Although the superior maternity of the human female is so difficult to
prove, so open to heavy charges of inadequacy, so erratic and
pathological, there remain intact our devout belief in it, our
reverence, our unshaken conviction that it is the one perfect thing. The
facts as to our carelessness and ignorance in the fulfilment of this
function are undeniable: the rate of infant mortality and children’s
diseases,—those classed by physicians as “preventable diseases,”
namely,—these mortal errors and failures confront us everywhere; but we
ignore them all, or attribute them to any and every reason save
deficient motherhood.
One of the most frequent excuses, among those who have gone far enough
to admit that excuse is needed, is that the father is to blame for these
conditions. His vices, it is alleged, weaken the constitution of the
race. His failure to provide prevents the mother from giving the proper
care. He is held responsible for what evil we see in our children; and
still we worship the mother for the physical process of bearing a
child,—now considered an act of heroism,—and for the “devotion” with
which she clings to it afterward, irrespective of the wisdom or
effectiveness of this devotion. A healthy and independent motherhood
would no more think of taking credit to itself for the right fulfilment
of its natural functions than would a cat for bringing forth her kittens
or a sheep her lambs. The common fact that the women of the lower social
grades bear more children and bear them more easily than the women of
higher classes ought to give pause to this ridiculous assumption, but it
does not. The more women weaken themselves and their offspring, and
imperil their very lives by anti-maternal habits, the more difficulty,
danger, and expense are associated with this natural process, the more
do women solemnly take credit to themselves and receive it from others
for the glorious self-sacrifice with which they risk their lives (and
their babies’ lives!) for the preservation of humanity. As to the father
and his share in the evil results, nothing that he has ever done or can
do removes from motherhood its primal responsibility.
Suppose the female of some other species, ignoring her racial duty of
right selection, should mate with mangy, toothless cripples,—if there
were such among her kind,—and so produce weak, malformed young, and help
exterminate her race. Should she then blame him for the result? An
entire sex, sacredly set apart for maternal functions so superior as to
justify their lack of economic usefulness, should in the course of ages
have learned how to select proper fathers. If the only way in which the
human mother can feed and guard her children is through another person,
a provider and protector on whom their lives and safety must depend,
what natural, social, or moral excuse has she for not choosing a good
one?
But how can a young girl know a good prospective father, we ask. That
she is not so educated as to know proves her unfitness for her great
task. That she does not think or care proves her dishonorable
indifference to her great duty. She can in no way shirk the
responsibility for criminal carelessness in choosing a father for her
children, unless indeed there were no choice,—no good men left on earth.
Moreover, we are not obliged to leave this crucial choice in the hands
of young girls. Motherhood is the work of grown women, not of
half-children; and, when we honestly care as much for motherhood as we
pretend, we shall train the woman for her duty, not the girl for her
guileless manœuvres to secure a husband. We talk about the noble duties
of the mother, but our maidens are educated for economically successful
marriage.
Leaving this field of maternal duty through sex-selection, there remains
the far larger ground to which the popular mind flees in triumph: that
the later work of the mother proves the success of our racial division
of labor on sex-lines, that in the care of the child, the education of
the child, the beautiful life of the home and family, it is shown how
well our system works. This is the last stronghold. Solidly intrenched
herein sits popular thought, safe in the sacred precincts of the home.
“Every man’s home is his castle,” is the common saying. The windows are
shut to keep out the air. The curtains are down to keep out the light.
The doors are barred to keep out the stranger. Within are the hearth
fire and its gentle priestess, the initial combination of human
life,—the family in the home.
Our thrones have been emptied, and turned into mere chairs for passing
presidents. Our churches have been opened to the light of modern life,
and the odor of sanctity has been freshened with sweet sunny air. We can
see room for change in these old sanctuaries, but none in the sanctuary
of the home. And this temple, with its rights, is so closely interwound
with the services of subject woman, its altar so demands her ceaseless
sacrifices, that we find it impossible to conceive of any other basis of
human living. We are chilled to the heart’s core by the fear of losing
any of these ancient and hallowed associations. Without this blessed
background of all our memories and foreground of all our hopes, life
seems empty indeed. In homes we were all born. In homes we all die or
hope to die. In homes we all live or want to live. For homes we all
labor, in them or out of them. The home is the centre and circumference,
the start and the finish, of most of our lives. We love it with a love
older than the human race. We reverence it with the blind obeisance of
those crouching centuries when its cult began. We cling to it with the
tenacity of every inmost, oldest instinct of our animal natures, and
with the enthusiasm of every latest word in the unbroken chant of
adoration which we have sung to it since first we learned to praise.
And since we hold that our home life, just as we have it, is the best
thing on earth, and that our home life plainly demands one whole woman
at the least to each home, and usually more, it follows that anything
which offers to change the position of woman threatens to “undermine the
home,” “strikes at the root of the family,” and we will none of it. If,
in honest endeavor to keep up to the modern standard of free thought and
free speech, we do listen,—turning from our idol for a moment, and
saying to the daring iconoclast, “Come, show us anything better!”—with
what unlimited derision do we greet his proposed substitute! Yet
everywhere about us to-day this inner tower, this castle keep of
vanishing tradition, is becoming more difficult to defend or even to
keep in repair. We buttress it anew with every generation; we love its
very cracks and crumbling corners; we hang and drape it with endless
decorations; we hide the looming dangers overhead with fresh clouds of
incense; and we demand of the would-be repairers and rebuilders that
they prove to us the desirability of their wild plans before they lift a
hammer. But, when they show their plans, we laugh them to scorn.
It is a difficult case to meet. To call attention to existing conditions
and to establish the relation between them and existing phenomena is one
thing. To point out how a change of condition will produce new
phenomena, and how these phenomena will benefit us, is quite another.
Yet this is the task that is always involved in the conscious progress
of the human race. While that progress was unconscious, it was enough
that certain individuals and classes gradually entered into new
relations in process of social evolution, and that they forced their
conditions upon the reluctant conservatives who failed so to evolve.
In the quite recent passage from the feudal to the monarchical system,
no time was wasted in the endeavor to persuade and convince the
headstrong barons of their national duty. The growing power of the king
struggled with and survived the lessening power of the barons,—that was
all. Had a book been written then to urge the change, it could have
proved clearly enough the evils of the feudal system; but, when it tried
to portray the glories of national peace and power under a single
monarch, it would have had small weight. National peace and power, which
had been hitherto non-existent, would have failed to appeal to the
sturdy lords of the soil, whose only idea of peace and power was to sit
down and rest on their prostrate neighbors. Had their strength run in
the line of argument, they would have scouted the “should be’s” and
“will be’s” of the author, and defied him to prove that the new
condition would be developed by the new processes; and, indeed, he would
have found it hard.
So to-day, in questioning the economic status of woman and her position
in the home and in the family, it is far easier to prove present evil
than future good. Yet this is what is most exactingly demanded. It is
required of the advocate of social reform not only that he convince the
contented followers of the present system of its wrong, but that he
prove to their satisfaction the superiority of some other system. This,
in the nature of the case, is impossible. When people are contented, you
cannot make them feel that what is is wrong, or that something else
might be better. Even the discontented are far more willing to refer
their troubles to some personal factor than to admit that their
condition as a whole inevitably produces the general trouble in which
they share. Even if convinced that a change of condition will remove the
source of injury, they, like the fox with the swarm of flies, fear to be
disturbed, lest their last state be worse than their first. In the face
of this inevitable difficulty, however, the task must be undertaken.
Two things let us premise and agree upon before starting. First, that
the duty of human life is progress, development; that we are here, not
merely to live, but to grow,—not to be content with lean savagery or fat
barbarism or sordid semi-civilization, but to toil on through the
centuries, and build up the ever-nobler forms of life toward which
social evolution tends. If this is not believed, if any hold that to
keep alive and reproduce the species is the limit of our human duty,
then they need look no farther here. That aim can be attained, and has
been attained, for irrefutable centuries, through many forms of
sex-relation and of economic relation. Human beings have lived and
brought up children as good as their parents in free promiscuity and
laziness, in forced polygamy and slavery, in willing polyandry and
industry, and in monogamy _plus_ prostitution and manufactures. Just to
live and bear children does not prove the relative superiority of any
system, either in sex or economics. But, when we believe that life means
progress, then each succeeding form of sex-relation or economic relation
is to be measured by its effect on that progress.
It may be necessary here to agree on a definition of human progress.
According to the general law of organic evolution, it may be defined as
follows: such progress in the individual and in his social relations as
shall maintain him in health and happiness and increase the organic
development of society.
If we accept such a definition of human progress, if we agree that
progress is the duty of society, and that all social institutions are to
be measured by it, we may proceed to our second premise. This is not to
be ranked with the first in importance: it should be too commonly
understood and accepted to be dragged into such a prominent position.
But it is not commonly understood and accepted. In fact, it is
misunderstood and denied to so general a degree that no apology is
needed for insisting on it here.
The second premise is this: our enjoyment of a thing does not prove that
it is right. Even our love, admiration, and reverence for a thing does
not prove that it is right; and, even from an evolutionary point of
view, our belief that a thing is “natural” does not prove that it is
right. A thing may be right in one stage of evolution which becomes
wrong in another. For instance, promiscuity is “natural”; the human
animal, like many others, is quite easily inclined thereto. Monogamy is
proven right by social evolution: it is the best way to carry on the
human race in social relation; but it is not yet as “natural” as could
be desired.
So, to return to our second premise, which is admittedly rather a large
one, to show that any custom or status of ours is “natural” and
enjoyable does not prove that it is right. It does not of course prevent
its being right. Right things may be enjoyed, may be loved, admired, and
reverenced, may even be “natural”; but so may wrong things. Even that
subhuman faculty called instinct is only a true guide to conduct when
the conditions are present which originally developed that instinct. The
instinct that makes a modern house-dog turn around three times before he
lies down is not worthy of much admiration to-day, though it served its
purpose on the grassy plains and in the leafy hollows where it was
formed. If these two premises are granted, that the duty of human life
is progress, and that a given condition is not necessarily right because
we like it, we may go on.
Is our present method of home life, based on the economic dependence of
woman in the sex-relation, the best calculated to maintain the
individual in health and happiness, and develope in him the higher
social faculties? The individual is not maintained in health and
happiness,—that is visible to all; and how little he is developed in
social relation is shown in the jarring irregularity and wastefulness of
our present economic system.
Economic independence for women necessarily involves a change in the
home and family relation. But, if that change is for the advantage of
individual and race, we need not fear it. It does not involve a change
in the marriage relation except in withdrawing the element of economic
dependence, nor in the relation of mother to child save to improve it.
But it does involve the exercise of human faculty in women, in social
service and exchange rather than in domestic service solely. This will
of course require the introduction of some other form of living than
that which now obtains. It will render impossible the present method of
feeding the world by means of millions of private servants, and bringing
up children by the same hand.
It is a melancholy fact that the vast majority of our children are
reared and trained by domestic servants,—generally their mothers, to be
sure, but domestic servants by trade. To become a producer, a factor in
the economic activities of the world, must perforce interfere with
woman’s present status as a private servant. House mistress she may
still be, in the sense of owning and ordering her home, but housekeeper
or house-servant she may not be—and be anything else. Her position as
mother will alter, too. Mother in the sense of bearer and rearer of
noble children she will be, as the closest and dearest, the one most
honored and best loved; but mother in the sense of exclusive individual
nursery-maid and nursery-governess she may not be—and be anything else.
It is precisely here that the world calls a halt. Nothing, it says, can
be better than our homes with their fair priestesses. Nothing can be
better for children than the hourly care of their own mothers. It is the
position of the feudal baron over again. We can perhaps be made to see
the evils of existing conditions: we cannot be made to see any
possibility of improving on them. Nevertheless, it may be tried.
Let us deliberately set ourselves to imagine, by sheer muscular effort
as it were, a better kind of motherhood than that of the private nursery
governess, a better way to feed and clean and clothe the world than by
the private house servant.
Here is felt the need of our second premise; for we enjoy things as they
are (that is, some of us do, sometimes, and the rest of us think that we
do). We love, admire, and reverence them; and it is “natural” to have
them so. If it can be shown that human progress is better served by
other methods, then other methods will be proven right; and we must grow
to enjoy and honor them as fast as we can, and in due course of time we
shall find them natural. If it can be shown that our babies would be
better off if part of their time was passed in other care than their
mothers’, then such other care would be right; and it would be the duty
of motherhood to provide it. If it can be shown that we could all be
better provided for in our personal needs of nutrition, cleanliness,
warmth, shelter, privacy, by some other method than that which requires
the labor of one woman or more to each family, then it would be the duty
of womanhood to find such method and to practise it.
Perhaps it is worth while to examine the nature of our feeling toward
that social institution called “the family,” and the probable effect
upon it of the change in woman’s economic status.
Marriage and “the family” are two institutions, not one, as is commonly
supposed. We confuse the natural result of marriage in children, common
to all forms of sex-union, with the family,—a purely social phenomenon.
Marriage is a form of sex-union recognized and sanctioned by society. It
is a relation between two or more persons, according to the custom of
the country, and involves mutual obligations. Although made by us an
economic relation, it is not essentially so, and will exist in much
higher fulfilment after the economic phase is outgrown.
The family is a social group, an entity, a little state. It holds an
important place in the evolution of society quite aside from its
connection with marriage. There was a time when the family was the
highest form of social relation,—indeed, the only form of social
relation,—when to the minds of pastoral, patriarchal tribes there was no
conception so large as “my country,” no State, no nation. There was only
a great land spotted with families, each family its own little world, of
which Grandpa was priest and king. The family was a social unit. Its
interests were common to its members, and inimical to those of other
families. It moved over the earth, following its food supply, and
fighting occasionally with stranger families for the grass or water on
which it depended. Indissoluble common interests are what make organic
union, and those interests long rested on blood relationship.
While the human individual was best fed and guarded by the family, and
so required the prompt, correlative action of all the members of that
family, naturally the family must have a head; and that form of
government known as the patriarchal was produced. The natural family
relation, as seen in parents and young of other species, or in ourselves
in later forms, involves no such governmental development: that is a
feature of the family as a social entity alone.
One of the essentials of the patriarchal family life was polygamy, and
not only polygamy, but open concubinage, and a woman slavery which was
almost the same thing. The highest period of the family as a social
institution was a very low period for marriage as a social
institution,—a period, in fact, when marriage was but partially evolved
from the early promiscuity of the primitive savage. The family seems
indeed to be a gradually disappearing survival of the still looser unit
of the horde, which again is more closely allied to the band or pack of
gregarious carnivora than to an organic social relation. A loose,
promiscuous group of animals is not a tribe; and the most primitive
savage groups seem to have been no more than this.
The tribe in its true form follows the family,—is a natural extension of
it, and derives its essential ties from the same relationship. These
social forms, too, are closely related to economic conditions. The horde
was the hunting unit; the family, and later the tribe, the pastoral
unit. Agriculture and its resultant, commerce and manufacture, gradually
weaken these crude blood ties, and establish the social relationship
which constitutes the State. Before the pastoral era the family held no
important position, and since that era it has gradually declined. With
social progress we find human relations resting less and less on a
personal and sex basis, and more and more on general economic
independence. As individuals have become more highly specialized, they
have made possible a higher form of marriage.
The family is a decreasing survival of the earliest grouping known to
man. Marriage is an increasing development of high social life, not
fully evolved. So far from being identical with the family, it improves
and strengthens in inverse ratio to the family, as is easily seen by the
broad contrast between the marriage relations of Jacob and the
unquenchable demand for lifelong single mating that grows in our hearts
to-day. There was no conception of marriage as a personal union for life
of two well-matched individuals during the patriarchal era. Wives were
valued merely for child-bearing. The family needed numbers of its own
blood, especially males; and the man-child was the price of favor to
women then. It was but a few degrees beyond the horde, not yet become a
tribe in the full sense. Its bonds of union were of the loosest,—merely
common paternity, with a miscellaneous maternity of inimical interests.
Such a basis forever forbade any high individualization, and high
individualization with its demands for a higher marriage forbids any
numerical importance to the family. Marriage has risen and developed in
social importance as the family has sunk and decreased.
It is most interesting to note that, under the comparatively similar
conditions of the settlement of Utah, the numerical strength and easily
handled common interests of many people under one head, which
distinguish the polygamous family, were found useful factors in that
great pioneering enterprise. In the further development of society a
relation of individuals more fluent, subtle, and extensive was needed.
The family as a social unit makes a ponderous body of somewhat
irreconcilable constituents, requiring a sort of military rule to make
it work at all; and it is only useful while the ends to be attained are
of a simple nature, and allow of the slowest accomplishment. It is easy
to see the family extending to the tribe by its own physical increase;
and, similarly, the father hardening into the chief, under the
necessities of larger growth. Then, as the steadily enlarging forces of
national unity make the chief an outgrown name and the tribe an outgrown
form, the family dwindles to a monogamic basis, as the higher needs of
the sex-relation become differentiated from the more primitive economic
necessities of the family.
And now, further, when our still developing social needs call for an
ever-increasing delicacy and freedom in the interservice and common
service of individuals, we find that even what economic unity remains to
the family is being rapidly eliminated. As the economic relation becomes
rudimentary and disappears, the sex-relation asserts itself more purely;
and the demand in the world to-day for a higher and nobler sex-union is
as sharply defined as the growing objection to the existing economic
union. Strange as it may seem to us, so long accustomed to confound the
two it is precisely the outgrown relics of a previously valuable family
relation which so painfully retard the higher development of the
monogamic marriage relation.
Each generation of young men and women comes to the formation of
sex-union with higher and higher demands for a true marriage, with
ever-growing needs for companionship. Each generation of men and women
need and ask more of each other. A woman is no longer content and
grateful to have “a kind husband”: a man is no longer content with a
patient Griselda; and, as all men and women, in marrying, revert to the
economic status of the earlier family, they come under conditions which
steadily tend to lower the standard of their mutual love, and make of
the average marriage only a sort of compromise, borne with varying ease
or difficulty according to the good breeding and loving-kindness of the
parties concerned. This is not necessarily, to their conscious
knowledge, an “unhappy marriage.” It is as happy as those they see about
them, as happy perhaps as we resignedly expect “on earth”; and in heaven
we do not expect marriages. But it is not what they looked forward to
when they were young.
When two young people love each other, in the long hours which are never
long enough for them to be together in, do they dwell in ecstatic
forecast on the duties of housekeeping? They do not. They dwell on the
pleasure of having a home, in which they can be “at last alone”; on the
opportunity of enjoying each other’s society; and, always, on what they
will _do_ together. To act with those we love,—to walk together, work
together, read together, paint, write, sing, anything you please, so
that it be together,—that is what love looks forward to.
Human love, as it rises to an ever higher grade, looks more and more for
such companionship. But the economic status of marriage rudely breaks in
upon love’s young dream. On the economic side, apart from all the
sweetness and truth of the sex-relation, the woman in marrying becomes
the house-servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the man. Of the world
we may say that the intimate personal necessities of the human animal
are ministered to by woman. Married lovers do not work together. They
may, if they have time, rest together: they may, if they can, play
together; but they do not make beds and sweep and cook together, and
they do not go down town to the office together. They are economically
on entirely different social planes, and these constitute a bar to any
higher, truer union than such as we see about us. Marriage is not
perfect unless it is between class equals. There is no equality in class
between those who do their share in the world’s work in the largest,
newest, highest ways and those who do theirs in the smallest, oldest,
lowest ways.
Granting squarely that it is the business of women to make the home life
of the world true, healthful, and beautiful, the economically dependent
woman does not do this, and never can. The economically independent
woman can and will. As the family is by no means identical with
marriage, so is the home by no means identical with either.
A home is a permanent dwelling-place, whether for one, two, forty, or a
thousand, for a pair, a flock, or a swarm. The hive is the home of the
bees as literally and absolutely as the nest is the home of mating birds
in their season. Home and the love of it may dwindle to the one chamber
of the bachelor or spread to the span of a continent, when the returning
traveller sees land and calls it “home.” There is no sweeter word, there
is no dearer fact, no feeling closer to the human heart than this.
On close analysis, what are the bases of our feelings in this
connection? and what are their supporting facts? Far down below
humanity, where “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have
nests,” there begins the deep home feeling. Maternal instinct seeks a
place to shelter the defenceless young, while the mother goes abroad to
search for food. The first sharp impressions of infancy are associated
with the sheltering walls of home, be it the swinging cradle in the
branches, the soft dark hollow in the trunk of a tree, or the cave with
its hidden lair. A place to be safe in; a place to be warm and dry in; a
place to eat in peace and sleep in quiet; a place whose close, familiar
limits rest the nerves from the continuous hail of impressions in the
changing world outside: the same place over and over,—the restful
repetition, rousing no keen response, but healing and soothing each
weary sense,—that “feels like home.” All this from our first
consciousness. All this for millions and millions of years. No wonder we
love it.
Then comes the gradual addition of tenderer associations, family ties of
the earliest. Then, still primitive, but not yet outgrown, the groping
religious sentiment of early ancestor-worship, adding sanctity to
safety, and driving deep our sentiment for home. It was the place in
which to pray, to keep alight the sacred fire, and pour libations to
departed grandfathers. Following this, the slow-dying era of paternal
government gave a new sense of honor to the place of comfort and the
place of prayer. It became the seat of government also,—the palace and
the throne. Upon this deep foundation we have built a towering
superstructure of habit, custom, law; and in it dwell together every
deepest, oldest, closest, and tenderest emotion of the human individual.
No wonder we are blind and deaf to any suggested improvement in our
lordly pleasure-house.
But look farther. Without contradicting any word of the above, it is
equally true that the highest emotions of humanity arise and live
outside the home and apart from it. While religion stayed at home, in
dogma and ceremony, in spirit and expression, it was a low and narrow
religion. It could never rise till it found a new spirit and a new
expression in human life outside the home, until it found a common place
of worship, a ceremonial and a morality on a human basis, not a family
basis. Science, art, government, education, industry,—the home is the
cradle of them all, and their grave, if they stay in it. Only as we live
think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed,
civilized, socialized.
The exquisite development of modern home life is made possible only as
an accompaniment and result of modern social life. If the reverse were
true, as is popularly supposed, all nations that have homes would
continue to evolve a noble civilization. But they do not. On the
contrary, those nations in which home and family worship most prevail,
as in China, present a melancholy proof of the result of the domestic
virtues without the social. A noble home life is the product of a noble
social life. The home does not produce the virtues needed in society.
But society does produce the virtues needed in such homes as we desire
to-day. The members of the freest, most highly civilized and
individualized nations, make the most delightful members of the home and
family. The members of the closest and most highly venerated homes do
not necessarily make the most delightful members of society.
In social evolution as in all evolution the tendency is from
“indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to definite, coherent
heterogeneity”; and the home, in its rigid maintenance of a permanent
homogeneity, constitutes a definite limit to social progress. What we
need is not less home, but more; not a lessening of the love of human
beings for a home, but its extension through new and more effective
expression. And, above all, we need the complete disentanglement in our
thoughts of the varied and often radically opposed interests and
industries so long supposed to be component parts of the home and
family.
The change in the economic position of woman from dependence to
independence must bring with it a rearrangement of these home interests
and industries, to our great gain.