The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for Aged Men.—Two things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life developed toward civilization. One was ancestor-worship, which made the father and the grandfather a link, indispensable and therefore honored, in the chain of blood relationship which carried on the generations. This type of religious belief and practice did not, however, work to ease the lot of old women. If the young wife did not have a child, especially a son, she could be repudiated often, and lose her standing in the family relation and hence be subjected to hardships that made her early old and often ended her life while still in middle age. If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has yet lived who could manage unassisted a group of women, such as legal polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of her children.

The Position of Chief-mother in Ancient Family.—These facts often made the position of the chief-mother in a family one of such importance that they became her insurance against want and ill-treatment. The position of the chief-mother in the collective family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to adjust the family system to modern ideas. The father's power is so much a delegated responsibility and the relationship between the lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students in an American university has drawn up include such as the following: "Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the authority of the mother-in-law?" The mother-in-law in such cases being usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the grandmother-in-law.

Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.—The position of aged men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious social existence before literature was born. The aged man who had been an important member of some military order or "fraternity" and remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious cult thus expressed. Also those who remembered vital tribal occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehearse the same with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished.

Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged woman in the periods before written literature. There were, however, as we can clearly see, traditions and customs, taboos and permitted familiarities so many and varied that old women with good memories and a personality that commanded attention must have had some accepted value within the inner circles of family experience. We get from folk-lore some clear intimations of this prestige and power of the ancient old woman in intimate social relationship.

The power of old men received a great accession when political and religious orders and legal rules began to make social organization more definite and precise. "Old men for council; young men for war" had an early meaning. "The venerable Senate" is not a modern phrase. The "reverend father of the church" is an ancient allusion to the respect for and leadership of the aged in religious circles. The Popes of to-day begin their high service at an age that is in many positions a "dead line." The hardening of the social arteries in religion, government, politics, and law, however, while making old men more sure of their place in life, made old women less valued and worse treated. The ages of mediæval experience and of the feudal order, until chivalry began to affect the sex-relation, show almost unbelievable cruelty toward many aged women. The idea of the church fathers that women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often assumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers. And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches compact with Satan. Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely old but also given to nervous prostration (before that title appeared in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned, drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in history.

Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.—The young woman, being necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill treatment. The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were at all "highstrung" or "meddling." Hence the natural conception, in a time of superstitious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with those spirits made her seem a danger to society. The history of the witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that nightmare of human ignorance.

Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members of the family circle. Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these.

The waste of old age in women, however, is, as has been indicated elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time began. The idea that women were serviceable only for the procreative function and the hardest drudgery of family service, and that they lost all social value when they ceased to be attractive to the senses of men or ended their personal ministrations to their own little children, long obtained. This idea is responsible for the further conception of old women as not only useless but a disagreeable burden.

Hence, while old men rose during many ages in social regard and protection and care, old women became more and more miserable and ill-treated where the collective family was superseded by the newer type of individualistic bond between one man, one woman, and their children. In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made the social fashion by what is called Christian civilization, the aged woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks, was the victim of the change from one system to the other. The fact that women, if well-developed and well-treated, are younger at seventy than are men and that more women than men live to be aged than when the conditions of living were less favorable to the weak and delicate, gave early in our civilization what must have seemed far too many old women.

While women had the constant burden of a "steady job" within the home, harder and more continuous than men had in their handicraft labor, yet men were killed in battle in large numbers, and were physically able to dangerously overdo in some labor "spurt" and hence more women than men lived to be old. Hence, again, there were far more grandmothers than grandfathers in the family in all mediæval life. This led to many cruelties to old women who were deemed "superfluous." While, however, the actual experience of common people made conditions so hard for grandmothers, the idealism within the religious field was favorable to the mother of any age. The same church fathers who shunned marriage as a cowardly concession to the body, and who wrote flaming animadversions upon women in general, gave the Virgin and Child their adoration and made a place of honor and of comfort to those women who chose the religious vocation outside the home.