The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

Should the Education of Girls Include Special Attention to Family Claims?—These facts indicate that social prudence must at least ask the question, Should not the education of girls include some distinct recognition of special problems to be met, often in acute experience of contrary currents of personal desire and social pressure, in the lives of young women? As has been shown in other connection what we are witnessing now in domestic life is the passing of the servant caste, of the ordinary "hired girl" and of the unpaid family drudge; not the eclipse of the housemother or the waning of the homemaker's power or charm. In this household change and in the demand that goes with it upon any woman who would have or make a home, and with clear understanding of the new responsibilities which the new freedom of women place upon them, certain fundamental principles should be held firmly in mind as we deal with special problems of adjustment created by new social situations. First of all, let us admit, and never cease to emphasize the fact, that the social education of women demands from now on the most scrupulous regard for the training of every normal girl for self-support. This cannot be too much emphasized. This is the only sure foundation for socially helpful sex-relationship and for that democratization of the family without which social progress is now impossible. The social education of women in general demands, also, the cultivation of domestic tastes and of some measure of household technic, not as a concession to the past, but as a safeguard of the future, in such fashion that the call to personal service of the family life may recall familiar and pleasant educational activities. These educational activities should precede those which tend directly toward vocational preparation for self-support. This point, too, is vital. The age when almost all little girls like to do things which concern the family comfort is from the eighth to the fourteenth year, a period too young for proper vocational drill. Then, when they are most likely to be ordered out of the kitchen if there is a paid cook to give the order, and most likely to be thought "in the way" if trying to help in domestic process of any sort, is the period of all others when to "learn by doing" what they are interested in will give them a background capable of easy adjustment to the later demands of family life. The training of boys of the same ages has an analogue in farming and handy use of common tools; and in the "work, play, and study school" boys and girls learn much together which fit both for mutual aid in the private family. The new education of the grade schools, therefore, is coming to the rescue of the housemother's task, as the high school and college have come to the aid of those who would provide vocational careers for women. They may meet in helpful alliance just as soon as a few social principles, which can make a bridge between them, are outlined and accepted.

Adjustment of Family Service and Vocational Work.—First, most women should allow for marriage and maternity first place for the years socially required. Second, women cannot afford to lose entirely out of their married lives vocational discipline, by the use of leisure time left them by new easing of household service, even in odd jobs of unpaid "social work," as is now so much the custom. The very multiplicity and variety of ancient crafts practised in the home make some one activity, held to rules of specialization, essential to the housemother's development. The chosen vocation retained as an avocation, during the housemother's active service, must not, however, be a chief dependence for either her own or the family support lest the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than any other of its treasures. Third, as has been before indicated, married women with young children must learn to combine in "team work," as they have never yet done, and to make engagements by two's or three's for the work one unmarried woman may take alone. This is especially called for in the great social task of teaching, "woman's organic office in the world," as Emerson called it. The evils charged against a "feminized school," where they really exist, are those due not so much to the sex of the grade-teachers as to the celibate condition in the "permanent supply" and to the too rapidly changing personnel of those who marry. The same suggested team work would operate well in all the higher professions; and the success of "continuation schools" proves that half-time and third-time labor schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor itself.

Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.—We are beginning to see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the social education of women must be lifted to a far higher plane of intellectual and ethical culture. Deeper than all the problems which the booming of the guns of this world war has forced upon the dullest social consciousness is the question, How may the individual conscience and personal ideal of the spiritual élite be harmonized with, not destroyed by, the levelling process of democracy? Saints and sages have always marked out the pathway of the future. How can they still dower a common life pressed insistently toward uniformity of action? May it not be that human beings of the mother-sex who have paid and still must pay a price, one by one, for each single life, and who have at the same time always been held and still must be held as supreme upbuilders of the social fabric, shall lead the race toward the solution of this most spiritual problem of democracy? It is not, however, solely to make women better fitted for a dual rôle in social order and social progress that we are socializing education: men also must be better fitted to the tasks of social serviceableness within as truly as without the family. No one has doubted the claim of society upon man to be a useful worker and a competent manager of affairs in the world. Until lately, however, few have seen that, as the "Declaration of Eights and Duties" set forth in 1795 by those who willed the freedom of France, "No one is a good citizen if he is not a good son, a good father, a good brother, a good friend, a good husband." It has been enough for a man to be able to achieve something of value; his personal character has not been, held of such great moment throughout the ages of the past.

Now we are beginning to demand that men be good in the sense they have long demanded that women shall be, and that women shall be strong in what they do as well as in what they are. This new demand strikes at the roots of what has been called the "social evil," but which is the most unsocial of all the pathological conditions of modern society.

The New Training in Sex-education.—The need to have the right sort of fathers as well as fit mothers requires a new training in lines of sex-education. One of the most perplexing of all educational problems is how to give the needed training in this line in the best and most effective way. In the admirable volume on Sex-Education written by Professor Maurice A. Bigelow, of Teachers College, Columbia University, a list of eight reasons for sex-instruction is given which are here quoted by permission:

1. Many people, especially in youth, need hygienic knowledge concerning sexual processes as they affect personal health.

2. There is an alarming amount of the dangerous social diseases which are distributed chiefly by the sexual promiscuity or immorality of men.

3. The uncontrolled sexual passions of men have led to enormous development of organized and commercialized prostitution.

4. There are living to-day tens of thousands of unmarried mothers and illegitimate children, the result of the common irresponsibility of men and the ignorance of women.

5. There is need of more general following of a definite moral standard regarding sex-relationships.