It is vain for "scientific optimism" to seek in "nature" a justification for woman's sexual subjection. "Independently ... of its false facts and false premises, this pretended scientific defense of the undue inequality of the sexes in man is fundamentally unsound in resting upon a thoroughly false assumption, which is only the more pernicious because widely prevalent. It assumes that whatever exists in nature must be the best possible state.... The only practical use to which we put science is to improve upon nature, to control all classes of forces, social forces included, to the end of bettering the conditions under which we inhabit the earth. This is true civilization, and all of it."[814]
The fear that the education of woman, in connection with her growing economic independence, will prove harmful to society through her refusal of matrimony or maternity appears equally groundless. According to Dike, "the demand for her enfranchisement, either as a right or on the ground of expediency, grows out of this way of treating her as an individual whose relations to society are less a matter of condition and more of personal choice. And this principle is carried into a sphere entirely her own. A partial loss of capacity for maternity has, it is said, already befallen American women; and the voluntary refusal of its responsibilities is the lament of the physician and the moralist."[815] It is true that the birth-rate is falling.[816] So far as this depends upon male sensuality, a prevalent cause of sterility; upon selfish love of ease and luxury—of which men even more than women are guilty; or upon the disastrous influence of the present extremes of wealth and poverty—of which women as well as men are the victims—it is a serious evil which may well cause us anxiety; but so far as it is the result of the desire for fewer but better-born children—for which, let us hope, the advancing culture of woman may in part be responsible—it is in fact a positive social good.[817] It is true also that, while fewer and fewer marriages in proportion to the population are taking place, men as well as women are marrying later and later in life.[818] Here again, for the reasons just mentioned, the results are both good and bad. Certain it is that early marriages and excessive child-bearing have been the twin causes of much injury to the human race. "To the superficial observer," declares a writer very conservative as to the effects of woman's emancipation, "it may appear that every marriage must enrich the state, and that early marriages must lessen the amount of sexual immorality, but inquiry will prove conclusively how fallacious are those views. Early marriages certainly tend to the production of large families, but then a family, to be a source of wealth to the state, must at least be self-supporting, which is exactly what the feeble, degenerate children of the great mass of our early marriages are not. They are brought forth ill-developed and unhealthy; their immature, improvident parents are unable to either feed or educate them as they ought to be fed and educated; hence, instead of being a source of wealth to the state, they prove a serious drain upon her resources. A large percentage of these miserable children succumb during infancy, but a great number drag out a pitiful existence, only to become inmates of our workhouses and infirmaries, our asylums and prisons, and, after being supported at the public expense for a longer or shorter period, to die prematurely, leaving the state poorer than they found it and no better. It is indeed a small percentage of the children of the immature that ever become robust useful, self-supporting citizens."[819]
It is not marriage or maternity which educated women are shunning; but they are declining to view marriage as their sole vocation or to become merely child-bearing animals. Let us not worry about the destiny of college women.[820] It is simply wrong wedlock which they are avoiding. They have, suggests Muirhead, a careful regard for the "kind" of marriage. They are determined to have only "the genuine article." They "look in marriage not only for the old fashioned 'union of hearts,' but for the union of heart and head in some serious interest which will survive the mere attractions of sex and form a solid bond of union even in the absence of others which, like the birth of children, depend on fortune." So "far from being hostile" to the family, "they are only preparing the way for a purer and more beneficent form of family life." The "maternal instinct is happily not confined to the uneducated."[821] The rise of a more refined sentiment of love has become at once a check and an incentive to marriage.[822] Long ago Mrs. John Stuart Mill explained how essential are knowledge and equality to render woman the real companion of man in the struggle for existence; how the subjection and ignorance of the wife degrade not only her own character, but that of the husband as well. "There is hardly any situation more unfavorable to the maintenance of elevation of character, or force of intellect, than to live in the society, and seek by preference the sympathy, of inferiors in mental endowments."[823]
If woman's even partnership with man in the nurture of the family and in facing the exigencies of external life depends mainly on equal education, never was such education more urgently required than at the present hour. Social and industrial problems are constantly demanding higher and higher mental training for their solution. The same is true of the problem of the family. It is very largely a question of reform and development in home education. Clearly, then, husband and wife have great need of intelligent sympathy and counsel in the discharge of their joint, yet partially differentiated, tasks. Hence, it should be the high function of public education to promote this healthy companionship in social duty. Furthermore, American experience appears to show that it can best do so by training young men and women together. Indeed, in this regard the sociological value of coeducation is very important. Theoretically it seems reasonable to assume that those who are to work together in later life may gain some advantage by spending the years of study side by side. The practical result of coeducation in the western states, where it has been given the freest opportunity, appears to demonstrate that such is actually the case. The majority of those who have had extended experience, after making all due allowance for special difficulties to be surmounted, are emphatic in their opinion that mentally and morally both sexes are the gainers by it, as compared with training in separate institutions.[824] It is true that eventually marriages very often result from such associations. That is precisely the gist of the matter. Are not the conditions entirely favorable to the fostering of happy unions? Under what better auspices can attachments be formed than when young men and women are learning to gauge each other's character through the varied social and intellectual rivalries of the years of scholastic life?
Educational equality, however, is but one aspect of the movement for woman's liberation. There are other factors of the ideal partnership of the sexes in the uplifting of society. Intellectual emancipation is proceeding, and necessarily must proceed, hand in hand with political and economic emancipation. The three movements are in large measure blended and interdependent. The participation of woman in the new vocations—industrial, artistic, professional, or administrative—implies a great advance in mental training. It means a distinct unfoldment of faculties and character. "No sociological change equal in importance to this clearly marked improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one century."[825] It is a revolution in which one-half of the human race is becoming an equal factor with the other in intellectual and economic production. At last woman is gaining a share in the social consciousness; she is entering into the social organization as a new and regenerative force. Doubtless, in the process of readjusting new functions and conditions to the old some temporary harm may ensue. Yet happily the alarm is subsiding lest by her entrance on the new vocations woman should permanently wreck her physical constitution, refuse to marry, or cause industrial disaster through over-competition.[826] With far greater justice a century ago it was complained that the "intrusion of men-traders" into woman's work was driving her to destitution and thus fostering the "social evil."[827] The callings into which women are charged with "intruding" were, many of them, women's callings before they were men's.
It is within the family itself that the growing economic independence of woman is producing the highest sociological results. Under the old domestic régime on both sides of the sea the woman who married entered legally, potentially, upon a life of financial bondage. In the theory of the common law the wife, with her children, her goods, and the fruits of her toil, was the sole property of the husband. Only in 1886 did the mother in England gain legal capacity for the partial custody of her offspring;[828] and in but few of the American states has she been placed on equal footing with the father in this regard.[829] Even now the "husband in England can claim damage from the man who has ruined his family life, but the woman can claim none from the rival who has supplanted her."[830] In both England and the United States notable progress has already been made in equalizing the property rights of the sexes; but the process is yet far from complete. The prevailing conception of marriage as a status in which the wife is "supported" by the husband is degrading in its influence on the woman's character. It tends to deaden her moral perceptions and to paralyze her mental powers. Girls are trained, or they are forced by poverty, to look upon wedlock as an economic vocation, as a means of getting a living. The result is that under the old order marriage tends to become a species of purchase-contract in which the woman barters her sex-capital to the man in exchange for a life-support. The man—not the woman as originally—has become the chooser in sex-selection. In the family, therefore, the sex-motive has become excessively pronounced, thrusting into the background higher social and spiritual ideals.[831] The liberation movement thus means in a high degree the socialization of one-half of the human race. Woman declines longer to be restricted to the dwarfing environment of sexual seclusion; and demands the means and the privilege of engaging in the larger activities of self-conscious society.[832]
We are thus confronted by still another phase of the emancipation movement—the divorce problem. In this problem woman has a peculiar interest. The wife more frequently than the husband is seeking in divorce a release from marital ills; for in her case it often involves an escape from sexual slavery. The divorce movement, therefore, is in part an expression of woman's growing independence. In this instance as in others it does not, of course, follow that the individualistic tendency is vicious. Nowhere in the field of social ethics, perhaps, is there more confusion of thought than in dealing with the divorce question. Divorce is not favored by anyone for its own sake. Probably in every healthy society the ideal of right marriage is a lifelong union. But what if it is not right, if the marriage is a failure? Is there no relief? Here a sharp difference of opinion has arisen. Some persons look upon divorce as an evil in itself; others as a "remedy" for, or a "symptom" of, social disease. The one class regard it as a cause; the other as an effect. To the Roman Catholic, and to those who believe with him, divorce is a sin, the sanction of "successive polygamy,"[833] of "polygamy on the instalment plan."[834] At the other extreme are those who, like Milton and Humboldt,[835] would allow marriage to be dissolved freely by mutual consent, or even at the desire of either spouse. Nay, there are earnest souls, shocked by the intolerable hardships which wives may suffer under the marital yoke, who, pending a reform in the marriage law, would, like the Quakers of earlier days, ignore the present statutory requirements and resort to private contract.[836] According to the prevailing opinion, however, as expressed in modern legislation, divorce should be allowed, with more or less freedom, under careful state regulation. Whatever degree of liberty may be just or expedient in a more advanced state of moral development, it is felt that now a reasonable conservatism is the safer course. Yet divorce is sanctioned by the state as an individual right; and there may be occasions when the exercise of the right becomes a social duty. The right is, of course, capable of serious abuse. Loose divorce laws may even invite crime. Nevertheless, it is fallacious to represent the institution of divorce as in itself a menace to social morality. It is not helpful to allege, as is often done, that with the increase of divorce certain crimes wax more frequent, thus insinuating the effect for the cause. It is just as illogical to assume that the prevalence of divorce in the United States is a proof of moral decadence as compared with other countries in which divorce is prohibited or more restricted. To forbid the use of a remedy does not prove that there is no disease. Is there any good reason for believing that what Tocqueville said fifty years ago is not true today? "Assuredly," he declares, "America is the country in the world where the marriage tie is most respected and where the highest and justest idea of conjugal happiness has been conceived."[837] It is remarkable, says Lecky, "that this great facility of divorce should exist in a country which has long been conspicuous for its high standard of sexual morality and for its deep sense of the sanctity of marriage."[838] Bryce passes a similar judgment: "So far as my own information goes, the practical level of sexual morality is at least as high in the United States as in any part of northern or western Europe (except possibly among the Roman Catholic peasantry of Ireland)." There "seems no ground for concluding that the increase of divorce in America necessarily points to a decline in the standard of domestic morality, except perhaps in a small section of the wealthy class, though it must be admitted that if this increase should continue, it may tend to induce such a decline."[839] Even more emphatic is Commissioner Wright. After eloquently describing the relatively high place which woman has reached in our land, he continues: "I do not believe that divorce is a menace to the purity and sacredness of the family; but I do believe that it is a menace to the infernal brutality, of whatever name, and be it crude or refined, which at times makes a hell of the holiest human relations. I believe the divorce movement finds its impetus outside of laws, outside of our institutions, outside of our theology; that it finds its impetus in the rebellion of the human heart against that slavery which binds in the cruelest bonds of the cruelest prostitution human beings who have, by their foolishness, by their want of wisdom, or by the intervention of friends, missed the divine purpose, as well as the civil purpose of marriage. I believe the result will be an enhanced purity, a sublimer sacredness, a more beautiful embodiment of Lamartine's trinity,—the trinity of the father, the mother, and the child"—to preserve which "in all its sacredness, society must take the bitter medicine labelled 'Divorce.'"[840]
This brings us to the root of the matter: the need of a loftier popular ideal of the marriage relation. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." While bad legislation and a low standard of social ethics continue to throw recklessly wide the door which opens to wedlock, there must of necessity be a broad way out. How ignorantly, with what utter levity,[841] are marriages often contracted; how many thousands of parents fail to give their children any serious warning against yielding to transient impulse in choosing a mate; how few have received any real training with respect to the duties and responsibilities of conjugal life! What proper check is society placing upon the marriage of the unfit? Is there any boy or girl so immature if only the legal age of consent has been reached; is there any "delinquent" so dangerous through inherited tendencies to disease or crime; is there any worn out debauchee, who cannot somewhere find a magistrate or a priest to tie the "sacred" knot? It is a very low moral sentiment which tolerates modern wife-purchase or husband-purchase for bread, title, or social position. "As our laws stare us in the face," exclaims an eloquent writer, "there is no man so drunken, so immoral, so brutal, so cruel, that he may not take to himself the purest, the most refined, the most sensitive of women to wife, if he can get her. There is no woman so paltry, so petty, so vain, so inane, so enfeebled in body and mind by corsets or chloral, flirtation, or worse, that she may not become the wife of an intellectual, honorable man, and the mother of his doomed children. There is no pauper who may not wed a pauper and beget paupers to the end of his story. There is no felon returned from his prison, or loose upon society uncondemned, who may not make a base play at wedlock, and perpetuate his diseased soul and body in those of his descendants, without restraint. There is no member of what we call our 'respectable' classes who may not, if he choose, make a mock of the awful name of marriage, in sacrilege to which we are so used that we scarcely lift an eyelid to suppress surprise or aversion at the sickening variety of the offence."[842]
It is vain to conceal from ourselves the fact that here is a real menace to society. Marriages thus formed are almost sure to be miserable failures from the start. It is the simple truth, as earnest writers have insisted, that often under such conditions the nuptial ceremony is but a legal sanction of "prostitution within the marriage bond," whose fruit is wrecked motherhood and the feeble, base-born children of unbridled lust. The command to "be fruitful and multiply," under the selfish and thoughtless interpretation which has been given it, has become a heavy curse to womanhood and a peril to the human race.[843] On the face of it, is it not grotesque to call such unions holy or to demand that they shall be indissoluble? What chance is there under such circumstances for a happy family life or for worthy home-building? In sanctioning divorce the welfare of the children may well cause the state anxiety; but are there not thousands of so-called "homes" from whose corrupting and blighting shadow the sooner a child escapes the better for both it and society?
How shall the needed reform be accomplished? The raising of ideals is a slow process. It will not come through the statute-maker, though he can do something to provide a legal environment favorable for the change. It must come through an earnest and persistent educational effort which shall fundamentally grapple with the whole group of problems which concern the related, though distinct, institutions of marriage, the home, and the family. In this work every grade in the educational structure, from the university to the kindergarten and the home circle, must have its appropriate share. Already a few of our higher institutions have made a worthy beginning. Departments of physical culture, economics, history, and sociology are providing instruction of real value. But the movement should become universal; and the curriculum should be broadened and deepened. The actual concrete problems must be dealt with frankly and without flinching. To gain the right perspective it is highly important that a thorough historical basis should be laid through the study of ethnology, comparative religion, and the evolution of cultural, economic, and matrimonial institutions. Moreover, the elements of such a training in domestic sociology should find a place in the public school program. If need be, a little more arithmetic or a little more Latin may be sacrificed. Where now, except perhaps in an indirect or perfunctory way, does the school boy or girl get any practical suggestion as to home-building, the right social relations of parent and child, much less regarding marriage and the fundamental questions of the sexual life? In this field the home, as the complement or coadjutor of the school and the state, has a precious opportunity. Indeed, our inspiring hope lies in the fact that, in spite of unfavorable conditions, many homes, presided over by enlightened parents, are discharging worthily, if not yet ideally, the high function of social training. Here father, mother, and child are equal members of the "trinity." Here it is held as binding an obligation and as joyous a privilege for the parents to honor their children as for the children to honor their parents. Of a truth, is there anything on earth more beautiful and inspiring than the real companionship of parent and child; than a home life in which the characters of the young are molded and their faculties drawn out by free and frank discussion with their elders; where mutual love is based on mutual respect? But what shall be said of the opposite picture—of the countless families in which mother and child still cower before the paternal despot; where authority and not reason prevails; where, as in the good old colonial days, the child is harshly thrust into the background and his insistent individualism is insulted and repressed? Before the home can become a healthful school for social education, parents must themselves be trained; they must become aware of their real place in the social order.