The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

We see the fruits of that ethical training in family responsibility in many of man's noblest traits; preëminently in his recognition of the duty of protection of the weak and young, and in his devotion to his own, against the world if need be.

The vast outreach of man's intelligence toward the organization of the state, of the industrial order, of the church, of the formal educative process, of the means of transportation, of the systems of finance, of the development and application of scientific knowledge, and even of the arts and of literature, all reveal the effect of his early schooling in the representative responsibility of fatherhood to society.

We speak to-day of the "father of modern invention" in this or that particular. We have not ceased to praise the "good provider" or to esteem him highly who has a well-ordered home.

Moral Qualities in Women Developed by Masculine Selection.—Moreover, we are all now recognizing the fact that we owe to the ownership of woman by man a secondary sex-selection of inestimable value. It may be an extreme statement to say, with at least one sociologist, that the ages of woman's subjection to man was not too great a price to pay for the gift to the race of feminine beauty and charm. We can assert, however, that some moral values which men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often difficult conditions.

Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution, organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and suffering.

The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and led to their mediation between every institution and the personal life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters, placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation, combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.

Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great social use in the modern state.

The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation of the value of feminine personality.

While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the old order of the family, led her to understand the value of personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good, the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us on."

The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.—Throughout this many-sided discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the central thought in many religions.