Socialism and the family

by H. G. Wells

Not all of them, of course. A middle-aged architect with a note-book full of bits of gothic, and a reputation for suburban churches, or full of bits of “Queen Anne” and a connexion among villa builders, or an engineer paterfamilias who has tasted blood as an expert witness, aren’t to be won by these suggestions. They’re part of things as they are. But that is only a temporary inconvenience to Socialism. The young men do respond, and they are the future and what Socialism needs.

And there’s another great constructive profession that should be Socialist altogether, and that is the medical profession. Especially does Socialism claim the younger men who haven’t yet sunken from the hospitals to the trading individualism of a practice. And then there are the teachers, the schoolmasters and schoolmistresses. The idea of a great organized making is innate in the quality of their professions; the making of sound bodies and healthy conditions, the making of informed and disciplined minds. The methods of the profit-seeking schoolmaster, the practice-buying doctor are imposed upon them by the necessities of an individualist world. Both these two great professions present nowadays, side by side, two types—the new type, highly qualified, official, administrative, scientific, public-spirited; the old type, capitalistic, with a pretentious house and equipment, the doctor with a brougham, and a dispensary, the schoolmaster or schoolmistress with some huge old stucco house converted by jerry-built extensions to meet scholastic needs. Who would not rather, one may ask, choose the former way who was not already irrevocably committed to the latter? Well, I with my Socialist dreams would like to answer “No one,” but I’m learning to check my buoyant optimism. The imagination and science in a young man may cry out for the public position, for the valiant public work, for the hard, honourable, creative years. He may sit with his fellow-students and his fellow-workers in a nocturnal cloud of tobacco smoke and fine talk, and vow himself to research and the creative world state. In the morning he will think he has dreamed; he will recall what the world is, what Socialists are, what he has heard wild Socialists say about science and his art. He will elect for the real world and a practice.

Something more than a failure to state the constructive and educational quality in Socialism on the part of its exponents has to be admitted in accounting for the unnatural want of sympathetic co-operation between them and the bulk of these noble professions. I cannot disguise from myself certain curiously irrelevant strands that have interwoven with the partial statements of Socialism current in England, and which it is high time, I think, for Socialists to repudiate. Socialism is something more than an empty criticism of our contemporary disorder and waste of life, it is a great intimation of construction, organization, science and education. But concurrently with its extension and its destructive criticism of the capitalistic individualism of to-day, there has been another movement, essentially an anarchist movement, hostile to machinery and apparatus, hostile to medical science, hostile to order, hostile to education, a Rousseauite movement in the direction of a sentimentalized naturalism, a Tolstoyan movement in the direction of a non-resisting pietism, which has not simply been confused with the Socialist movement, but has really affected and interwoven with it. It is not simply that wherever discussion and destructive criticism of the present conventional bases of society occur, both ways of thinking crop up together; they occur all too often as alternating phases in the same individual. Few of us are so clear-headed as to be free from profound self-contradictions. So that it is no great marvel, after all, if the presentation of Socialism has got mixed up with Return-to-Nature ideas, with proposals for living in a state of unregulated primitive virtue in purely hand-made houses, upon rain water and uncooked fruit. We Socialists have to disentangle it from these things now. We have to disavow, with all necessary emphasis, that gibing at science and the medical profession, at schools and books and the necessary apparatus for collective thinking, which has been one of our little ornamental weaknesses in the past. That has, I know, kept a very considerable number of intelligent professional men from inquiring further into Socialist theories and teachings. As a consequence there are, especially in the medical profession, quite a number of unconscious Socialists, men, often with a far clearer grip upon the central ideas of Socialism than many of its professed exponents, who have worked out these ideas for themselves, and are incredulous to hear them called Socialistic.

So much for the specifically creative and imagination-using professions. Throughout the whole range of the more educated middle classes, however, there are causes at work that necessarily stimulate thought towards Socialism, that engender scepticisms, promote inquiries leading towards what is at present the least expounded of all aspects of Socialism—the relation of Socialism to the institution of the Family....

The Family, and not the individual, is still the unit in contemporary civilization, and indeed in nearly all social systems that have ever existed. The adult male, the head of the family, has been the citizen, the sole representative of the family in the State. About him have been grouped his one or more wives, his children, his dependents. His position towards them has always been—is still in many respects to this day—one of ownership. He was owner of them all, and in many of the less sophisticated systems of the past his ownership was as complete as over his horse and house and land—more complete than over his land. He could sell his children into slavery, barter his wives. There has been a secular mitigation of the rights of this sort of private property; the establishment of monogamy, for instance, did for the family what President Roosevelt’s proposed legislation against large accumulations might do for industrial enterprises, but to this day in our own community, for all such mitigations and many euphemisms, the ownership of the head of the family is still a manifest fact. He votes. He keeps and protects. He determines the education and professions of his children. He is entitled to monetary consolation for any infringement of his rights over wife or daughter. Every intelligent woman understands that, as a matter of hard fact, beneath all the civilities of to-day, she is actual or potential property, and has to treat herself and keep herself as that. She may by force or subtlety turn her chains into weapons, she may succeed in exacting a reciprocal property in a man, the fact remains fundamental that she is either isolated or owned.

But I need not go on writing facts with which every one is acquainted. My concern now is to point out that Socialism repudiates the private ownership of the head of the family as completely as it repudiates any other sort of private ownership. Socialism involves the responsible citizenship of women, their economic independence of men, and all the personal freedom that follows that, it intervenes between the children and the parents, claiming to support them, protect them, and educate them for its own ampler purposes. Socialism, in fact, is the State family. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it, just as the old water works of private enterprise, or the old gas company. They are incompatible with it. Socialism assails the triumphant egotism of the family to-day, just as Christianity did in its earlier and more vital centuries. So far as English Socialism is concerned (and the thing is still more the case in America) I must confess that the assault has displayed a quite extraordinary instinct for taking cover, but that is a question of tactics rather than of essential antagonism.

It is possible to believe that so far as the middle classes are concerned this discretion has been carried altogether too far. Socialists would have forwarded their cause better if they had been more outspoken. It has led to preposterous misunderstandings; and among others to the charge that Socialism implied free-love.... The middle-class family, I am increasingly convinced, is a group in a state of tension. I believe that a modest but complete statement of the Socialist criticism of the family and the proposed Socialist substitute for the conventional relationships might awaken extraordinary responses at the present time. The great terror of the eighties and early nineties that crushed all reasonable discussion of sexual relationship is, I believe, altogether over.

The whole of the present system is riddled with discontents. One factor is the enhanced sense of the child in middle-class life: the old sentiment was that the parent owned the child, the new is that the children own the parents. There has come an intensified respect for children, an immense increase in the trouble, attention and expenditure devoted to them—and a very natural and human accompaniment in the huge fall in the middle-class birth-rate. It is felt that to bear and rear children is the most noble and splendid and responsible thing in life, and an increasing number of people modestly evade it. People see more clearly the social service of parentage, and are more and more inclined to demand a recognition from the State for this service. The middle-class parent might conceivably be horrified if you suggested the State should pay him for his offspring, but he would have no objection whatever to being indirectly and partially paid by a differential income tax graduated in relation to the size of his family.

With this increased sense of the virtue and public service of parentage there has gone on a great development of the criticism of schools and teaching. The more educated middle-class parent has become an amateur educationist of considerable virulence. He sees more and more distinctly the inadequacy of his own private attempts to educate, the necessary charlatanry and insufficiency of the private adventure school. He finds much to envy in the elementary schools. If he is ignorant and short-sighted, he joins in the bitter cry of the middle classes, and clamours against the pampering of the working class, and the rising of the rates which renders his efforts to educate his own children more difficult. But a more intelligent type of middle-class parent sends his boy in for public scholarships, sets to work to get educational endowment for his own class also, and makes another step towards Socialism. Moreover, the increasing intelligence of the middle-class parent and the steady swallowing up of the smaller capitalists and smaller shareholders by the larger enterprises and fortunes, alike bring home to him the temporary and uncertain nature of the advantages his private efforts give his children over those of the working man. He sees no more than a brief respite for them against the economic cataclysms of the coming time. He is more and more alive to the presence of secular change in the world. He does not feel sure his sons will carry on the old business, continue the old practice. He begins to appreciate the concentration of wealth. The secular development of the capitalistic system robs him more and more of his sense of securities. He is uneasier than he used to be about investments. He no longer has that complete faith in private insurance companies that once sustained him. His mind broadens out to State insurance as to State education. He is far more amenable than he used to be to the idea that the only way to provide for one’s own posterity is to provide for every one’s posterity, to merge parentage in citizenship. The family of the middle-class man which fights for itself alone, is lost.

Socialism comes into the middle-class family offering education, offering assurances for the future, and only very distantly intimating the price to be paid in weakened individual control. But far profounder disintegrations are at work. The internal character of the middle-class family is altering fundamentally with the general growth of intelligence, with the higher education of women, with the comings and goings for this purpose and that, the bicycles and games, the enlarged social appetites and opportunities of a new time. The more or less conscious Strike against Parentage is having far-reaching effects. The family proper becomes a numerically smaller group. Enormous numbers of childless families appear; the middle-class family with two, or at most three, children is the rule rather than the exception in certain strata. This makes the family a less various and interesting group, with a smaller demand for attention, emotion, effort. Quite apart from the general mental quickening of the time, it leaves more and more social energy, curiosity, enterprise free, either to fret within the narrow family limits or to go outside them. The Strike against Parentage takes among other forms the form of a strike against marriage; great numbers of men and women stand out from a relationship which every year seems more limiting and (except for its temporary passional aspect) purposeless. The number of intelligent and healthy women inadequately employed, who either idle as wives in attenuated modern families, childless or with an insufficient child or so, or who work for an unsatisfying subsistence as unmarried women, increases. To them the complete conceptions of Socialism should have an extraordinary appeal.