power. When two
persons have decided to marry, for instance, it remains quite generally
customary for the man to go through the formality of asking the woman’s
nearest male relation for her hand. This is of course a survival from
the period when a woman’s male guardian had actual power to prevent her
marrying without his consent. The influence of affection is too obvious
to require illustration; it is the subtlest and most powerful sanction
of family interference. Economic power is perhaps most commonly used
to prevent or compel the contracting of marriage. It may make itself
felt, where parents or other relatives are well-to-do, in threats of
disinheritance if prospective heirs undertake to make marriages which
are displeasing to them. A striking instance of the use of this power
is the will of the late Jay Gould, which required each of his children
to obtain consent of the others before marrying. It is not uncommon for
legators to stipulate that legatees shall or shall not marry before a
certain age under penalty of losing their inheritance.
These influences do not always, of course, take the same direction.
At present, for example, artificial limitation of offspring receives
irregular but effective community-sanction in face of opposition by
Church and State. Or again, public opinion almost universally condemns
the idea that a father may, by his will, remove his children from
the custody of their mother, although the State, as in Maryland and
Delaware, may sanction such an act. But, however much they may check
one another, these influences are all constantly operating to restrict
and regulate marriage away from its original intention as a purely
personal relationship, and to keep it in the groove of economic and
social institutionalism. The reasons for this are to be found in the
vestigiary fear of sex, love of power, love of the habitual, religious
superstition, and above all in the notion that the major interests of
the group are essentially opposed to those of the individual and are
more important than his. A combination of two of these motives has
recently come under my own observation in the case of a young woman
whose parents can not forgive her for having divorced a man whom she
did not love and married a man whom she did. They were accustomed
to their first son-in-law, and resent the necessity of adjusting
themselves to the idea of having a new one. Moreover, they feel that
their daughter should have spared them the “disgrace” of a divorce. The
fact that she was unhappy in her first marriage and is happy in her
second seems to have little weight with them. They did their best to
prevent her second marriage and are at present exerting every effort to
make it unsuccessful. It is needless to emphasize the fact that this
order of interference can not be expected to disappear while the notion
persists that the actions of one adult member of a family or group can
possibly reflect credit or discredit upon all the other members.
II
If one be an apologist for the present economic and social order,
there is little fault to be found with this endless and manifold
regulation of the most intimate concern of the individual, save that it
is not as effective as it once was. Society, we are being constantly
reminded, is founded in the family. No one, I think, will quarrel
with this statement, particularly at this stage of the world’s rule
by the exploiting State. Marriage is, to quote Dr. E. C. Parsons, “an
incomparable protection of society--as society has been constituted”;
and this for a reason which Dr. Parsons did not mention. Nor has the
reason been stated by anyone else, so far as I am aware, although the
fact is emphasized often enough. It is emphasized, however, largely
in the spirit of a contemporary French writer who declares that “an
institution upon which society[14] is based should not be represented
to society as an instrument of torture, a barbarous apparatus. We know,
on the contrary that this institution is good, and that it would be
impossible to conceive of a better one upon which to base our customs.”
Well, but suppose it _is_ an instrument of torture, or at least that we
have come to find it highly unsatisfactory; must we, in spite of the
fact, resolve to think it good because society is based upon it? Ought
we not, rather, to examine the order of society that institutionalized
marriage helps to perpetuate, in order to determine whether it is worth
preserving at the cost of preserving also an institution which has
become “an instrument of torture”?
The reason why marriage is “an incomparable protection to society”
lies in the fact that the continuance of the power of the exploiting
State depends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited subjects;
and nothing renders the subject more helpless against the dominance
of the State than marriage. For monopoly, under the protection of the
State, has rendered the support of a family extremely difficult, by
closing free access of labour to natural resources and thus enabling
the constant maintenance of a labour-surplus. Where there is little
or no land not legally occupied, access to the soil is impossible
save on terms that render it, if not downright prohibitive, at least
unprofitable. The breadwinner who has neither land nor capital is
thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market overcrowded by
applicants for work who are in exactly his position: they are shut out
from opportunity to work for themselves, and obliged to accept such
employment as they can get at a wage determined not by their capacity
to produce, but by the number of their competitors. Not only is the
wage-earner thus obliged to content himself with a small share of what
his labour produces; he is forced to pay out of that share further
tribute to monopoly in most of the things he buys. For shelter, for the
products of the soil and mines, he pays tribute to the monopolist of
land and natural resources; for industrial products, in most countries,
he pays to the monopoly created by high tariffs. Or he may have to pay
to both, as in the case of the purchaser of steel products.
Such disadvantages tend not only to keep wages near the
subsistence-level, but to keep opinions orthodox--or if not orthodox,
unexpressed. For the wage-earner gets his living on sufferance: while
he continues to please his employer he may earn a living, however
inadequate, for himself and family; but if he show signs of discontent
with the established order, by which his employer benefits or thinks
he benefits, he is likely to find himself supplanted by some other
worker whose need makes him more willing to conform, in appearance
at least. There are even conditions under which his mere unorthodoxy
may bring him to jail, in thirty-four States of this enlightened
Republic. There are exceptional cases, of course, where his skill
or special training makes him a virtual monopolist in his line and
thus renders him indispensable, like a certain well-known professor
who continues to hold his position in spite of his avowed economic
unorthodoxy simply because there is no one else who can fill it. But
it may be perceived at once that the average wage-earner with a family
to support will be under much greater pressure to dissemble than
will the worker who has no family; for where the single worker risks
privation for himself alone, the married worker takes this risk for
his family as well. Nor does economic pressure operate only towards
the appearance of conformity; it operates towards actual conformity,
for the person who has children to rear and educate will be strongly
impelled towards conservatism by his situation. If he can get along at
all under the present order, the mere _vis inertiae_ will incline him
to fear for the sake of his family the economic dislocation attendant
upon any revolutionary change, and to choose rather to keep the ills
he has.[15] Moreover, the unnatural situation popularly called the
“labour-problem,” brought about through exclusion from the land, tends
to create the psychology of the wage-slave: it tends to make people
regard the opportunity to earn one’s living not as a natural right, but
as something that one receives as a boon from one’s employer, and hence
to accept the idea that an employer may be justified in dictating to
his employees in matters of conduct and opinion.
Thus the economic conditions brought about by the State operate to make
marriage the State’s strongest bulwark; and those who believe that the
preservation of the State, or of a particular form of it, is a sacred
duty--their number among its victims is legion--are quite logical in
taking alarm at the increasing unwillingness of men and women to
marry, or if they do marry, to have children. They are logical not only
because marriage and children make for endurance of established abuses,
but because, as I have already remarked, it is important for the State
to have as many subjects as possible, to keep up a labour-surplus at
home and to fight for the interests of its privileged class abroad;
that is, so long as industry is able to meet the exactions of monopoly
and still pay interest and wages. Where monopoly has reduced interest
and wages to the vanishing-point, the State can no longer be said
to be a going concern; its breakdown is then only a matter of time.
This point has been reached in England, and hence the condition of
which I have spoken: a numerous population is no longer desirable,
for as unemployed they are a burden on the State and a menace to its
existence. But as long as the State is a going concern, the Spartan
rule is that best suited to its interests: obligatory marriage, and
unlimited reproduction.
In modern civilization, however, in spite of the enormous power of
the State, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to
enforce this rule. The State, with all its power, can not force its
subjects to obey any law which they do not really want to obey--or
perhaps I should say, which they want not to obey; and the growth of
individualism has created a general distaste for any effort on the part
of government to meddle directly in the affairs of citizens. Attempts
to do so are likely to bring humiliation on the Government through
its inability to enforce them, and to generate in the population a
salutary disrespect for law; as the attempt to enforce the fourteenth
and eighteenth Amendments has done in this country. With the decline
of the patriarchal system, the contracting of marriage if not the
status of marriage, is coming to be regarded as the exclusive concern
of the individual. Many who would not for a moment tolerate compulsory
marriage will tolerate a humiliating regulation of marriage; they
will allow the State to make of marriage a life-long bondage, but
they reserve the right to refuse to enter into bondage. The State may
penalize celibacy by levying a special tax on unmarried persons; but it
can no longer force people to abandon it.
Indeed, one may say without overmuch exaggeration that at present
the preservation of marriage as an institution is almost solely due
to its tenacity as an instinctive habit. For while marriage is the
strongest bulwark of the State, the economic order for the sake of
which the State exists tends nevertheless to discourage marriage
because it progressively concentrates wealth in a few hands, and thus
deprives the great mass of people of adequate means to rear and educate
families. This condition is largely responsible for the fact that
celibacy, illegitimacy and prostitution are on the increase in every
civilized country; and that the average age at which marriage takes
place tends steadily to become higher, as it takes longer to get into
an economic position which makes possible the support of a family. In
this connexion, Katharine Anthony’s statement that factory-girls and
heiresses are the country’s youngest brides is significant. Neither
the heiress nor the factory-girl has anything to gain by waiting: the
heiress already has economic security and the factory-girl never will
have it, for she and her husband--if she marries in her own class--will
always be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in the labour-market.
It should also be remarked that among the great middle class the
standard of education for both sexes, but more particularly for women,
is higher than among the very rich and the very poor; and this tends
to advance the average age for marriage.
It tends as well to make children a heavy burden on the parents. Among
primitive peoples, where difficulty in supporting a family is virtually
unknown, where adjustment to the environment offers no complexities and
childhood is therefore not so prolonged, and where, moreover, children
through their labour become an economic asset, they are desirable.[16]
But in a civilized society where the parental sense of responsibility
has developed to the point where the child is reared for its own sake,
where adaptation to the environment is a complex and lengthy process
involving expensive education and prolonged dependence of the child
upon the parents, and where the difficulty of getting a start in life
tends also to lengthen the period of dependence; in such a society
it is natural that the parental sense of responsibility should find
expression in an artificial limitation of offspring to the number that
the circumstances of the parents will enable them to educate properly.
There is a further step that this feeling can suggest in these days of
excessive economic exploitation and ruinous wars; that is, refusal to
reproduce at all: and this step an increasing number of married people
are taking, to the great distress of self-appointed guardians of our
customs and morals.
Failure to perceive the decisive importance of the connexion between
the economic condition of the parents and the proper equipment
of children for making their way in life often leads to absurd
contradictions; as for example in that staunch friend of childhood,
the late Ellen Key. No one is more insistent than this writer upon
the importance of rearing the child for its own good; yet she gravely
declares that “from the point of view of the nation, always from
that of the children, and most frequently from that of the parents,
the normal condition must be, that the number of children shall not
fall short of three or four.” Miss Key’s primary failure is one that
must be judged with great severity because it is both fundamental
and typical--it pervades and vitiates the whole body of feminist
literature. It is a failure in intellectual seriousness. Miss Key
is fully aware of a persistent economic dislocation bearing on her
thesis--“At present there is a shortage of labour for those willing
to work, of food for the hungry, of educational advantages for those
thirsting for knowledge, of nursing for the sick, of care for the
children. The circumstances of the majority are now such as to produce,
directly or indirectly, crime, drunkenness, insanity, consumption,
or sexual diseases in large sections of the population.” Again, “The
struggle for daily bread, the cares of livelihood ... are now the
stamp of public as well as private life.... Married people have no
time to cultivate their feelings for one another.... Through the cares
of livelihood parents have no time to live with their children, to
study them in order to be able really to educate them.”[17] One must
suspect a peculiar incapacity for logic in the writer who recognizes
such conditions and still recommends three or four children as being
the minimum number that people should have who wish to do their duty by
their country, their children and themselves. Miss Key has been content
to shirk inquiry into the fundamental cause of these conditions, and
hence the means she recommends for their cure are silly and feeble.
An international universal organization which is to regulate all
competition and all co-operation; trade-unionism, the abolition of
inheritances; the exercise of “collective motherliness” in public
affairs; these are some of the means she offers for the regeneration of
society. Probably never since the remark attributed to Marie Antoinette
that if the starving populace could not get bread they should eat cake,
has ineptitude gone further. If Miss Key’s call to duty were brought
to the attention of the well-to-do married couple of the city of New
York whose means are sufficient to permit them to occupy an apartment
of, let us say, two or three or four rooms, often without kitchen, they
might agree with her in principle; but they would probably not attempt
to bring up three or four children in such straitened surroundings and
to educate them over a long span of years, for a very doubtful future.
If this example seem special and far-fetched, I would remind my readers
that over fifty per cent of people in this country are urban dwellers,
and that the vast majority of them are worse off for dwelling space,
not better, than the hypothetical couple I have cited.
It is, of course, among those who are worse off that children are
most numerous. Ignorance and religious scruples--for the Church is
strongest among the ignorant because of their ignorance--combine to
produce large families among the class that can least afford them. For
civilization, although it denies these people most things, grants them
too great a fecundity. Among primitive peoples fecundity is decreased
by various causes, such as excessively hard work, childbearing at a
too early age, and prolonged lactation during which continence is
often the rule. The average number of children borne by a savage
does not often exceed five or six, whereas the civilized woman may
bear eighteen or twenty, and it is not at all exceptional for the
woman of our slums to bear ten or twelve. Among west-side women of
New York whom Katherine Anthony questioned concerning frequency of
pregnancies, one reported fifteen in nineteen years, another ten in
twelve years, and another six in nine years. Obviously, then, when
eugenists and moralists deplore what they term the modern tendency to
race-suicide, they refer to the educated classes. The moralist argues
from prepossession and may be dismissed from consideration; but the
eugenist has scientific pretensions which are not without a certain
degree of validity and can therefore not be lightly passed over. So
long as he argues for improvement in the quality of the race through
the substitution of intelligence for blind instinct in propagation, he
is on solid ground: no one unprepossessed by the sentimentalism which
regards legitimate children, however untoward be the circumstances
of their birth and breeding, as a direct visitation from God, can
deny that voluntary and intelligent attention to the quality of
offspring offers better prospects for civilization than hit-or-miss
quantity-production. The eugenist deplores the fact that at present
this exercise of intelligence is confined to the comparatively small
class of the educated and well-to-do, and that therefore the birth-rate
among that class is all too small to offset the unchecked propagation
of the ignorant and unfit. This is unfortunately true; and it suggests
the obvious question: Why is there in every modern State so large
a class of ignorant and unfit persons as to constitute a menace to
the vitality of that State? If it is solely because the unfit are
allowed to propagate unchecked, then those eugenists who advocate
the sterilization of paupers and imbeciles and the encouragement of
propagation among the intelligent classes by an elaborate system of
State subsidy, may be listened to with respect if not with perfect
faith in the practicability of their proposals. But how about that
large mass of the physically and mentally normal who live at the
subsistence-level, and whose progeny, if economic pressure tighten
a little, are likely to be forced down into the class of underfed
beings, dulled and brutalized by poverty, from whose ranks our paupers,
imbeciles and criminals are largely recruited? To ignore the existence
of this perennial source of unfitness is levity. To recognize it, and
to assume that it results from over-propagation is to assume at the
same time that the earth’s population is too numerous for comfortable
subsistence on the amount of cultivable land in existence. If this
disproportion be real, the only hope lies in persuading this class to
limit its offspring voluntarily to the number that the earth’s surface
will comfortably support. If it be only an apparent disproportion
due to an artificial shortage of land created by monopoly, then
the eugenist’s program amounts simply to a recommendation that the
population be somehow restricted to the number that can get subsistence
on the terms of the monopolist. Henry George has conclusively disproved
the validity of the Malthusian theory which underlies the assumption
of over-population, while Oppenheimer’s figures show that if land
were freely available for use, the earth’s present population might
easily be supported on one-third of its arable surface.[18] Here,
really, is the most convincing answer to the standard arguments for
birth-control; yet so far as I know, the opponents of birth-control
have never done much with it, whether out of ignorance or because of
the profound economic readjustments that it implies. The eugenist,
too, generally displays a constitutional aversion to attacking the
problem of unfitness at the right end--which is, to inquire, first of
all, why it exists. Hence the ineptitude of his proposals for social
betterment: they would involve much unwieldy governmental machinery and
considerably more intelligence than any State has ever displayed in
dealing with social questions; and they would attack only the results
of our social ills, leaving the causes freely operative.[19]
While those causes continue to operate, the support of a family, save
in the comparatively small class of wealthy people, will be more or
less of a burden. At present, this burden bears most heavily upon the
middle-class man and the lower-class woman. Meretricious standards of
respectability, among them the idea that a married woman must not work
outside her home even when she is childless, tend to make marriage
from the outset a burden on the man of the middle class. For it must
be remembered that since the so-called feminine occupations have been
taken out of the home, a man no longer gains an economic asset in
taking unto himself a wife. Rather, he assumes a liability. This is
especially true among the middle classes, where social standing has
come to be gauged to some extent by the degree in which wives are
economically unproductive. It is a commonplace in this country that
women form the leisure class; and this leisure class of women, like
leisured classes everywhere, has its leisure at the expense of other
people, who in this case are the husbands. Moreover, it is among the
middle classes that the standards of education are highest and the
rearing of children therefore most expensive; and this burden is
usually borne by the husband alone. Hence the emergence of the type
of harassed _pater familias_ at whom our comic artists poke much
sympathetic fun, who meets his family now and then on Sundays, foots
their bills, and is rewarded for his unremitting toil in their behalf
by being regarded much in the light of a cash-register.
This sort of thing, of course, is not the invariable rule. There are
many middle-class women who give their families untiring service, and
an increasing number who, either from choice or necessity, engage in
gainful occupations outside their homes. Of this country’s eight and
one half million women breadwinners, two million are married; and
it may be assumed that a fair percentage of these are of the middle
class. The great majority, however, are of the labouring class; and
upon these, economic injustice weighs most heavily. It is these women
who bear most children; and it is they who, when their husbands are
unable or unwilling to meet the growing expenses of the family, assume
the double burden of “woman’s work” in the home and whatever they can
get to do outside that will enable them to earn a few dollars a week,
in order to “keep the family together.” Miss Katharine Anthony, in
her book, “Mothers Who Must Earn,” gives a striking picture of the
unskilled married women workers of west-side New York, victims of a
crowded labour-market, who take the hardest jobs at the lowest pay, in
order that they may give some few poor advantages to the children they
have brought into the world unwillingly, knowing that they could not
afford them. “The same mother,” says Miss Anthony, “who resents the
coming of children and resigns them so apathetically to death, will
toil fourteen hours a day and seven days a week to keep up a home for
the young lives in her charge.”
Such testimony, and testimony of a similar kind from governmental
investigators, somehow makes the general run of social criticism
appear frivolous and superficial. The married wage-earner, worn with
excessive childbearing, who still finds strength to work long hours
in laundry or factory during the day and do her housework at night,
hardly fits into the picture of selfish, emancipated women, wilfully
deserting their proper sphere of domesticity either to seek pleasure or
to maintain their economic independence. Indeed, the idea of economic
independence is quite at variance with her notions of respectability.
“Not to work,” says Miss Anthony, “is a mark of the middle-class
married woman, and the ambitious west-side family covets that mark.
Hence comes the attempt to conceal the mother’s employment, if she
has one, which is one of the little snobberies of the poor.” The sole
object of these women’s toil is to preserve the home, chief prop of
a social order which bears upon it with crushing weight; and their
adherence to a social philosophy which regards the preservation of
the home as peculiarly the business of women is evident in the fact
that they contribute the whole of their meagre earnings to its upkeep,
whereas their husbands are likely to contribute only as much of their
own earnings as they see fit.
It goes without saying that the conditions I have cited have a profound
effect on the psychology of parents, and therefore on the lives of
children. The rearing of children, if justice is to be done them, is
one of the most exacting tasks that can be undertaken. The adjustment
that is required to fit parents to the personalities of their children
and children to those of their parents and of one another, is in itself
a most delicate and difficult process, and one upon which the nature
of the child’s adjustment to the larger world greatly depends. Such
a process naturally involves friction, and therefore, if it is to be
successful, calls for no little tact and patience in the parents; and
cramped quarters, sordid poverty, and exhausting labour are hardly
conducive to the possession of either of these qualities. Children
of the middle class, it is remarked often enough, hardly know their
harassed, overworked fathers; but children of the labouring class
are likely to know neither of their parents, or to know them only as
fretful, quarrelsome people, brutalized by overwork. “The strain of
bringing up a family on the average workingman’s wage,” says Miss
Anthony, “reduced as this is likely to be by unemployment, sickness,
or drink, constitutes, indeed, the dark age of the tenement mother’s
life. It is not strange that the good will existing between husband
and wife often gives way beneath it. ‘I tell my husband,’ said Mrs.
Gurney, ‘it’s not right for us to be quarreling all the time before the
children. But it seems like we can’t help it. He’s so worried all the
time and I’m so tired. If we were easy in our minds we wouldn’t do it.’”
Nor do the children of these people have anything much better to look
forward to than such a lot as that of their parents, for poverty
drives them too into the labour-market as soon as they are old enough
to earn, to the profound distress of reformers who refuse to face
the basic question of child-labour, namely: whether it is better for
human beings, even if they be children, to work for their living or
to starve. This applies not only to the children of our industrial
labouring classes, but to those of the agricultural labourer and
the tenant-farmer, who pay the same penalty for the exploitation of
their parents. There is no little irony in the fact that our growing
consciousness of the right of children to be well born and well reared
proceeds hand in hand with an economic injustice which renders it
impossible to secure that right for all children.
If responsibility for the upbringing of children is to continue to
be vested in the family, then the rights of children will be secured
only when parents are able to make a living for their families with
so little difficulty that they may give their best thought and energy
to the child’s development and the problem of helping it to adjust
itself to the complexities of the modern environment. Such a condition
is not utopian, but quite possible of attainment, as I shall show
later. But for the present, and for some time to come, marriage and
parenthood will continue to make men and women virtual slaves of the
economic order which they help to perpetuate. Small wonder that
the women of whom Miss Anthony writes are thoroughly disillusioned
concerning “marriage life,” and would avoid it if they “had it to do
over.” Marriage as an institution has little to offer these people
save toil and suffering; it is, as I have remarked, its tenacity as an
instinctive habit that makes them its victims. And if it were not for
the responsibilities that marriage entails, responsibilities which make
people fearful of the economic uncertainty involved in revolutionary
change, the economic order that makes marriage “an instrument of
torture” and thwarts the development of children, would not last
overnight.
Both as a personal relationship and as an institution, marriage is at
present undergoing a profound modification resulting from the changing
industrial and social position of women. The elevation of woman from
the position of a chattel to that of a free citizen must inevitably
affect the institution in which her subordinate position has been most
strongly emphasized--which has been, indeed, the chief instrument of
her subordination. The woman who is demanding her rightful place in
the world as man’s equal, can no longer be expected to accept without
question an institution under whose rules she is obliged to remain
the victim of injustice. There is every reason therefore, assuming
that the process of emancipation shall not be interrupted, to expect
a continuous alteration in the laws and customs bearing on marriage,
until some adjustment shall be reached which allows scope for the
individuality of both parties, instead of one only. The psychological
conflict involved in the adaptation of marriage to woman’s changing
position and the changing mentality that results from it, is not to
be underrated. At present the process of adjustment is needlessly
complicated and this attendant conflict immensely exaggerated, by
an economic injustice which bears most heavily on married people.
Individualism is developing in modern society to such an extent that
marriage based on anything but affection seems degrading; but economic
injustice is progressing simultaneously with such strides that marriage
based on nothing but affection is likely to end in disaster; for
affection and the harassment of poverty are hardly compatible. If this
complication were removed, as it could be, we should probably find that
the adjustment of marriage to shifting ideals and conditions would come
about in a natural and advantageous manner, as adjustments usually do
when vexing and hampering conditions are removed. The question will
settle itself in any case. Just how, no one, of course, can tell; but
however revolutionary the adaptation to new conditions may be, it will
not _seem_ revolutionary to the people of the future because “the minds
of men will be fitted to it.” This is an all-important fact, and one
that is too little respected; for the desire to enforce our own moral
and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire
to enforce them upon contemporaries. It is a desire which finds a large
measure of fulfilment--where is the society which does not struggle
along under a dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its
grandfathers? All political and religious systems have their root and
their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its
intense fear of autonomy. Because of this conservatism, people never
move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable
injustices in the economic and social order under which they live.
There were, and are, such injustices in the laws and customs of the
Christian world governing marriage and the relations of the sexes;
hence the changes which have already begun, and may conceivably proceed
until they shall prove as far-reaching as those by which marriage in
the past was transformed from an instinctive habit into an institution
subject to regulation by everyone except the two people most intimately
concerned.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Westermarck defines it as “a more or less durable connexion
between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of propagation till
after the birth of the offspring.”
[11] E. C. Parsons: “The Family.”
[12] It is interesting in this connexion to note that in post-war
England, where the thousands of unemployed workers constitute a heavy
drain on the public purse and a baffling political problem, it has
been made lawful to sell devices for birth-control. One now sees these
devices conspicuously displayed in druggists’ windows.
[13] In Maryland fornication is not a crime, although it may entitle
a husband to divorce if he did not know of it at the time of the
marriage. Adultery is punishable by a fine of ten dollars.
[14] It is important to call attention to the loose use of the word
“Society” in this quotation, as practically synonomous with the
State. In their final definition, the two terms are antithetical.
There is general agreement among scholars, according to Professor
Beard, that in the genesis of the State, exploitation was primary,
and organization for other purposes, e.g., what we know as “law and
order,” was incidental and secondary. The term Society, then, really
implies the disappearance of the State, and is commonly so used by
scholars. Even now, too, tribes which have never formed a State and
are without government of any kind, maintain society, i.e., a quite
highly organized mode of communal life. Thomas Jefferson remarked this
phenomenon among the American Indian hunting tribes, and so did the
historian Parkman.
[15] This motive is especially powerful in the United States, because
monopoly in this country even now permits people to do relatively well.
Moreover, there is still a strong current of optimism attributable
to the failure of Americans to see that the old days of almost
unlimited opportunity ended with the closing of the frontier. If the
American family finds itself in straitened circumstances, its members
are likely to attribute the fact to “hard times,” and to expect an
improvement before long, since the country has recovered from a panic
about every twenty years for the past century. They do not understand
that the measure of recovery they hope for is now impossible. How
many Americans, I wonder, have stopped to ask themselves why this
country has suffered from _uninterrupted_ economic “depression,” with
the exception of the war-period, ever since the panic of 1907? What
they regard as depression is really the normal result of complete
land-monopoly and high tariffs. Prices have continued to rise since the
war; which is to say that real wages have fallen.
[16] According to Herriot, children form the wealth of savage tribes.
[17] The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage”;
the other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Generation,”
simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more clearly and
definitely expressed in that book than in the other.
[18] Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen Œkonomie.
Berlin, 1912.
[19] For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I
refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made
Plain.”