Among hand-workers, especially in the country, the work being more obvious and often shared by the whole family, the pressure of necessary labor makes a kind of discipline for all, and the children are more likely to see that there are rules and conditions of life above their immediate pleasure. Social play, as we have seen, may also do much for this perception. But this visible control of a higher law has a decreasing part in modern life, especially with the well-to-do classes, whose labors are seldom such as children may share, or even understand.
In this, as in so many other respects, we are approaching a higher kind of life at the cost of incidental demoralization. The modern family at its best, with its intimate sympathy and its discipline of love, is of a higher type than the family of an older régime. “I never,” said Thackeray, “saw people on better terms with each other, more frank, affectionate, and cordial, than the parents and the grown-up young folks in the United States. And why? Because the children were spoiled, to be sure.”[158] But where this ideal is not reached, there is apt to be a somewhat disastrous failure which makes one regret the autocratic and traditional order. Not merely is discipline lacking, but the affection which might be supposed to go with indulgence is turned to indifference, if not contempt. As a rule we love those we can look up to, those who stand for the higher ideal. In old days parents shared somewhat in that divinity with which tradition hedged the great of the earth, and might receive a reverence not dependent upon their personality; and even to-day they are likely to be better loved if they exact respect—just as an officer is better loved who enforces discipline and is not too familiar with his soldiers. Human nature needs something to look up to, and it is a pity when parents do not in part supply this need for their children.
In short, the child, like the woman, helps to bear the often grievous burden of disorganization; bears it, among the well-to-do classes, in an ill-regulated life, in lack of reverence and love, in nervousness and petulance; as well as in premature and stunting labor among the poor.
The opening of new careers to women and a resulting economic independence approaching that of men is another phase of “individualism” that has its worse and better aspects. In general it has, through the fuller self-expression of women, most beneficial reactions both upon family life and society at large, but creates some trouble in the way of domestic reluctance and discontent.
The disposition to reject marriage altogether may be set aside as scarcely existent. The marriage rate shows little decline, though the average age is somewhat advanced. The wage-earning occupations of women are mostly of a temporary character, and the great majority of domestic servants, shop and factory girls, clerks, typewriters and teachers marry sooner or later. There is no reason to doubt that a congenial marriage continues to be the almost universal feminine ideal.
A more real problem, perhaps, is found in the excessive requirements, in the way of comfort and refinement, that young women are said to cherish. In the United States their education, so far as general culture is concerned, outstrips that of men, something like three-fifths of our high school pupils being girls, while even in the higher institutions the study of history, foreign languages and English literature is largely given over to women. A certain sense of superiority coming from this state of things probably causes the rejection of some honest clerks or craftsmen by girls who can hardly look for a better offer; and it has a tendency toward the cultivation of refinement at the expense of children where marriage does occur. It need hardly be said, however, that aggressive idealism on the part of women is in itself no bad thing, and that it does harm only where ill-directed. Hardly anything, for instance, would be more salutary than the general enforcement by women of a higher moral standard upon the men who wish to marry them.
And certainly nothing in modern civilization is more widely and subtly beneficent than the enlargement of women in social function. It means that a half of human nature is newly enfranchised, instructed and enabled to become a more conscious and effective factor in life. The ideals of home and the care of children, in spite of pessimists, are changing for the better, and the work of women in independent careers is largely in the direction of much-needed social service—education and philanthropy in the largest sense of the words. Any one familiar with these movements knows that much of the intellectual and most of the emotional force back of them is that of women. One may say that the maternal instinct has been set free and organized on a vast scale, for the activities in which women most excel are those inspired by sympathy with children and with the weak or suffering classes.
To the continental European, accustomed to a society in which the functions and conventions of men and women are sharply distinguished and defined by tradition, it seems that Americans break down a natural and salutary differentiation, making women masculine and men feminine by a too indiscriminate association and competition. No doubt there is some ground for distinct standards and education, and in the general crumbling of traditions and sway of a somewhat doctrinaire idea of equality some “achieved distinctions” of value may have been lost sight of. Like other social differentiations, however, this is one that can no longer be determined by authority, but must work itself out in a free play of experiment. As Mr. Ellis says, “The hope of our future civilization lies in the development, in equal freedom, of both the masculine and feminine elements in life.”[159]
Perhaps, also, the masculine element, as being on the whole more rational and stable, should be the main source of government, keeping in order the emotionality more commonly dominant in women: and it may appear that this controlling function is ill-performed in America. It should be remembered, however, that with us the emancipation of women comes chiefly from male initiative and is a voluntary fostering of das ewig Weibliche out of love and respect for it. And also that most European societies govern women by coercive laws or conventions and, in the lower classes, even by blows. Americans have almost wholly foregone these extrinsic aids, aiming at a higher or voluntary discipline, and if American women are, after all, quite as well guided, on the whole, as those of Europe, it is no mean achievement.
There are in general two sorts of forces, one personal and one institutional, which hold people together in wedlock. By the personal I mean those which spring more directly from natural impulse, and may be roughly summed up as affection and common interest in children. The institutional are those that come more from the larger organization of society, such as economic interdependence of husband and wife, or the state of public sentiment, tradition and law.