One of the most frequent excuses, among those who have gone far enough to admit that excuse is needed, is that the father is to blame for these conditions. His vices, it is alleged, weaken the constitution of the race. His failure to provide prevents the mother from giving the proper care. He is held responsible for what evil we see in our children; and still we worship the mother for the physical process of bearing a child,—now considered an act of heroism,—and for the “devotion” with which she clings to it afterward, irrespective of the wisdom or effectiveness of this devotion. A healthy and independent motherhood would no more think of taking credit to itself for the right fulfilment of its natural functions than would a cat for bringing forth her kittens or a sheep her lambs. The common fact that the women of the lower social grades bear more children and bear them more easily than the women of higher classes ought to give pause to this ridiculous assumption, but it does not. The more women weaken themselves and their offspring, and imperil their very lives by anti-maternal habits, the more difficulty, danger, and expense are associated with this natural process, the more do women solemnly take credit to themselves and receive it from others for the glorious self-sacrifice with which they risk their lives (and their babies’ lives!) for the preservation of humanity. As to the father and his share in the evil results, nothing that he has ever done or can do removes from motherhood its primal responsibility.
Suppose the female of some other species, ignoring her racial duty of right selection, should mate with mangy, toothless cripples,—if there were such among her kind,—and so produce weak, malformed young, and help exterminate her race. Should she then blame him for the result? An entire sex, sacredly set apart for maternal functions so superior as to justify their lack of economic usefulness, should in the course of ages have learned how to select proper fathers. If the only way in which the human mother can feed and guard her children is through another person, a provider and protector on whom their lives and safety must depend, what natural, social, or moral excuse has she for not choosing a good one?
But how can a young girl know a good prospective father, we ask. That she is not so educated as to know proves her unfitness for her great task. That she does not think or care proves her dishonorable indifference to her great duty. She can in no way shirk the responsibility for criminal carelessness in choosing a father for her children, unless indeed there were no choice,—no good men left on earth. Moreover, we are not obliged to leave this crucial choice in the hands of young girls. Motherhood is the work of grown women, not of half-children; and, when we honestly care as much for motherhood as we pretend, we shall train the woman for her duty, not the girl for her guileless manœuvres to secure a husband. We talk about the noble duties of the mother, but our maidens are educated for economically successful marriage.
Leaving this field of maternal duty through sex-selection, there remains the far larger ground to which the popular mind flees in triumph: that the later work of the mother proves the success of our racial division of labor on sex-lines, that in the care of the child, the education of the child, the beautiful life of the home and family, it is shown how well our system works. This is the last stronghold. Solidly intrenched herein sits popular thought, safe in the sacred precincts of the home. “Every man’s home is his castle,” is the common saying. The windows are shut to keep out the air. The curtains are down to keep out the light. The doors are barred to keep out the stranger. Within are the hearth fire and its gentle priestess, the initial combination of human life,—the family in the home.
Our thrones have been emptied, and turned into mere chairs for passing presidents. Our churches have been opened to the light of modern life, and the odor of sanctity has been freshened with sweet sunny air. We can see room for change in these old sanctuaries, but none in the sanctuary of the home. And this temple, with its rights, is so closely interwound with the services of subject woman, its altar so demands her ceaseless sacrifices, that we find it impossible to conceive of any other basis of human living. We are chilled to the heart’s core by the fear of losing any of these ancient and hallowed associations. Without this blessed background of all our memories and foreground of all our hopes, life seems empty indeed. In homes we were all born. In homes we all die or hope to die. In homes we all live or want to live. For homes we all labor, in them or out of them. The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives. We love it with a love older than the human race. We reverence it with the blind obeisance of those crouching centuries when its cult began. We cling to it with the tenacity of every inmost, oldest instinct of our animal natures, and with the enthusiasm of every latest word in the unbroken chant of adoration which we have sung to it since first we learned to praise.
And since we hold that our home life, just as we have it, is the best thing on earth, and that our home life plainly demands one whole woman at the least to each home, and usually more, it follows that anything which offers to change the position of woman threatens to “undermine the home,” “strikes at the root of the family,” and we will none of it. If, in honest endeavor to keep up to the modern standard of free thought and free speech, we do listen,—turning from our idol for a moment, and saying to the daring iconoclast, “Come, show us anything better!”—with what unlimited derision do we greet his proposed substitute! Yet everywhere about us to-day this inner tower, this castle keep of vanishing tradition, is becoming more difficult to defend or even to keep in repair. We buttress it anew with every generation; we love its very cracks and crumbling corners; we hang and drape it with endless decorations; we hide the looming dangers overhead with fresh clouds of incense; and we demand of the would-be repairers and rebuilders that they prove to us the desirability of their wild plans before they lift a hammer. But, when they show their plans, we laugh them to scorn.
It is a difficult case to meet. To call attention to existing conditions and to establish the relation between them and existing phenomena is one thing. To point out how a change of condition will produce new phenomena, and how these phenomena will benefit us, is quite another. Yet this is the task that is always involved in the conscious progress of the human race. While that progress was unconscious, it was enough that certain individuals and classes gradually entered into new relations in process of social evolution, and that they forced their conditions upon the reluctant conservatives who failed so to evolve.
In the quite recent passage from the feudal to the monarchical system, no time was wasted in the endeavor to persuade and convince the headstrong barons of their national duty. The growing power of the king struggled with and survived the lessening power of the barons,—that was all. Had a book been written then to urge the change, it could have proved clearly enough the evils of the feudal system; but, when it tried to portray the glories of national peace and power under a single monarch, it would have had small weight. National peace and power, which had been hitherto non-existent, would have failed to appeal to the sturdy lords of the soil, whose only idea of peace and power was to sit down and rest on their prostrate neighbors. Had their strength run in the line of argument, they would have scouted the “should be’s” and “will be’s” of the author, and defied him to prove that the new condition would be developed by the new processes; and, indeed, he would have found it hard.
So to-day, in questioning the economic status of woman and her position in the home and in the family, it is far easier to prove present evil than future good. Yet this is what is most exactingly demanded. It is required of the advocate of social reform not only that he convince the contented followers of the present system of its wrong, but that he prove to their satisfaction the superiority of some other system. This, in the nature of the case, is impossible. When people are contented, you cannot make them feel that what is is wrong, or that something else might be better. Even the discontented are far more willing to refer their troubles to some personal factor than to admit that their condition as a whole inevitably produces the general trouble in which they share. Even if convinced that a change of condition will remove the source of injury, they, like the fox with the swarm of flies, fear to be disturbed, lest their last state be worse than their first. In the face of this inevitable difficulty, however, the task must be undertaken.
Two things let us premise and agree upon before starting. First, that the duty of human life is progress, development; that we are here, not merely to live, but to grow,—not to be content with lean savagery or fat barbarism or sordid semi-civilization, but to toil on through the centuries, and build up the ever-nobler forms of life toward which social evolution tends. If this is not believed, if any hold that to keep alive and reproduce the species is the limit of our human duty, then they need look no farther here. That aim can be attained, and has been attained, for irrefutable centuries, through many forms of sex-relation and of economic relation. Human beings have lived and brought up children as good as their parents in free promiscuity and laziness, in forced polygamy and slavery, in willing polyandry and industry, and in monogamy plus prostitution and manufactures. Just to live and bear children does not prove the relative superiority of any system, either in sex or economics. But, when we believe that life means progress, then each succeeding form of sex-relation or economic relation is to be measured by its effect on that progress.