Woman in Modern Society Part 9

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 pa.s.sion 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 partners.h.i.+p. 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 circ.u.mstances 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.[54] 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 Was.h.i.+ngton led the country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. j.a.pan 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.

[54] See _Statistics of Marriage and Divorce_, prepared by the Bureau of the Census, beginning in 1906, and published in 1910.

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 advent.i.tious 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 prost.i.tution, 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[55] without feeling that she has a vision of the future.

[55] _The Century of the Child._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907.

_Love and Marriage_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911. _Love and Ethics._ New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1911.

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 pa.s.s on to the larger groups of socialized buildings, with common kitchens, day nurseries, and parks.[56]

[56] See _Woman and Economics_, by CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; and the writings of H.G. WELLS.

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.

X

Family Life as a Vocation

The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the real significance of their lives while they are still living. Life's values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily. If not nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and significant life is its own justification; and in a last a.n.a.lysis philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure, which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always held before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own justification.

We have maintained throughout this volume that complete self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and women, when either lives alone. On every side of their natures they are complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of their love. "There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it." It is in this unit, under the stress of s.e.xual pa.s.sion and maternal love, that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin.

Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to the home as their source.

But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the antagonistic interests of men and women. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman. The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life.

And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when two trade one must lose. The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who partic.i.p.ate in it rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, a.s.sociation and cooperation lies strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and compet.i.tion lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid and fickle.

In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for men and women alike. The political life was the family life; each family was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity. But, because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted.

Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have seen, to define and secure all our later inst.i.tutions until it has become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost always considered from the point of view of national and industrial efficiencies.

To-day men and women are confronted by two tempters which constantly lure them away from the complete living of the family; one is work, and the other is comfort. With the majority of people in our modern industrial democracies work uses up the hours and the energy of life. We have pa.s.sed into a time when our habitual material needs are great, and the products of work are shamelessly diverted to the excessive uses of comparatively few individuals and groups. Hence millions of workers march along the narrow dark roads that lead through factories and farms to the grave. Only little patches of their nervous systems are ever used, but all their energy flows through these sections day after day, leaving their lives dull and empty.

Marriage for these workers means decreased earning power for the woman, with increased needs for the family, especially when the children come.

As one watches the procession of young factory and shop women, with Sunday finery and some leisure, pa.s.sing over into draggled factory mothers, with no finery and no leisure, one marvels at the strength of the forces with which nature drives them to their destiny. And yet, even with these hopeless workers, marriage and children mark the heights of life.

With others, who are economically freer, work has become an obsession. A Charles Darwin or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces to shaping facts into science; our industrial leaders mint their hours into dollars; our reformers give up their lives that social conditions may be changed; our society leaders trade life for triumphs. Meantime we all know, or would know if we stopped to consider, that we are here to live life fully and significantly day by day. But domesticity takes time and effort, and so the hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of success until he or she becomes a machine for manufacturing generalizations, for painting pictures, for performing surgical operations or for merely getting money. The richest woman in America said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.

As industry drives the ma.s.s of workers and specialists away from life's deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more abundantly comes only at the price of vigorous living; and love travels always in company with anxiety. It would be well, says Cicero, to have children, were it not for the fear of losing them. Let a man apply this principle to wife, friends, possessions and enthusiasm in general and life sinks into utter worthlessness.

The love of ease among women is in a measure independent of the emanc.i.p.ation movement, but the entry of great numbers of young women into lines of independent livelihood has placed them in a condition where the ideals of a materialistic and commercial civilization appeal to them with great force. Many of them have been liberally educated and are living lives of independence. They lodge in flats or boarding houses where they have no responsibilities for the routine work connected with daily living. They carry their own latch-keys; and no one interferes with their friends.h.i.+ps or their pleasures. They read the books they like, attend the theaters that appeal to them, and avoid people who bore them. One can easily understand why these young women hesitate before abandoning their easy conditions for the uncertain economic position of wife and mother, with a man whose career lies in the future. And yet here, as everywhere, one must lose one's life to gain it.

What then does daily a.s.sociation of a man and woman who belong together do for them? It gives gladness and peace, and these are fundamental conditions for all good and healthful living. It gives incentive to effort, for a man or woman dares not fail before the one he or she loves; but, in case of failure, it gives comfort and support, for love understands and credits intent and effort as highly as achievement. It complements the powers, for it gives four eyes, four hands and two minds with but one aim. And in this it does not simply multiply by two, but the blended powers are far more than two times one. It calls into activity all the gracious, artistic and altruistic powers of the soul.

Surely these are gifts for which we may well forego some material comforts, may well work, and even face anxieties unafraid.

Each part of the human unit must educate the other to a realization of the fulness of life. This education is not entirely dependent on physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive creature, whether he be a mediaeval saint, or she a militant suffragette, or they both be simply commonplace egoists.

Because married life is so perfect when it finds its highest levels, it is capable of sinking to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and cynicism when realization fails. The G.o.d to whom n.o.blest souls aspire in hours of deepest exaltation, is the G.o.d invoked by the ribald drunkard when he curses his comrade. The family life we are discussing is the subject of most of the vulgar and indecent jokes of the disappointed and the unfit. The earth which nourishes the nations, merely soils the boots of the boor who unthinkingly lives on her bounty.

On the working side the life of the family has an evil record for pettiness and monotony, but much of this is due to wrong comparisons. A woman who does her own housework would presumably have to work in any case. Is the work of the family more petty or monotonous than the work of the factory, shop or office? Surely the woman who spends her days looking after the details of furnis.h.i.+ng a house and keeping it clean, of providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends, neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required for teaching or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will relieve the routine of housework. And if the family has means to hire help, the wife has a position from which she can exercise social and political power superior to that of the foot-loose celibate.

Meantime, the housework grows steadily simpler and less exacting, even with the growing complexity of our modern life. Most of the primitive industries have left the home, and products come from the factory ready to use. Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved cooking conditions and many domestic inventions of our day are keeping housework well abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.

The fact that domestic servants are scarce and unwilling to do general housework, in no way disproves the soundness of these conclusions. The wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing no others, is working for those she loves, under conditions of free initiative. The general servant is working for those who will not even admit her right to partic.i.p.ate in their social life, and instead of freedom in her industrial life, she must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices of an untrained mistress. Well-trained mistresses, who know how to work themselves and who have a democratic sense of human values, seldom have trouble in securing able servants, even in this transition time when the shops and factories are calling so loudly to working girls.

No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the handling of a family. Women spend most of the household money to-day, at least in lower and middle-cla.s.s homes. To use wisely the family pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order. Problems in economics, sanitation, food-values and aesthetics confront the housewife at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave need not work as a slave;" and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.

But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it.

Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers.

To the man, family life, of the kind we are considering, brings a vital connection with the past and the future. Reputation, possessions, friends, all become deeply significant when a man becomes a link in the generations of men. In establis.h.i.+ng his material home, and modifying it to the changing conditions of the family; in building up a social setting for the group; in projecting his work and his service into the future, he is held to highest standards by the fact that he is working with the partner of his choice, and for interests that are in harmony with the const.i.tution of the universe.

Of the greater physical health of married people there can be no doubt.

Statistics all show the greater longevity of married people, and insurance companies recognize it. The celibate type of physical degeneration is so well differentiated that it can generally be recognized even among strangers, at least after forty.[57] On the moral side, too, very few criminals are found among married people.

[57] ARNOLD LORAND, _Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old Age and its Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures._ F.A. Davis Co., 1911.

If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even intellectual life may s.h.i.+ft to a higher level than was before possible.

With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized.

The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.

No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the intellectual life as growing up with one's children.

On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods, vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection, undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and libraries--everything that touches the social well-being--touches him vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away.

The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the old and the young.

Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders among emanc.i.p.ated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom bear them gaily along. Generally better educated than the men of their own cla.s.s, habituated to a personal expenditure which would correspond with a large family expenditure, their intelligence prevents their falling desperately in love with the men whom they might marry. But in the thirties they have visions of the future which are deeply disturbing; and in the forties they face the tragedy of a lonely old age. Some men and women there must always be whose lives lack the fulfilment of family life because of ill health or the accidents of personal relations. But most women, if they are willing to pay the same price for a significant family life that they so gladly pay for professional success, will find the way open to live all of life. Why is it that women count it an honor to work and starve for an art, but dishonor to undergo privations for their children? All that is here said of women may be said of men, but the man's period of family life is longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely old age with him seems less overwhelming.