The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

VIII. Education standards, fixed by experts and maintained, at least in normal minimum, by community provision.

IX. Such vital relation between the family, the school, the political system, and all cultural opportunities as shall insure to each child his just share of the social inheritance to which all are heir.

The Need for Two Parents.—The first point noted is the need of two parents for every child. The illegitimate child is handicapped. It is a sound social movement that aims to make every "slacker" father accept his share of responsibility in the case of the unmarried mother and either marry the woman or give financial aid for the child. It does not thereby secure two actual parents for the child. The orphan child, the half-orphan child is handicapped; more so if bereft of mother than of father, but if the father dies or deserts after marriage, all experience shows that even if the mother lives and is capable and faithful, the child who lacks a father has many difficulties to overcome. The child of parents who have come to dislike each other is seriously handicapped. A forced tie between those who no longer love each other creates an atmosphere often fatal to comfort and happiness and one to which children, sensitive as they are to the feeling of their elders, react most unfavorably. The child of divorced parents is handicapped; perhaps not so often or so seriously as when held for years in an atmosphere of mutual hatred, suspicion, fault-finding, and distrust—handicapped, however, by many social embarrassments, by shock to affection given, perhaps, to both parents equally, and by the often great difficulty of finding a suitable home for the child of the divorced couple. The child that is not wanted and comes into a world hostile to his birth is handicapped in proportion as the influence reaches him at the moment of conception or lessens the power of the parents to give him what he needs before or after he arrives.

There must, then, be two parents, in love, as in law, to start a child right—two parents who live until he has reached age of independent direction and support, two parents who pull together for themselves and for him, two parents who are equally recognized in law as acting for him in guardianship throughout his minority.

The recognition of some of these needs of every child has been more general and intelligent than that of others. For example, the equal guardianship of the father and mother, their mutual responsibility for financial support when financially competent, their equal control over the family life and their common pledge to the community of parental care—this has not been recognized until recently, is not now in many of the States of the Union and perhaps not perfectly in any one.

At an Annual Meeting of the Uniform Laws Commission, at Cleveland, Ohio, Mrs. Catherine Waugh McCulloch, partner with her husband in the firm of McCulloch and McCulloch, Chicago, Illinois, and representing the League of Women Voters, secured an almost unanimous recommendation for uniform laws giving equal guardianship to fathers and to mothers. As Mrs. McCulloch is the successful mother of four children, besides being Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cook County, and has long represented the legal interests of women in the largest organizations of progressive women in the United States, she could, and did, speak with special authority in urging the right of mothers to protect their children on equal terms with fathers, by a "Uniform Joint Guardianship Law."

Some facts have given color to the claim of the extreme feminist that if you can only get the right sort of mother the father is more or less a negligible quantity. The history of the family, however, proves, if it proves anything, that to actively engage two adults in the business of rearing children is an immense asset to those children.

The two parents insisted upon as foremost necessity for child-care may, however, be of a poor sort, perhaps only furnished with good-will toward their task. Even so, whatever the lacks may be, however small the capacity, feeble the will and poor the purse, however society-at-large has to make up for deficiencies in the parents, it is at least one step toward a successful life to have two recognized parents who mean to do the right thing by their offspring and never fail in love toward each other and toward the children whom they call their own.

Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.—The second demand of child-life is for a competent mother—competent in health, that the baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength. It is in those first years that the child gains power to begin his own conquest of the world at an advantageous point. That many women are not competent physically for even the first test of childbirth we know from many sources of inquiry. The facts brought out in legislative hearings by those urging support for the so-called "Maternity Bill" amply prove this. Taking the figures for New York State alone, in the year 1920 we find a total of thirteen mothers out of every thousand dying in childbirth, with an estimate from physicians that with proper care two-thirds of these women could have been saved. A competent mother, then, physically speaking, means not only one measurably strong but one sufficiently cared for to prevent overstrain before the birth-hour. Again, in New York State alone, we find that eighty-six babies out of every thousand die before they reach the end of their first year. This may be from ignorance on the mother's part, or it may be from her physical weakness unequal to the care of the new baby. It may be there are already too many children near that baby's age who also make heavy demands upon time and energy. It may be that discouragements from unhappy family conditions or worry over economic disabilities sap the mother's vitality. It may be that taints of blood doom the child and the mother. Whatever the cause, it is reason for deep concern that a great state, like New York, for example, has a rate of infant mortality nearly twice as high as that of New Zealand and ranking eleventh in the twenty-three states of the registration area in which the death of babies is set down with care. When we add to this loss the death of at least 25,000 women each year in childbirth, most of whom could have been saved under right conditions, we are still more concerned. Of the 250,000 babies lost last year we are safe in estimating at least one-half whose lives could have been spared with even a minimum care. The effort now making all along the line of social advance to give every child a decent start in life is obviously necessary and wise.

If the mother is proved wholly incompetent in mind or character we have acquired a social right to take her child from her and place it where it can receive better nurture and training. We are beginning to recognize the corollary duty of social aid to all women of good character, motherly feeling, and any fair degree of intelligence in their function of motherhood. There are those hopelessly incompetent who should never be allowed to have children. There are far more with power to bear and rear children successfully whom adverse circumstances submerge to incompetency. These, we are now learning, must be helped in some way, for society's sake even more than for their own, if they are willing to undertake parental service to the race.