The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

But for the shallow, and the selfish, and the pleasure-seeker without reverence for the right way of life, and for the scoffer at all high moods of feeling and of ideal aim, there can be little to justify his flitting about on the very outmost limits of true love. For such, some check must be had in ordered rules and legal bonds, in order that the race-life shall go on in safety and in social health. Meanwhile, although there is much to give us pause and to demand serious study and earnest and wise social work in the situation revealed by the divorce court statistics, there is nothing that need give hysterical alarm lest the home is being destroyed and the family abolished. On the contrary, there probably was never a time when so many people were really happy, each and every member of the family, in the home relation; and hence never a time when it was clearer that to keep the home stable and permanent, and make marriage successful in the vast majority of cases, we have only to get better and wiser people in larger proportion.

To understand the real reason for marital unhappiness and for family instability, to know that such reason inheres primarily in personal character and not in any statute, is to begin work for the real cure and prevention of such unhappiness and instability. The broken family may be a sad necessity, alike for individuals concerned, and for the well-being of society. To prevent that tragedy is a social duty than which none is more pressing or more open to social effort.

Turning From Compulsory to Attractive Methods of Reform.—To undertake that social task, the psychology of social effort must be turned from compulsive methods of prevention of legal divorce, when such divorce is sought, to ways of making marriage choices wiser, marriage experience more sane and better balanced by sense of obligation to the nearer and more remote of social relations, and by putting at the command of all, the helpful sympathy and the social guidance that can alone hold to firm and noble lines the wavering and the weak.

QUESTIONS ON THE BROKEN FAMILY

1. Is the admitted increase in divorce wholly a testimony to moral degeneracy? If so, what can be done about it? If not, what else does it indicate?

2. What are the main points to work for in order to reduce the number of divorces, and to remove the social evils of which divorces are only the symptom?

3. Should the social psychology be directed principally toward preventing people from getting divorce or from remarrying after divorce, or toward making marriage so generally successful that fewer people want to separate?

4. What is specially needed in education both of youth and the adult in the United States in the interest of family stability and family success?

5. Make a list of causes that in your opinion justify legal separation or divorce and find out whether or not these causes are named in the statutes of your State. If they are not, what should be done about it?

6. What is done for and with the children of legally separated and divorced persons in your State?