The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

Monogamic Marriage Does Not Work Inerrantly.—Certainly no one can contend that monogamic marriage has worked inerrantly to give women who are "born mothers" a chance for their natural career, or to keep from physical motherhood within legal marriage all the women unfit for the spiritual tasks of parenthood. It is certain that in present conditions many women most needed for the transmission of both physical and social inheritance in finest form are side-tracked from the central roadway of life, and the race suffers thereby.

Any custom, however, which should make it a negligible matter whether or not a permanent "houseband" were enlisted with a "housewife" in building a home in which to place a child desired must tend toward a reversion, not an advance, in social organization. Or so it seems to many students of the evolution of the family.

The mother and child made the first social grouping in which love and trust could work. The father, as we know him, is a later asset of social progress. He has taken into the home many things we want now to get rid of, as, for example, a social tendency toward masculine monopolies. His genius for organization in political and economic fields has in many ways worked against the right alignment of men and women in family relations. But can we do without the father altogether, save for a brief hour of service as a "biologic necessity"? Still more, can we have for mothers that "calm and repose" which Ellen Key bespeaks for them unless they have fathers of efficiency and character to help them in their peculiar task of life-creation? Is not the alternative to the father's partnership in family life the creation of a class of "state mothers" or the social endowment of all mothers by public grant?

New Demand that Motherhood Have Social Support.—In point of fact, all the demands for new freedom in respect to motherhood rest primarily upon the recognition by society-at-large of a claim upon it, financial as well as spiritual, for the benefit of all who are allowed to be mothers, in right of their own fitness for the function. And this recognition of the social value of mothers is emphasized by many who hold firmly to the monogamic family. It is not clear that any sweeping changes away from the private family should be made to meet a condition that may be changed by less drastic means.

Local Discrepancies in Numbers of Men and of Women.—Fit men and women are not always together in the same place. To have more men in a given locality than can possibly have wives or more women than can possibly marry under the monogamic system is to derange its workings. Is it conceivable that we shall always be so stupid and clumsy in economic adjustment that such conditions shall continue, now that we are able to be more easily mobile and flexible every decade? The mere mechanical maladjustment caused by serious discrepancies in numbers of the two sexes; in cities and in older countries more women, in manufacture and pioneer agriculture more men; certainly creates serious conditions. Social engineering is needed for remedy. We may not, as so long ago was done in Virginia, transport hundreds of "attractive damsels" from crowded towns, where women most do congregate, to a new country, to be eagerly accepted wives on landing from the ships. We are told, however, that many girls are being assisted to emigrate from England to places where their service is needed and where there are so many surplus men that they do marry in short order. We shall find that nature and economic adjustments will unite to more and more even up the two sides of life. It is a sinister condition of modern life that forbids early marriage to so many men and all chance of suitable marriage to so many women who really desire that relationship with all their hearts. We must go about its remedy with open eyes, and from frankly accepted reasons, for the sake of better family conditions.

The Increasing Tendency of Women Toward Celibate Life.—There is, however, another condition, many-sided and complex, often operating upon the persons most involved unconsciously and seldom treated with clarity or frankness, which works against the family as an institution. This condition is the increasing tendency of many of the ablest women to marry very late or to refuse to marry at all. These are not the women who feel defrauded that they are not mothers in their own person, still less that life has cheated them in not furnishing a husband. They are usually those who in youth began some specialized form of vocational service which holds their interest and leads toward pecuniary profit and social recognition.

They are the modern spinsters, happy and busy, who often feed their motherly instincts by caring for other people's children and feel a sense of relief that it is a voluntary service, which they may rightly indulge in vacations, and not a bond that never releases from duty. They are the maiden aunts who spend affection and money upon the families of their relatives; who help their younger brothers and sisters through college; who take care of the aged and invalid in the family connection, and act often as stay and prop to all the weaker and more burdened of their kin. What many families would do without this type of unmarried woman is hard to tell. They are often grateful for their release from wearing domestic cares and enjoy their sense of power in general serviceableness to those they love while at the same time appreciating with keen satisfaction their own joy of craftsmanship in some chosen profession. Except for a brief hour now and then, when sister has a new baby or brother takes a new wife, they feel anything but troubled over their condition of single blessedness until, perhaps, a premonition of lonely old age stirs regret.

The Demand of Eugenists.—From the point of view of the eugenists, who demand more fecundity on the higher and less on the lower levels of life, one of the most sinister of all influences inimical to family life is this large and increasing band of superior and happy single women who are not even discontented and make no demand for any closer touch with life than is now given them. If it is bad for the family for a large number of women unable to find suitable permanent mates to be so eager for motherhood that they claim social permission for that public service whatever their marital position, it may be still worse for the family for a large number of highly superior women to cease to care greatly for intimate comradeship with men or for the actual experience of motherhood. Many women working and living in solitary fashion until too old to risk the chances of marriage, and able to find highest comradeship and largest comfort in other women's companionship, have been so held by family burdens in youth that this result has been inevitable. Society has, therefore, a task to prevent the weight of past generations, falling now so heavily upon some young men and upon far more young women, from operating against the well-being of the generations to come. We should make it our social business to share more justly the burdens due to old age and chronic invalidism.

Women Can Not be Forced Back to Compulsory Marriage.—It is too late in the day to pass laws forbidding women from gaining economic freedom and social power in professional careers so that all the best of them shall again be obliged to marry as a "means of support." Few persons would do this if they could. But we can and should make haste to bring together, as the State Universities of our country do so helpfully, those who should be the fathers and mothers of the future, in that period of life when love will take chances for the future. "Propinquity," the old adage declares, is the "best incentive to courtship," and it should be made to work more effectively.

In our own country, eugenists may be comforted to learn, it is still fashionable to marry, even in the best families. We are told by our census that more people marry in the thousand and marry young in the United States than in other countries.[2] And although it may be claimed that the older Americans and the finest types do not reproduce so freely as social well-being requires, there is much hope that movements of population, so much freer here than elsewhere among the educated and competent, will lead to better sex-adjustments and to the absorbing of more first-class women in family life.