The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

New Calls for Trained Leadership.—This pressure of the new subject-matter of education from the top down, and the pressure from the bottom up of the new ideals in methods of training of the child-mind, have made an educational ferment which has often given confusion of aim and ineffectiveness of accomplishment, but both mean educational advance and educational advance in obedience to new conceptions of common social need. All this movement in the educational world has a direct and immediate influence upon family life. What was good in the old domestic training for individual life-work we are trying to put into the school, and what is needed for skill and leadership in the modern industrial order we are trying to put into the college and university. This means not only that the family rule is less deferred to in the education of even the youngest child, it also means that if we would save the family influence in education we must bring the parents and teachers together in council and in united control as never before. This is being attempted; the Mothers' Club and the Parent-Teacher Associations now in evidence being impressive symbols of a larger social movement through books, pamphlets, magazines, reports, and "Foundations," together with clubs of more general social type. The value of the Trade Unions and of other special forms of organization of workers in the matter of securing rights and opportunities in the labor world has been alluded to, but the definite educational value of such class organizations must not be ignored. It is true that there is a loss of emphasis upon skill and good workmanship in much of the modern Trade Union influence as compared with the Guild ranking of older craft-unions, but there is a type of education for citizenship which, with all its crudity and coarseness of ideal, inheres in the Trade Union as in few other organizations. To emphasize class feeling, it is said, is to work against democracy. True, but to have a political system in which one class is ignored, as "hands," not heads, is still more detrimental to democratic government. The class consciousness of the worker was strong in the days when the Guilds had political power, and it was a wholesome check upon the claim of divine right of kings and nobles to rule. The class consciousness of wage-earners is needed in modern times and should have its due representation in halls of legislation where it could meet naturally, in healthful competition and debate, the class consciousness already there in the persons of employers of labor and managers of legal interests of great corporations. The education that will finally unite in better understood coöperation all class interests in public well-being is to be found in such use of the school as will show how we are all bound together in industry, as in the political body; in work as in voting power. That education which, with more or less intelligence and with deeper or more shallow understanding, society is now working toward will make the home life more secure as well as the state more united.

The Special Education of Girls.—The application of new educational ideals and methods to the training of girls and young women is of first-rate importance in the matter of home relationship to the school. And this is the case not only because there are far more women than men at work in carrying out those ideals and methods in the schools but because if there is to be made valid and useful, conscious and definite, union of school and home in one educational approach to childhood it must be largely through the mothers and women-teachers that such union can be effected. The reasons for this are too obvious to require explanation.

There are those who believe that there is no question of sex-differences in education, that all that is needed is to open all educational opportunities to boys and girls alike and give both precisely the same instruction. There are also those who still believe that some varying elements of child-training and the instruction of youth should be retained and further developed in the case of boys and girls. Some basic facts must be in mind when we attempt to answer the question, Shall we try for somewhat divergent schooling for the two sexes?

First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys and girls was made wholly unlike after sex-differentiation began, and sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land, and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood, and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this: that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be, was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family life. The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others' expert knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this specialization and organization of industrial and institutional life has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation, women were again left out of control of the processes which man's organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact, as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were denied formal school training so long after such denial became actively injurious to the family and group life was because the popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to fit boys for "a man's part in the world."

Formal School Training of Women New.—When the principle of democracy began to work in women's natures with an irrepressible yeast of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman's rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal chance with men for preparation for vocations. The school they sought to enter was inherited from a past in which not only sex lines but class lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a vastly more varied range than the older civilization required. At first the leaders in the higher education of women, like all nouveaux riche, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently entered. Classic curricula were strictly adhered to and all "practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for leadership now opening in our country for women as for men.

New Training for Social Service.—Two movements have resulted from the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease, poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture and of social organization for common human welfare. This conviction led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply, housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment. It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers, doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life, the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the wayward, and the undeveloped—these, which have been their special tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their main business in the more complex situations of modern life.

Departments of Household Economics in Colleges.—When the departments of household economics were added to college courses they were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of woman's position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in women's higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are these studies limited to feminine students, although far more women than men choose them. The interrelation of the present social order by which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men; especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training "departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking, graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work, or to take positions as expert dietitians, managers of hospitals and other public institutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as trained nurses, assistants or directors in chemical laboratories, architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not. All these specialties are essential to social progress, and all are linked to family life in general, but none of them is particularly related to any one family group of one father, one mother, and their children. They, therefore, while tending to make family life in general far more successful than of old, fit no woman surely for wifehood and motherhood; and they cannot do so unless omniscient social wisdom can tell in advance what girls will marry and have children and social control becomes despotic enough to oblige such girls to take these courses in preference to any others; or unless society returns to its old drastic compulsion for all to marry and bear active part in the race-life as parents.

Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership.—Any study of the needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home partnership. This continues to be the rule even in social strata where the sense of justice gives both parties a common purse and where finest quality of affection and of comradeship makes it a negligible matter which one makes the larger contribution to the united treasury.

Women Socially Drafted for Motherhood.—The second fact which must have its recognition in any study of education in relation to the family, is that no married woman is exempt from all demands of motherhood unless some "selective draft," more delicate in its evaluation than any we have yet evolved, shall indicate her right to exemption, and that if marriage is to continue on anything like its present basis commonplace women cannot have all its advantages without paying some adequate price.

Father-office and Mother-office Still Differ.—We are now in the midst of a social order in which the father-office and the mother-office do differ essentially in their requirements in the vast majority of families. The father-office leads directly toward specialization and achievement in some one calling. To be a good father is, in ordinary family conditions, not so much to give constant personal attention to his children as to do something well which the world wants done and will pay for and by which he may maintain and improve the economic and social standing of his family. To "give hostages to fortune in wife and child" may, indeed often does, hamper a man's idealistic relation to his vocation and oblige him to work for money when he wants to work for fame or for higher usefulness, but it serves almost always to keep him steady to his job. For the average mother this is not the case. Where there is a family of children more than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or incompetent members of the family circle call for special consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without, the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength and the most of time in the service of the private family for many years of life. That is to say, getting a group of children up to adult independence and saving the community most of the intimate duties of care of the aged and of the weak, while it calls upon the man-head of the family for greater activity in his special line, calls upon the woman-head of the family for a general and personal service as a primary duty. This puts any vocational specialty she has chosen in a secondary place while the family obligation is most pressing. The result of this obvious fact is that the average woman does still have a double choice to make when marriage offers; a choice for or against the man, and a choice for or against her vocation. In proportion as women are highly educated or industrially trained they have been pressed toward some one calling for which they can be definitely prepared and in which they may hope to rise in personal achievement and in financial compensation. On the other hand, marriage and motherhood appeal to the deepest instincts of human nature; and if the man seems worth it a woman will generally risk vocational impediment and awkwardness of economic adjustment for the sake of a congenial mate and children of her own.