The Family and its Members Part 1

The Family and it's Members.

by Anna Garlin Spencer.

INTRODUCTION

=A Threefold Aim.=--This book is based upon three theses--namely, first, that the monogamic, private, family is a priceless inheritance from the past and should be preserved; second, that in order to preserve it many of its inherited customs and mechanisms must be modified to suit new social demands; and third, that present day experimentation and idealistic effort already indicate certain tendencies of change in the family order which promise needed adjustment to ends of highest social value.

Many learned books have been written concerning the evolution of s.e.x, the history of matrimonial inst.i.tutions and the development of the family. This volume is not an attempted rival of any of these. The work of Havelock Ellis, of Le Tourneau, of Otis T. Mason, of Geddes and Thompson, and others building upon the foundations laid by the great pioneers in the study of the family, const.i.tute a sufficient mine of historical information and scientific a.n.a.lysis and evaluation.

The studies and suggestions of Olive Schreiner, Mrs. Clews Parsons, Mrs. Helen Bosanquet, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ellen Key and others indicate the tendency of modern inquiry into the just basis of the family order. The work of Professors Howard, Giddings, Thomas, Boss, Goodsell, Calhoun, Patten, Dealey, Cooley, Ellwood, Todd and others in college fields, shows the importance of the family and the necessity of giving all that concerns it the most serious attention.

This book aims to begin where many of these students leave off and to turn specific attention to the problems of personal and ethical decision which now face men and women who would make their own married life and parenthood successful. The past experience of the race is drawn upon only in so far as it seems to explain present conditions and point the way to future social and personal achievements.

=Basic Principles Underlying All Socially Useful Changes.=--A fundamental principle in democracy is the right and duty of every human being to develop a strong, n.o.ble and distinctive individuality.

For such development it is necessary that a person be self-supporting, free of despotic control by others, and able and willing to bear equal part with every other human being in the social order to which he or she belongs.

This implies that no human being should be wholly sacrificed in personal development to the service or welfare of any other human being, or group of human beings, either inside or outside the family circle. On the other hand, after temporary excursions into an extreme individualism that ordained a free-for-all compet.i.tion in every walk of life, society is now keenly alive to the need for control of personal desire and individual activity within channels of social usefulness. It is beginning to be clearly seen that society has a right to demand from any person or cla.s.s of persons that form of community service which definitely inheres in the social function which is a.s.sumed by, or which devolves upon, such person or cla.s.s of persons. In the old days of "status," when each and every person found himself in a place set for him and from which he could not depart, there was only the duty of being content and useful in the "sphere of life to which he was called." In the new condition of "contract," in which each and every person in a democratic community finds himself at liberty to use all common opportunities in the interest of his own achievement, there is the duty of choice along every avenue of purpose and of activity. This gives the new double call to the intelligence and conscience; the call to become the best personality one can make of oneself and the call to serve the common life to ends of social well-being.

=The Sense of Kind and the Sense of Difference.=--Doctor Giddings declares in fine summary "we may conceive of society as any plural number of sentient creatures more or less continuously subjected to common stimuli, to differing stimuli and to inter-stimulation, and responding thereto in like behaviour, concerted activity or cooperation, as well as in unlike or compet.i.tive activity; and becoming, therefore, with developing intelligence, coherent through a dominating consciousness of kind while always sufficiently conscious of difference to insure a measure of individual liberty." Democracy tends to enlarge the area of those who, while conscious of kind that unites, are also keen in desire to develop in liberty any natural difference which can make their personality felt as distinctive or powerful. The individual differences among women were wholly ignored in the past. They were never in reality all alike, as they were commonly thought to be. The usual designation of a subject cla.s.s lumps all together as if all were the same. It is the mark of emergence from the ma.s.s to the cla.s.s, and from the cla.s.s to the individual, that more and more defines differences between persons. Women have now, for the first time in the civilization called Christian, arrived at a point in which differences between members of their s.e.x can claim social recognition. They are, therefore, now called upon as never before to balance by conscious effort the personal desire and the social claim.

The family, more than any other inherited inst.i.tution, feels the oscillations between the individual demand for personal achievement and the response to the social need for large service within group relations.h.i.+ps which now, for the first time, stir in the consciousness of average women.

=The Family as We Know It Is the Central Nursery of Character.=--The inevitable outcome of the new freedom, education and economic opportunity of women gives us the problem of the modern family. The ideal of the democracy we are trying to achieve is higher personality in all the ma.s.s of the people. The method of democracy so far as we can see is education, perfected and universalized, by which all the children of each generation may be developed physically, mentally, morally, and vocationally to their utmost excellence and power. The family, as we have inherited it, is so far the central nursery and school in this development. So far in the history of the race or in its present social manifestation no rival inst.i.tution, even the formal school, offers an adequate subst.i.tute for the family in this beginning of the educative process. The intimate and vital care and nurture of the individual life still depends for the ma.s.s of the people upon the private, monogamic, family. This intimate and vital care of the children of each generation has so far in human experience cost women large expenditure of time and strength; so large expenditure that personal achievement has been wholly and is even now largely subordinated to the social service implied in home-making. The deepest problems of the modern family inhere in the effort to adjust the new freedom of women, and its new demands for individual development in customary lines of vocational work, to the ancient family claim. New adjustments are called for not only in the family itself but in all the educational, political, economic, and social arrangements of life to accommodate this new demand of women to be achieving persons whether married or single. Women have entered, as newly emerging from status to contract, into a man-made social organization, a man-made school, a man-made industrial order, and a man-made state.

Achievement, individual and successful, means to most of them, as to any newly enfranchised cla.s.s, the type of distinctive activity and accomplishment which their elder brothers have outlined. The ant.i.thesis, therefore, which now works toward acute problems in the minds of both men and women is between the sort of achievement which men have sought after and attained, and the sort of social service which the past conditions required of women. Slowly it is being perceived that in the actual family service, as it is now aided by social mechanisms surrounding the household, is place and economic opportunity for high personal achievement by competent women. Still more slowly is it being apprehended that in the new adjustments of economic and professional life there is or may be opportunity for married women and mothers to serve the family in high measure and also attain outside some distinctive vocational pride and satisfaction of craftsmans.h.i.+p. Most slowly of all is it being understood that the future calls for such modification of specialization in outside work that men and women alike may serve the generations in family devotion to the sort of work fathers and mothers have to do and yet cherish some personal and ideal vocational effort which may sweeten and enrich their lives.

=Vital Changes in All the Basic Inst.i.tutions of Society.=--There are five basic inst.i.tutions in modern social organization. They may be named the family, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the state. They have all come to us as parts of our social inheritance from time too remote to reckon. They have mingled and intermingled their tendencies of control and influence in varieties of social functioning too numerous to mention. They are now emerging to distinctness only to be engaged in new forms of interaction that make the highest ideals of each and all seem fundamentally akin.

The main tendency of development in all these inst.i.tutions is, however, identical and one clearly perceived. It is the tendency from status to contract, from fixed order to flexible adjustment, from static to dynamic condition, already noted in regard to the family.

In the school we have moved and are now moving from an aristocracy of command, by which ancient life was reproduced, to a democracy of comrades.h.i.+p in which it is aimed to make each generation improve upon its predecessor. In the church, as it has moved from the family ritual at the domestic fireside to the self-chosen altar of each wors.h.i.+pper in the world's cathedrals, the reactionaries have held on to "the faith once delivered to the saints" and the progressive minds have moved to some new prophecy of the truth and right; until to-day, as Professor Coe well says, "the aim of the modern church is to give education in the art of brotherhood," and to evoke "faith in a fatherly G.o.d and in a human destiny that outreaches all the accidents of our frailty." In the industrial order, still in the trial stage of conflict between the fixed status of the "hand" and the "master" and the contract of equal partners in a cooperative enterprise, the movement is steadily toward the social requirement of equality, justice, and good-will. In the state we have achieved mechanical expression of complete democracy. We still lack, and in our own country woefully lack, the "spirit within the wheels" that can move with power toward an actual government by the people, for the people, and truly of the people. Yet by fire and sword and through blood and suffering the handwriting of equality, justice, and fraternity has been set in our Const.i.tutions and Bills of Right. What remains to be done is the socializing of the political mechanisms. That means simply that we shall learn to live our democracy and be no longer content to merely write it in law. The difficulty now is not so much to get a good statement of democratic right as to make it work effectively in common action. This fact makes it of doubtful wisdom that men and women so often concentrate effort on the eighteenth-century doctrinaire position of appeal for Const.i.tutional Amendments and blanket state legislation as if of themselves these could secure actual personal liberty and social welfare. The objection that some forward-looking persons have to the demand of the "National Woman's Party," so called, for a Federal Amendment that shall "abolish all s.e.x discriminations in law" is not that its principle is too radical, but that its method is too antiquated.

The business of the present and the immediate future is to so adjust the family life to "two heads" as to keep love and to balance duties.

The next job is to adjust the family order itself to a contract system of industry that gives each member of the family a free and often a separating access to daily work and to its return in wages or salary, in such manner as to retain family unity and mutual aid while giving freedom and opportunity for each of its members. The pressing political duty is to use the new voters, the women recently enfranchised, for needed emanc.i.p.ation from partisan and selfish political despotism in the interest of effective choices for the public good. The ever-growing demand of the school is for some translation of freedom of self-development in terms of respect for social order and in the spirit of social service. The family life, in the United States, at least, stands not so much in need of manifestoes of equality of rights between men and women as of delicate and discriminating adjustments of that equality to the social demands upon husbands and wives and upon fathers and mothers. This book aims to suggest some of the changes in external customs and inherited ways of living which may lead toward a firmer hold upon social idealism within the family, as well as within all other inherited inst.i.tutions, while new bases of democratic freedom are being firmly installed.

=Coveted Uses of the Book.=--This volume is intended to meet the needs of college and teacher-training school students; of university extension cla.s.ses; of study groups in Women's Clubs, Consumers'

Leagues, Leagues of Women Voters and Church Cla.s.ses. It is also hoped that it may form the basis for private study by groups within the home.

The book is written with a poignant sense of the breaking up of old social foundations in the agony and terror of the Great War. It is sent forth with a keen understanding of the spirit of youth that to-day challenges every inherited inst.i.tution and ideal, even to the bone and marrow of the church, the state, the industrial order, the educative process, and even the family itself. It issues from an abiding faith that "above all things Truth beareth away the victory"

and hence that no fearless inquiry can harm the essential values of life. It confesses a clear trust in "the Spirit that led us. .h.i.ther and is leading us onward." It would sound a call to hold all that has dowered the race at the sources of life sacred and of worth. It would echo all that bids us move onward to higher and better things.

The greatest ambition herein recorded is to serve as one who opens doors of insight into the House of the Interpreter.

--THE AUTHOR.

JANUARY, 1923.

THE FAMILY AND ITS MEMBERS

CHAPTER I

THE FAMILY

"The family is the heart's fatherland; the fatherland is the cradle of humanity."--MAZZINI.

"The family has two functions; as a smaller group it affords opportunity for eliciting qualities of affection and character which cannot be displayed in a larger group; and in the second place it is a training for future members of the larger group in the qualities of disposition and character which are essential to citizens.h.i.+p. Marriage converts an attachment between man and woman into a deliberate, permanent, responsible, intimate union for a common end of mutual good. Modern society requires that the husband and wife contemplate lifelong companions.h.i.+p, and the affection between husband and wife is enriched by the relation of parents to the children which are their care. The end of the family is not economic profit but mutual aid and the continuance and progress of the race."--PROFESSOR TUFTS, in _Ethics_, by Dewey and Tufts.

=Social Work and Family Conservation.=--"By whatever name they may be called, the most essential elements of social work are those which seek to conserve the family life; to strengthen or supplement the home; to give children in foster homes or elsewhere the care of which tragic misfortune has deprived them in their natural homes; to provide income necessary in the proper care of their children; to restore broken homes; to discover and, if possible, remove destructive influences which interfere with normal home life and the reasonable discharge of conjugal and parental obligations. The inst.i.tutions which exist for the benefit of those individuals who have no home or who need care of a kind that cannot well be supplied in the home, only emphasize the importance of conserving family life when its essential elements are present."--EDWARD T. DEVINE.

"Human nature has achieved the consciousness that existence has an aim. Human life, therefore, is a mission; the mission of reaching that aim, by incessant activity upon the path toward it and perpetual warfare against the obstacles opposed to it."--MAZZINI.

The Home:

"For something that abode endued With temple-like repose; an air Of life's kind purposes pursued With ordered freedom, sweet and fair; A tent, pitched in a world not right, It seemed, whose inmates, every one, On tranquil faces bore the light Of duties beautifully done."

--COVENTRY PATMORE.

=The Experience of the Past.=--By many experiments, over many differing "folk-ways," the modern family has arrived. We name it now "monogamic," and mean by the name the union of one man and one woman, in aim at least for life, and their children. Whereas once it was the rule of a tribe or clan which determined every detail of s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p, a rule represented either by the mother or the father, it is now an individualistic choice of two adult persons only, socially legalized by a required certificate and ceremony. Whereas once it was the basis of all social order and mutual aid, it is now one of several inst.i.tutions inherited from the past, and is itself subject to the state, which is the chief heir to our social inheritance. The family, however, is now, as it has always been, the interior, vital, and so far indispensable social relations.h.i.+p, beginning, as it does, at first hand the training of each individual toward members.h.i.+p in society-at-large. In the past, under the mother-rule, the social elements of the family were emphasized, since her power was one delegated by the group of which she and her children were a part and closely related to peaceful ways and to primitive industrial arts. Under the father-rule, the political and legal elements of the family were emphasized, since his was an autocratic and personal control of wife and children, even of adult sons, and in many cases of his own mother, and marked the beginning and worked toward the power of the modern state. In all cases, however, it was as a representative of the group-ideal and the group-control that the parents held sway over the family; and if the family is to persist in the future as an inst.i.tution it will hold its authority over individual lives as trustee of society-at-large. Name, line of inheritance, rights and duties of one member toward other members and to the family group as a whole, must all be determined in the last a.n.a.lysis by the "mores" of the people and the time concerned.

=New Ideals Affecting the Family.=--To-day the ideal of equality of rights for men and women, and the ideal of ministration to childhood's needs, are stronger than the ideal of family control. The social demand is, therefore, for standardization of family life and of child-care on a high plane of physical, mental, and moral development of each individual life rather than for an autocratic representation of the power of what Professor James called "the collectivity that owns us." Hence certain problems which have never before been clear in social consciousness are now arising to enter all debates on family stability and family success.

=The Heads.h.i.+p of the Father.=--During the middle ages of our civilization and for centuries of our later past the heads.h.i.+p of the family rested securely in the father. Now the ideal of "Two heads in council; Two beside the hearth; Two in the tangled business of the world" is working toward democratization of the family. This leads toward a legal status and an economic adjustment in which the relation of husband and wife may be equalized toward each other and toward their children. In this new process, which is a part of the general movement we call democracy, there are special difficulties of modification peculiar to the family relation. The monogamic ideal and practice demands permanency, solidarity of interest and unity of control both within and without the family circle, at least until all the children of a marriage have reached maturity. The ideal of the rightful individuation of women, and even of minor children, works against that legal solidarity and obvious unity. The old way of obtaining these elements of family stability, a method still in vogue in many places and still defended by some persons, was to place all power of control in the hands of the husband and father, and thus make the wife a perpetual minor and leave the children wholly under patriarchal bondage. The modern ideal of women as ent.i.tled to self-owners.h.i.+p and self-control even when married, and the social need, just beginning to be understood, for women as for men to fully develop their powers and capacities militates against the legal heads.h.i.+p of the father. To-day there is a demand, growing in insistency, that we accept the right of each member of the family circle to individual development and work toward its realization.

There is also the demand that we retain inviolate the social means for successful family life. Some do not hesitate to say that to fulfil both these demands is not within human power.

=Is It Possible to Democratize the Family?=--The witty writer who declares that "the democratization of the family is impossible, since the family is by nature an autocracy and ruled by the worst disposition in it," is not without endorsers. There are also those, more serious in intent, who claim that the family as an inherited inst.i.tution is by virtue of its inmost quality inimical to the personal freedom of its members, and hence that the state, which is now standardizing child-care, must undertake the practical duties involved and leave both parents free to change marital relations.h.i.+p at will before or after the birth of children and maintain their separate bachelor or spinster freedom.

=Mating and Parenthood.=--This latter view is stated definitely by one writer who believes that a new morality will "separate entirely, mating from parenthood" in the interest of a more effective social arrangement--"mating," or the free union of a man and a woman in s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p, to be in that case "solely a private matter with which no one but the parties involved have any concern." "Parenthood,"

on the other hand, having relation, as it must, to society, requires, so this writer declares, from either the father or the mother, as inclination and capacity indicate, or from both parents if such should be the wish of both, a "contract with the state" binding to an upbringing of the child in accordance with accepted standards of physical, mental, moral, and vocational demands. Such a contract with the state in respect to child-care and the training of youth might give far better results, be it confessed, than follow the utterly ignorant and careless breeding of the young of the human race by those on lowest levels of thought and action. Few, however, think such a contract would meet all essentials of child-development.

=What Is the Modern Ideal in Child-care?=--What is the ideal of those most advanced in knowledge of childhood's needs and most sincere in devotion to the welfare and happiness of the young? It is certainly not one which ignores or minimizes the influence of the private home or one which includes the belief that one parent, however wise or good, can do as much for a child as two parents working in harmony over a long period of years can accomplish.

Nor can the influence of such a proposed separation of mating and parenthood upon the s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p itself be ignored in any proposed new ways of living together. Some of the critics of the family, as we know it, may put "duty" in quotation marks when dealing with s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p in the effort to put "love" on the throne, but experience shows that in all the intimate relations.h.i.+ps of life some stay from without the individual desire is needed to restrain from impulsive change and lessen frictional expression of temperamental weakness. On reason and a sense of obligation are based all successful human arrangements, and these need social support.

=Modern Ideals in s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p.=--To so separate mating and parenthood as to make it the business of no one but the two chiefly concerned when or how often such mating became a personal experience, and to make it a matter of social indifference whether one or two parents contracted with society for the right upbringing of the child or children involved (with no troublesome questions asked about either parent not in evidence in the contract), would certainly blur the social outline of the family, as we know it, to the point of legal nullification. There might, indeed, grow up in such an imagined condition a form of contract between two persons mating, as well as one between parents and state, in respect to parenthood's social responsibilities, and where such personal contract was broken redress from the courts might be sought and obtained. The effect, however, of such a plan as that proposed would inevitably be to leave the n.o.bler, the more loving and less selfish of the men and women involved, more surely even than is now the case, the victims of the weaker, the more grasping, and the more selfish of the twain.

=Ellen Key and Her Gospel.=--Indeed, the high priestess of the gospel of freedom from legal bondage in s.e.x-relation, Ellen Key, declares that "a higher culture in love can be attained only by correlating self-control with love and parental responsibility," a correlation she believes would "follow as a consequence when love and parental responsibility were made the sole conditions of s.e.x-relations." She also says that "in all cases where there is an affinity of souls and the sympathy of friends.h.i.+p, love is what it always was and always will be, the cooperation of the father with the mother in the education of the children as well as the cooperation of the mother with the father in all great social works." She thus links her ideal of true freedom for the choices of love with social obligations and hence again with what is best in inherited family life.

In addition, however, to the claim that love should be freed from legal restraints in the interest of self-expression and self-development (whether or not from Ellen Key's high standpoint of parental responsibility) we have another attack upon the legal autonomy of the family, as we know it, in the demand of some radical feminists that "illegitimacy should be abolished."

=What is Meant by This Demand?=--A crusade against all s.e.x-a.s.sociation that may result in children born out of wedlock is understandable but is surely not the counsel of perfection in s.e.x-control intended by those making this demand. What is meant seems rather that we should take ground against any legal distinction between the status of children born within and those born outside of legal marriage. What would that be likely to mean in respect to the monogamic family? The hard conditions attaching to both unmarried motherhood and unfathered childhood, often in the past wholly cruel and unsocial, have been much ameliorated during the last fifty years and largely through the efforts of those who held firmly to the value of legal marriage and the accepted family system in general. Laws have been pa.s.sed and firmly executed to find the s.h.i.+rking father and bring him to marriage with the woman involved; or if such marriage is not possible or feasible to compel him to make financial contribution toward the support and education of the child.

=The Legitimation of Children Born Out of Wedlock.=--If marriage occurs, then the child otherwise illegitimate may come within the legal family through appropriate laws which the most conservative now advocate. In such cases the belated acceptance within the family bond does not count seriously against the child. If marriage does not occur, and there are many cases of irregular s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p where that is not the right solution of the problems involved in illegitimacy, then the unmarried mother is helped to establish herself with her child where cruel stigma and useless curiosity may be best avoided. To aid in her protection she is encouraged by many agencies and persons to take the t.i.tle of "Mrs.," since that is a conventional term at best and may be given according to age (as in the older custom) or come to attach itself to motherhood as justly as to wifehood. More and more society is reaching out through law and wise philanthropy to fasten mutual responsibility for child-care and nurture upon both parents even where they are not legally married.

This movement must go on until the handicap of the child born out of wedlock is reduced to its lowest possible terms.[1]

=Philanthropic Tendencies Respect Legal Marriage.=--These tendencies, however, are not in the direction, intentionally at least, of making legal condition and status in respect to name, inheritance of family property from a father whose parental relations.h.i.+p is not legally established, and public recognition of parenthood, identical in the case of children born within and without the legal family circle. Is such an identical status and condition desirable? If so, in what way could this goal be accomplished?

If men and women become fathers and mothers without benefit of clergy or state license and later marry, then the children born before and those born after the wedding ceremony may, usually do, and always should, become one flock. In many countries where legal marriage is difficult because of expense involved or distance from officials, such cases often occur and with no apparent social harm where there is real affection and true loyalty between the men and women involved. Many illegitimate conceptions are similarly taken care of by the enforced or a.s.sisted marriage of the parties concerned just before the birth of the child. In many cases, however, in our own country doubtless the great majority, the father concerned has an illicit connection with some girl quite outside his own social circle and later, as in the famous "Kallikak" case, marries a woman of his own cla.s.s and has a family of recognized children. What would be advised in such a case by those advocating the legal abolition of illegitimacy? Should a searching investigation of the whole previous life of every prospective bridegroom be made, and wherever a previous relations.h.i.+p can be found which involves parenthood a legal prohibition work automatically to prevent a second relations.h.i.+p? This seems to be the plan proposed by Mrs. Edith Houghton Hooker in her recent book, _The Laws of s.e.x_, as in her program of "measures designed to minimize extra-marital s.e.x relations.h.i.+ps and to check the commercialization of vice," she lays down the principle "the common parentage of an illegitimate child to const.i.tute marriage or if either of the parents was previously married, bigamy." This would, of course, carry out her next item of the social program, namely, "place the illegitimate child on the same plane as the legitimate," but that plane would be a very low one in the cases that would legally become those of bigamy. In the case of very unequal partners in an illicit s.e.x-relations.h.i.+p, a legal union that was based on the fact of equal responsibility for a child born out of wedlock, and made a legal necessity only because of that mutual relations.h.i.+p, could surely be good neither for the men and women involved nor for any child or children thus legitimatized by force of arms, as it were.