The Modern Family

The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us, at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they persisted, they would be fed by force.

Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves. If one could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.

In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life in the building up of the family institution. To-day, however, family life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much nobler to care for other people’s children in a social settlement, or in a school, than to care for one’s own in a home? Why should women mass themselves together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as suffragettes? We hear of women’s work, of women’s careers, of women’s clubs, associations and parties, of women’s interests, movements, causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?

Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the second is the nature of the institution of marriage.

A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. Sexual love is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic in a word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.

From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.

Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past, it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than common race and the same general social position. With simple personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.

But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions, industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her, qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a score of his personal needs in another personality.

In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.

A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of mediaeval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism, culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security. They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of men and women who wished to live together and rear children.

But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords; even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat down the older political institutions with their swords. Finally the movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the industrial institution which shall give us freedom and security in our work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.

Of all these older institutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this institution and strengthened its resisting power. The church increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the family and made it the standard for respectability.

Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible to students of institutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148 feeble-minded children to curse the state.

Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul and body? How can this student understand woman’s economic dependence, her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order for legalized rape, under the name of restitution of marital rights?

Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediaeval institution. So far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.

Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President Eliot has called “the conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex” must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with Ellen Key that “In love humanity has found the form of selection most conducive to the ennoblement of the species."

In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the older theological conscience. We must recognize the infamy of knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be allowed to live together unless they are unsexed. Justice to future generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.

Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions. Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for two young lovers to live together outside them.

As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view, still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany and England, is that the woman’s duty is to complement the husband. He does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the home, pray and wait.

This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of promise.

In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that the peasant of the family, the Hausfrau, shall join with them and dethrone the husband so that all shall share life’s responsibilities together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their equal share of opportunity.

But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete, and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life, the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.

In their reactions against old abuses, writers like Mrs. Gilman or Olive Schreiner try to create a world for women alone, on the political analogy. Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure political freedom, these leaders would turn to that nebulous creation of social reformers, the state; and it should subsidize the mothers in their periods of need. But there are only two ingredients out of which a nation can be formed: one is women; the other is men. Shall woman in her time of need turn to a state made up of other women, or to a state made up of men? Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is to depend on men, she might as well depend on man. No, in the political revolutions we broke up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations; but in this domestic revolution we are breaking up and must readjust the fundamental unit of life.

Men and women must live and work together in the domestic unit, and they cannot do the same things. Nature has specialized their functions and each must supplement the other. Even in Germany, the Hausfrau is not going back to an exclusive service of children, cooking and church; nor in America will man continue to be merely the breadwinner and the father of children. With the enlightenment that is on the way, we shall see that husband and wife can have no antagonistic differences. Each profits in all that really benefits the other; and slowly we shall shape a new institution based on absolute equality, and at the same time on complementary service.

In this adjustment, legal forms can help or hinder; but they cannot prevent nor compel the final action of human beings. Sex instinct is stronger than any human law. The law can, however, help us in regulating conditions of marriage, in settling disputes about common property and children, and in determining how the contract may be set aside when that becomes necessary.

The right of the church to sanction or regulate the family, rests in a belief that marriage involves spiritual changes and obligations that make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable, and to be administered only by the church, like the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief resting not in eugenic considerations, nor in the human needs of the persons involved, but in theological dogmas with which this chapter cannot deal. Hence we shall maintain that the church has no more right to control matters of marriage than it has to interfere in business or political relations.

The state, on the other hand, meaning by the state the whole community, must concern itself with the marriage of its individuals. The commonwealth must have future citizens, and these should be strong and intelligent; hence it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If parents die, or fail in obligations, the community must care for the children. In case of disagreement between married people, the courts of the community must settle disputes about children and property; hence the state must know when a man and woman determine to live together. The regulation of marriage certainly belongs to the state, that is, to all of us.

Marriage should therefore always be a matter of definite and open record in the archives of the community. It should also be advertised, through the public record, for a considerable time, preferably six months or a year, before consummation, that the past experiences of contracting parties may be looked up by interested friends or officials, and the marriage of the unfit prevented; and so that mere caprice and passion shall have time to realize their mistake and turn away. The form which the final ceremony of marriage will take can well be left to the tastes and traditions of the contracting parties.

The question of rights in children, or in property acquired after marriage, should be settled by the state; and it is hard to see how it can ever be settled satisfactorily except on a basis of equal partnership. No man should be contented with a woman to bear and train his children, and create a social atmosphere for his home, who is not worth half of what he makes; and the same holds true of a woman. So with regard to children, while one parent or the other may, under certain conditions, be given the direction of the child’s life, it is hard to imagine any circumstances that would justify society in refusing either father or mother the right frequently to see his child.

Since marriages must be contracted in youth and since inexperienced people must make mistakes and the wisest must sometimes change, it will sometimes happen that men and women must face the possibility of separation. The problem of divorce is very difficult. In less than twenty years, from 1887 to 1906, 945,625 divorces were granted in the United States; so that probably to-day there are nearly one million divorced people in this country. Generally speaking, the divorce rate increases as one goes westward. In 1900, the State of Washington led the country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. Japan alone leads us with 215, while England and Wales had only 2. England grants divorce only for infidelity; and on the man’s side it must be accompanied by cruelty; all divorce cases must be tried in London, and the expense, never less than two hundred dollars, is prohibitive for the poor. Meantime, England grants many separation orders; and it seems sure that the Royal Commission, which has been taking evidence for the past three years, will favor a freer system of divorce.

While divorce is increasing steadily all over the world, and most rapidly in the most intelligent and progressive sections, the subject is so bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices that it is difficult to secure any intelligent thinking on the subject. Thus, most people think Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, are places of free divorce, but the fact is that twenty-one other States have a higher divorce rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a higher rate than Nevada. So, too, the impression that divorces spring from hasty action is certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those for which we have records there had been a separation of more than three years before the divorce was granted. The idea that people generally seek divorces that they may marry some one else seems also unfounded, since in the cases for which we have records, less than forty per cent. remarry within a year.

There are three main objections which one hears urged against free divorce. The first is that organized society rests on the family, and with free divorce anarchy would ensue. In reply, it is pointed out that the same argument was used to support kings, aristocracies and a universal church. All these have been set aside, in many parts of the earth, and society seems even more stable than before. The love of men and women is probably more powerful and less in need of adventitious support than either patriotism or religion.

In the second place, it is claimed that children will suffer when parents separate. It is replied that this is true, but they were already suffering when parents had ceased to love each other. The fact that children are involved in only two out of five divorces seems to indicate that children hold parents together when the opposition is not too strong; and when a separation occurs, those who favor divorce claim that a child is better off with either father or mother alone than with both if love is absent.

In the third place, it is pointed out that often only one desires the divorce and that this brings tragedy to the other life. In reply it is claimed that many of the tragedies of life have always gathered around the love of men and women, that when marriage is declined tragedy often follows, and that compelling a person to live with some one whom he does not love, and may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.

In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim that their proposals are profoundly conservative, that they are seeking to bring marriage back to its eternally binding realities. They say that under our present conditions of restricted divorce, we have wide-spread prostitution, constant irregularities that are tolerated and condoned, and a million divorced people, some prevented from remarrying and all socially ostracized, so that the whole group is a dangerous element in our midst. These advocates claim that with free divorce, granted some months after the determination to separate had been registered in the public records, the love of men and women and their mutual love for their children would be free to bind families together in permanent trust and open honesty; and that with all excuse for irregularity absent, the unfaithful man or woman would sink to the level of unfaithfulness in business or political life. With freedom to readjust their lives, if they preferred to keep what they had and get what they could, they would simply take their place among thieves and liars, and most of them would disappear.

All transitions are hard, and this one in which we are involved is most difficult of all; but no one can study the conditions around him without seeing that change is inevitable and that we are not going back to our earlier ideals. At the same time, no one can read the singularly scholarly and fair-minded presentations of Ellen Key without feeling that she has a vision of the future.

With regard to the nature of the material plant in which the family should live, there are also two widely different ideals struggling for favor in the public mind, and for realization in practice. The one ideal, while recognizing the changes necessitated by modern conditions, would still seek to retain those features which have been supposed to make for family privacy, the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. The other would frankly accept our changed conditions, and pass on to the larger groups of socialized buildings, with common kitchens, day nurseries, and parks.

This question has been discussed in the chapter on industry, and it will be considered again in the following chapter. Meantime there can be no doubt that love is reticent so far as the outside world is concerned; and domesticity must always demand a large measure of privacy. It still remains to be proved that this can be secured, in the absence of a private kitchen, nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to need the personal care and constant love of mothers, and women seem to need a long period of loving and caring for a family to round out a deeply significant life.

To summarize this chapter we may say that the realization of romantic love, under conditions of domesticity, is necessary for men and women, and for the well-being of the race. Our present marriage system is defective, and needs to be corrected through the creation of a eugenic conscience. It should be taken out of the hands of the church and made more difficult by the state. Women’s property rights should be defined and safeguarded, and men and women should never live together when they are repugnant to each other.