The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

The fiat has gone forth in the Western world that no one shall be compelled to marry against his or her will. The first revolt from family control of marriage, that which made so many persons believe that any one should be allowed to marry any one whom he or she might choose, is now, however, waning. Elements of social control are superseding the "marriage broker" and the parental office in deciding what unions shall be allowed.

The Young Should be Helped to Make Wise Choices.—Wisdom and consistency are not yet developed in this new way of helping the young, even against their will, to avoid mistakes of ignorance and folly, but they are developing. Meanwhile, many children still revere their parents' wishes and ideals, even if the wild few do as they please without regard to their elders. Most marriages in our country are not only safely entered upon but happy in results because of tendencies and tastes engendered in homes of love, truth, and goodness. The increase of social control in the direction of knowledge and caution even among the best people, and the safeguarding of the less advantaged in family training, must go on until all the good things parental choice gave to marriage arrangements are retained more perfectly and all the bad things outgrown.

The fifth element in the ancient parental control of marriage choices was the definite placing of youth under the leadership of age and thus holding firm the inherited "mores" to make the family stable in ideal as in practice. We have now a revolt of youth against the leadership of age. We have now, even among those whose affection for their parents is strong in feeling and generous in action, an idea that the convictions and reverences of the older generation are outgrown and for the better. There is a general impression, perhaps speeded unduly by the war, that what is new must be good, and what is old must be, if not bad, at least not the best. The decay of family religion lessens respect for old sanctions. The fact that business and pleasure alike take the different members of each family on different ways all the week and Sunday, too, make each age represented in the household influenced chiefly by its own set of friends. The way in which mechanical invention gives unexampled speed in opposite directions to the young and the old alike intensifies the segregation of each group and minimizes the influence of the family bond. The fact, perhaps of all most significant, that every form of art, from the lowest to the highest, is changing before our eyes into something new and strange tends toward the unconscious absorption by youth of new ideals of what is desirable in life. These things all conspire to make youth impatient of age.

The Revolt of Youth.—Many of the boys who went to torture and cripplement in the war have returned to declare that the old life is gone, and if there can be no better one devised and realized then the old world should go too. Many of the girls who went overseas to a vivid excitement and a stimulus of unwonted comradeship with men feel that they have so much more insight into real things than do their mothers that they know not only what is best for themselves but what is best for all youth. Many women, for the first time earning independent livelihood during the war-struggle, feel that now, at last, they have arrived; and what have they to do with old-fashioned behavior? More than all else, the modern economic independence of women of good breeding and assured position, in social classes which used to consider that only women in direst need could properly earn money, gives a wholly different aspect to many social questions. The tendency to individualism, so often seen in the modern woman, unbalanced by study of the past or its lessons or by any real grappling with present problems as they relate to possible future adjustments, now begins its strongest revolt at the fireside and makes the daughter often a stranger to her mother.

Only the older woman who has kept in touch not only with young life outside her own family but with the problems that modern changes in education, in industry, in art and literature, press upon the mind, can understand why so many young people to-day distrust everything that is old and welcome everything that seems new, however ancient it may actually be. Many of the newest things proclaimed are old mistakes of human nature revamped for a masquerade. A little study, for example, would show many young people who think they are responding to fresh revelation of the right relation of the sexes that they are really coming under the spell of some ancient and discarded plan of getting all satisfaction out of a relationship without assuming any obligation in return.

The Wisdom of the Ages Must be the Guide of Youth.—There is no chance of putting youth back into tutelage to age in any personal relation and in the old sense. Wise older people do not wish that. What is happening, and will be accelerated in action when the first flush of youthful consciousness of power is a bit balanced by knowledge of life's difficulties, is this; the wisdom of the ages, not the wisdom of their own parents and family alone, will be available to youth and used by youth in ever-increasing reverence. Not that some one who has lived longer shall of right determine a young life, but that young life shall learn more than in any past time it could do what the experience of the race has to teach. Happy the child whose parent can interpret this wisdom of life and happy the parent whose child can even now see that there is wisdom from the past to interpret.

Meanwhile, the fact that so many people marry and so many marriages turn out happily speaks well for the wisdom of youth or else gives testimony of the kindness of the fate that watches over lovers. We are told that at the ages of twenty to twenty-five half of the women and one-fourth of the men in the United States are married, and at the period of life between thirty-five and forty-five years only seventeen per cent. of the men are single and only eleven per cent. of the women; while at sixty-five years and over only six per cent. of either sex are listed as having never married. If out of this large proportion who dare matrimony on their own motion, and often without even the parental approbation, only one marriage out of ten to twelve turns out so badly that the parties ask to be released from their marriage vows, surely it argues well for independence in choosing one's partner for one's self even if there are mishaps and disasters for the few.

Personal Choice in Marriage Has Now the Widest Range.—One fact which many overlook when making estimates of the mistakes in marriage (and drawing therefrom dire prognostication for the future of the family in our country) is that personal choice among a circle of friends was not only never so free for young people but also never able to cover so wide a range of divergent national and racial backgrounds as in the United States. Marriages in this country often bridge or try to bridge a chasm between centuries of social development and continents of educational influence. It is estimated that of the 3,424 languages and dialects spoken in the world, about one-third, or 1,624, are spoken in some part of the American continent. The English language is spoken by more people than use either the German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, or Portuguese, but the 150,000,000 who thus preserve the "mother-tongue" of the early American settlers have to come into intimate contact with those of far different lingual background. This difference in language, which is found so often a barrier to unity between the respective parents of the young people who choose each other in marriage, is but a sign and symbol of deep-seated and ineradicable divergence in family tradition, in fashion of customary ways of living, in scale of moral values and in personal habits. It is rather a matter for astonishment that so many "mixed marriages" turn out well than that a minority prove disastrous. Mixed marriages will continue and with wider range of alignment in the future than in the past. That is inevitable with our increased complexity of life, which brings together in school and in labor, in social gatherings and in political association, all sorts and conditions of men, and women. Love not only laughs at prison bars, love scoffs at parental differences as well as at parental control. Yet is it true that wide divergence in family background is accountable for many of the tragedies of broken families after love has cooled and the facts of sober obligations incurred have become obvious.

The great social need in the United States is for means of acquaintance and friendship for the young in lines of association in which a safe and helpful marriage choice may be made. William Penn said, "Never marry but for love, but see that thou lovest what is lovely." The effort of all social arrangements for the young in families where the elders do not try to reinstate parental control but rather to give a chance for safeguarded independence of choice is to bring together young people who should find, each one of them in that group, a chosen one of the right sort. Financial capacity, mutually congenial relatives, suitable age and similar tastes, after acquaintance giving reasonable basis for hope for permanent agreement in essentials, might insure suitable marriages. The many advantages of close friendships within a group bound together by similar culture and outlook is the real reason for "society." Often foolish in its ways and defeating its own higher ends, it is yet a real effort to give a new and more democratic guidance through favorable circumstances, rather than through personal will or family rule, to the marriage choice of youth.

The reason why one is chosen and another not is never clear to any but the ones who make the choice. To them, indeed, it may be a mystery, but one they are sure must have its source in the necessity of things. To others it is often a puzzle past understanding because so many of the friends of each of the twain "would have chosen so differently, you know."