The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

Are any of these essential elements of motherhood's ancient devotion to child-life lifted wholly from her obligation? Careful study of the family needs and conditions, and the effect upon them of modern social control and social organization, indicates that not one of these ancient obligations is taken bodily from the modern mother's service.

The Protective Function.—The protective function has indeed been considered for many centuries peculiarly the father's duty. Ever since man was bound to family obligations he has been charged with repelling enemy attacks upon the group of which his own family was a part and with the task of standing guard over wife and child as against all physical dangers. Man has developed under this social pressure a sense of chivalry and a tendency to "save women and children first" which give noble examples of courage and self-sacrifice to fire the imagination of each new generation. Has the father-office developed such many-sided and adequate protective service to childhood that mothers have been able to "lay down their arms" and rest content in the knowledge that their children are shielded from every danger? It seems not. In the days when women were ignorant of all outside their homes they may have felt so secure because not understanding the cause of many family tragedies. In the days when they had no power to change conditions affecting the home from without they may have felt excused from the protective function of early motherhood, since men had taken over physical defense and economic support and the relationship of the family group to the social whole. No open-eyed woman in a country giving women social, economic, and political power can so think to-day.

It is a far cry from the savage mother, beating back some beast of the jungle or the plain, to the modern mother whose physical protection and that of her children is amply provided not alone by the husband and father concerned but by organized society with its police power, its courts and laws. The dangers that threaten child-life to-day in the more civilized communities are not the same that threatened the young of the herd-pack or the early lives of primitive men and women. Then the mother had sometimes to defend her child against its own father, especially her girl-babies against the social fiat of death executed by the father's will. Ancient folk-lore and myth show us many a struggle, intense and cruel, between mother-love and this group-sentence of death upon some of its young. In case of war also the ancient mother had to protect her virgin daughters against outrage and capture, albeit so feebly and to so disastrous an end. And war, since it is always and by its nature must be a return to savage conditions, now leads to the sacrifice of women and children in much the ancient manner; and faced by its horrors at close touch, the mother-instinct essays the old task to the same bitter defeat.

In peaceful periods, however, in the long ages when the father-rule was a despotism tempered only by natural affection and the skill of women in securing advantages while simulating submission, mothers had large use of their protective function in easing family discipline and in gaining relief from harsh conditions affecting childhood. Theirs was then no open fight for the well-being of their offspring, and often not a wise effort to that end, but ancient song and story all show that childhood and youth depended upon the mother-love in crises of family experience and that without such refuge many young lives would have been utterly sacrificed.

Social Elements in Modern Protection of Children.—To-day the dangers to which babies and children are exposed are more subtle in form and more complex in action. They are less within than without the average home. They are those that give the high death-rate of infants, the crippled limbs of children, the weakness of body and defectiveness of mind and feebleness or perversion of moral nature that make so many human beings unequal to life's demands. They are the dangers, personal and social, summed up in the antitheses of "health" and "disease," of "normal" and "abnormal." Not that the dangers so indicated are new but rather that we are newly aware of them. Not that savage or early civilized life had conditions more favorable to health and normality but that the easier modern conditions save alive many who in harsher times would have died in babyhood. Moreover, we are beginning at last to set a standard, in ever-clearer outline, of what is health and of what is normality in physical, mental, and moral human life. Moreover, we are seeing as never before that the dangers that beset the child to-day are not those from which the mother alone, or the individual father and mother working together, can adequately protect. They are dangers that only society can prevent and that society alone can abolish.

Women's Leadership in Social Protection.—Why, then, do we say that the protective function of individual motherhood is still demanded and still a large part of the modern mother's obligation? Because she is to-day the one most clearly required, in our own country at least, to summon the social forces to lessen or abolish those dangers to which children are exposed. The action of the solitary, primitive mother fighting off the despoiler of her child does not much resemble the banding together of modern women by the hundreds and by the thousands to abolish typhoid fever in some city in which it has become endemic through the greed of manufacturers who pollute the water supply. It is, however, the same spirit in both; and in the modern instance it wakes, first, the fathers to their protective duty, and then the guardians of the public health, and then educates the public mind, and at last accomplishes the desired result through appropriate laws, well enforced. It is a long step from the indirect "influence," the often deceitful cunning, the appeal to sex-attraction and the pleading of weakness by which for ages women sought to protect their children against harsh punishments, their daughters against marriage to those whom they loathed, and their sons to apprenticeship to work they could not choose, to the openly exercised power of the modern mother. In the days when wives and mothers had no legal rights which society was bound to respect, appeal was woman's only weapon; now the modern mother has command of her protective function and exercises it fearlessly. The same spirit is in all the long process of change, however, and women to-day banding openly together and joining also with men on equal terms, to secure laws protecting children from cruelty even against their own parents; to raise the "age of consent" in order to prevent the unwitting moral suicide of little girls; to sweep the streets free from vicious allurements that young boys may be preserved from debauchery and disease; to place trustees of society's power of public protection as chaperones in every place of moral danger; these modern women are near of kin to all motherhood of any past. So also are those of the same spirit as the ancient mother who band themselves together, again with men on equal terms, but oftenest, perhaps, with men whom their own social interest has summoned to the task, for the establishment of "Health Centres", of adequate and efficient clinics and dispensaries; for securing necessary education and care of mothers before the birth of their children, and for mothers and babies alike needing good, fresh air, rest and comfort after birth; for the raising of standards of physical well-being all along the line of life from youth to age. The ancient mother was too ignorant and had too little power to save her children and family from physical ills, but she did her best. The modern mother is able to learn about requirements and to act with power for the better health and better training of every child. Is she always ready for and equal to the task?

At least we can claim this for the mother devotion in modern times, that it shows, and in exact proportion of its increasing social power, an alertness and a moral earnestness in all that concerns the welfare of children that have perpetuated and extended the protective functions of society as no other agency has done. Much of the modern legislation and social work directed toward the physical and moral safeguarding of the young has been instituted and is carried out in detail largely by women. The passage of the so-called Maternity Bill by our National Congress, at the recognized instigation of women of the United States, and the call it makes for a large staff of women workers to carry out its provisions, is a case in point. This protective work for mothers and babies is not always done by women who are themselves mothers. Perhaps too often its details are in charge of those lacking deep experience of life, and hence not able to interpret new laws of social control to parents of ancient ideals and backward social culture. But women in any case are called for in large numbers to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young in terms of social obligations.

The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.—The second recognized ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food, clothing, and shelter for the young. This duty has undergone great changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of population has altered almost past recognition. These changes seem to many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these matters to the vanishing point.

It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all parts of the earth at the call of her telephone. Is the modern mother, then, released from all obligations as to that food supply? It is a long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor. Is the modern mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing?

For the modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live? Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care?