A History of Matrimonial Institutions, Vol. 3 of 3

by George Elliott Howard

The achievement of a wisely conceived and carefully drafted uniform law for the entire country, would be of great advantage, although it might not directly cause a very great decrease in the average divorce rate, and certainly would not produce the same rate for the individual states.[780] How may such a uniform law be secured? The method of procuring the enactment of a federal law under a constitutional amendment—once much in favor[781]—has for the present been almost abandoned by active workers. Instead, it is preferred, through the state commissions on uniform legislation, to urge the adoption of a model statute by the separate commonwealths. These commissions, now thirty-five in number, have prepared a bill for a law governing divorce procedure; and its temperate and practical provisions ought to gain its general adoption.[782] All this is well; but it is still more needful to strive for a common marriage law. In the end it may be found necessary, under a constitutional amendment, to appeal to the federal power. What service could a national legislature render more beneficent than the creation of a code embracing every division of the intricate law of marriage and divorce? Aside from its educational value as a moral force, such a code in material ways would prove a powerful guaranty of social order and stability.

In the meantime it is essential to fix the attention upon causes rather than effects. For the wise reformer, who would elevate and protect the family, the center of the problem is marriage and not divorce.

II. THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION

It is needful in the outset, as already suggested, frankly to accept marriage and the family as social institutions whose problems must be studied in connection with the actual conditions of modern social life. It is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very different conditions. The guiding light will come, not from authority, but from a rational understanding of the existing facts. Small progress can be expected while leaning upon tradition. The appeal to theological criteria is, no doubt, matter of conscience on the part of many earnest men. Nevertheless the vast literature which seeks to solve social questions through the juggling with ancient texts seems in reality to be largely a monument of wasted energy. Much of it is sterile, or but serves to retard progress or to befog the issue. Witness the perennial discussion of the "scriptural" grounds of divorce, or of the Levitical sanction or condemnation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister! Witness the vapid homilies and treatises on the wedded life! There is, in truth, urgent need that the moral leaders of men should preach actual instead of conventional social righteousness. It is high time that the family and its related institutions should be as freely and openly and unsparingly subjected to scientific examination as are the facts of modern political or industrial life.

From the infancy of the human race, we have already seen, the monogamic family has been the prevailing type. There have been, it is true, many variations, many aberrations, from this type under diverse conditions, religious, economic, or social. Under changing influences the interrelations of the members of the group—of husband and wife, of parent and child—and their relations individually and collectively to the state, have varied from age to age or from people to people. There have been wife-capture, wife-purchase and the patria potestas. But in essential character—at first for biological, later for ethical or spiritual reasons—the general tendency has always been toward a higher, more clearly differentiated type of the single pairing family. Moreover, setting aside all question of special priestly sanctions, the healthiest social sentiment has more and more demanded that the "pairing" should be lasting. Whether of Jew or gentile, the highest ideal of marriage has become that of a lifelong partnership. Are these tendencies to remain unbroken? Is the stream of evolution to proceed, gaining in purity and strength? Are marriage and the family doomed; or are they capable of adaptation, of reform and development, so as to satisfy the higher material and ethical requirements of the advancing generations? Seemingly they are now menaced by serious dangers. Some of them have their origin in the new conditions of a society which is undergoing a swift transition, a mighty transformation, industrially, intellectually, and spiritually; while others, perhaps the more imminent, are incident to the institutions themselves as they have been shaped or warped by bad laws and false sentiments. Apparently, if there is to be salvation, it must come through the vitalizing, regenerative power of a more efficient moral, physical, and social training of the young. The home and the family must enter into the educational curriculum. Before an adequate sociological program can be devised the facts must be squarely faced and honestly studied. In the sphere of domestic institutions, even more imperatively than in that of politics or economics, there is need of light and publicity.

The family, it is alleged, is in danger of disintegration through the tendency to individualism which in many ways is so striking a characteristic of the age.[783] Within the family itself there are, indeed, signs that a rapid transition from status to contract is taking place in a way which Maine scarcely contemplated; for he appears to have imagined that precisely in this sphere the process was already virtually complete. The bonds of paternal authority are becoming looser and looser. In America in particular young men and even young women earlier than elsewhere tend to cut their parental moorings and to embark in independent business careers. So also more and more clearly the wife is showing a determination to escape entirely from manu viri—still sustained by the relics of mediæval law and sentiment—and to become in reality as well as in name an equal partner under the nuptial contract. The state also has intervened to abridge the parental authority. Minor children are no longer looked upon as the absolute property of the father. For the purpose of education, society removes them for a considerable part of the period of nonage from home and immediate parental control; and, on the other hand, it forbids their employment in mines, factories, or other injurious vocations during their tender years. Under child-saving laws they may even be removed from home, when they are cruelly treated or exposed to vicious influences, and placed under the protection of the state. Thus, little by little, to use the phrase of a thoughtful writer, the original "coercive" powers of the family under the patriarchal régime have been "extracted" and appropriated by society. In the education of the young the family retains the lesser part. "The state has here interfered in the private ordering of the household by taking the child from its parents for one-third of its waking hours, and has introduced order and system into the training of children, together with the assertion of rights on their part. The family becomes therefore less a coercive institution, where the children serve their parents, and more a spiritual and psychic association of parent and child based on persuasion. A more searching interference on the part of the state, together with a new set of governmental organizations for its enforcement, is found in the boards of children's guardians, the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, orphans' asylums, state public schools, with their investigating and placing-out agents, empowered under supervision of the courts to take children away from parents and to place them in new homes. A large part of the unlimited coercion of the patria potestas is here extracted from the family and annexed to the peculiar coercive institution where it is guided by notions of children's rights, and all families are thereby toned up to a stronger emphasis on persuasion as the justification of their continuance."[784] Here we catch a glimpse of the direction of future evolution in the family. At the same time it appears that the disintegration of paternal and marital coercive power is not a serious menace to the family. It has cleared the way for a higher and nobler spiritual domestic life. The real danger is that the family and the home will surrender an undue share of their duty and privilege to participate in the culture and training of the young. This function for the good of society may be vastly developed, though mainly on new lines bearing directly on the nature of marriage and the family. Of this function some further mention will presently be made.

More threatening to the solidarity of the family is believed to be the individualistic tendencies arising in existing urban and economic life.[785] With the rise of corporate and associated industry comes a weakening of the intimacy of home ties. Through the division of labor the "family hearth-stone" is fast becoming a mere temporary meeting-place of individual wage-earners. The congestion of population in cities is forcing into being new and lower modes of life. The tenement and the "sweating system" are destructive of the home. Neither the lodging-house, the "flat," nor the "apartment" affords an ideal environment for domestic joys. In the vast hives of Paris, London, or New York even families of the relatively well-to-do have small opportunity to flourish—for self-culture and self-enjoyment. To the children of the slum the street is a perilous nursery. For them squalor, disease, and sordid vice have supplanted the traditional blessings of the family sanctuary. The cramped, artificial, and transient associations of the boarding-house are a wretched substitute for the privacy of the separate household.[786] For very many men club life has stronger allurements than the connubial partnership. Prostitution advances with alarming speed. For the poor, sometimes for the rich, the great city has many interests and many places more attractive than the home circle. The love of selfish indulgence and the spirit of commercial greed, not less than grinding penury, restrain men and women from wedlock. Yet the urban environment has also the opposite effect. In the crowded, heterogeneous, and shifting population of the great towns marriages are often lightly made and as lightly dissolved. Indeed, the remarkable mobility of the American people, the habit of frequent migration, under the powerful incentives of industrial enterprise, gold-hunting, or other adventure, and under favor of the marvelously developed means of swift transportation, will account in no small degree for the laxity of matrimonial and family ties in the United States. May not one gather courage even from this untoward circumstance? Assuredly the present thus clearly appears to be an age of transition to a more stable condition of social life. Furthermore, the perils to the family of the kind under review need not be fatal. They are inherent mainly in economic institutions which may be scientifically studied and intelligently brought into harmony with the requirements of the social order. Already in great municipal centers, through improved facilities for rapid transit, the evils resulting from dense population are being somewhat ameliorated. Of a truth, every penny's reduction in street-railway fares means for the family of small means a better chance for pure air, sound health, and a separate home in the suburbs. The dispersion of the city over a broader area at once cheapens and raises the standard of living. Every hour's reduction in the period of daily toil potentially gives more leisure for building, adorning, and enjoying the home.

To the socialist the monogamic family in its present form is decidedly a failure. "To those who would substitute common ownership for industrial liberty, the institution of the family presents one of the most persistent obstacles. Domestic unity is inconsistent with the absolute social unity vested in the state."[787] The larger social body must be composed of individual members, free and equal; and it will not tolerate within itself a smaller body with special group-interests of its own, much less with any vestige of coercive authority over its constituent parts. There must be no imperium in imperio. Writers like Engels[788] seek consolation and support in Bachofen's theory of a universal stage of mother-right before the monogamic family with the institution of private property had brought domestic slavery into the world. They "hold that the monogamic family is a relic of decaying civilization. All ideas on which it rests, the subordination and dependence of women, the ownership of children, the belief in the sacredness of marriage as a divine institution, above all respect for the individual ownership of property and the rights of inheritance as permanent elements in our social organization—have been undermined. The foundations are sapped and the superstructure is ready to topple in."[789]

Woman in particular has been the devoted victim of the greed of individual possession upon which the monogamic family rests. "Far back in history," according to Edward Carpenter, "at a time when in the early societies the thought of inequality had hardly arisen, it would appear that the female, in her own way—as sole authenticator of birth and parentage, as guardian of the household, as inventress of agriculture and the peaceful arts, as priestess and prophetess or sharer in the councils of the tribe—was as powerful as man in his, and sometimes even more so. But from thence down to today what centuries of repression, of slavehood, of dumbness, of obscurity have been her lot!"[790]

Under socialism, declare Morris and Bax, marriage and the family will be affected "firstly in economics and secondly in ethics. The present marriage system is based on the general supposition of economic dependence of the woman on the man, and the consequent necessity of his making provision for her." In the new social order this degrading condition must disappear. "Property in children would cease to exist, and every infant that came into the world would be born into full citizenship, and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parents might be. Thus a new development of the family would take place, on the basis, not of a predominant life-long business arrangement, to be formally and nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party." Thus a higher morality would be sanctioned. There would be no "vestige of reprobation for dissolving one tie and forming another."[791]