Socialism and the family

by H. G. Wells

The appearance of the feminine mind and soul in the world as something distinct and self-conscious, is the appearance of a distinct new engine of criticism against the individualist family, against this dwindling property of the once-ascendant male—who no longer effectually rules, no longer, in many cases, either protects or sustains, who all too often is so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexatious power of jealous restriction and interference upon his wife and children. The educated girl resents the proposed loss of her freedom in marriage, the educated married woman realizes as well as resents the losses of scope and interest marriage entails. If it were not for the economic disadvantages that make intelligent women dread a solitary old age in bitter poverty, vast numbers of women who are married to-day would have remained single independent women. This discontent of women is a huge available force for Socialism. The wife of the past was, to put it brutally, caught younger—so young that she had had no time to think—she began forthwith to bear babies, rear babies, and (which she did in a quite proportionate profusion) bury babies—she never had a moment to think. Now the wife with double the leisure, double the education and half the emotional scope of her worn prolific grandmother, sits at home and thinks things over. You find her letting herself loose in clubs, in literary enterprises, in schemes for joint households to relieve herself and her husband from the continuation of a duologue that has exhausted its interest. The husband finds himself divided between his sympathetic sense of tedium and the proprietary tradition in which we live.

For these tensions in the disintegration of the old proprietary family no remedy offers itself to-day except the solutions that arise as essential portions of the Socialist scheme. The alternative is hypocrisy and disorder.

There is yet another and still more effectual system of strains at work in the existing social unit, and that is the strain between parents and children. That has always existed. It is one of our most transparent sentimental pretences that there is any natural subordination of son to father, of daughter to mother. As a matter of fact a good deal of natural antagonism appears at the adolescence of the young. Something very like an instinct stirs in them, to rebel, to go out. The old habits of solicitude, control and restraint in the parent become more and more hampering, irksome, and exasperating to the offspring. The middle-class son gets away in spirit and in fact to school, to college, to business—his sister does all she can to follow his excellent example. In a world with vast moral and intellectual changes in progress the intelligent young find the personal struggle for independence intensified by a conflict of ideas. The modern tendency to cherish and preserve youthfulness; the keener desire for living that prevents women getting fat and ugly, and men bald and incompetent by forty-five, is another dissolvent factor among these stresses. The daughter is not only restrained by her mother’s precepts, but inflamed by her example. The son finds his father’s coevals treating him as a contemporary.

Well, into these conflicts and disorders comes Socialism, and Socialism alone, to explain, to justify, to propose new conventions and new interpretations of relationship, to champion the reasonable claims of the young, to mitigate the thwarted ownership of the old. Socialism comes, constructive amid the wreckage.

Let me at this point, and before I conclude, put one thing with the utmost possible clearness. The Socialist does not propose to destroy something that conceivably would otherwise last for ever, when he proposes a new set of institutions, and a new system of conduct to replace the old proprietary family. He no more regards the institution of marriage as a permanent thing than he regards a state of competitive industrialism as a permanent thing. In the economic sphere, quite apart from any Socialist ideas or Socialist activities, it is manifest that competitive individualism destroys itself. This was reasoned out long ago in the Capital of Marx; it is receiving its first gigantic practical demonstration in the United States of America. Whatever happens, we believe that competitive industrialism will change and end—and we Socialists at least believe that the alternative to some form of Socialism is tyranny and social ruin. So, too, in the social sphere, whether Socialists succeed altogether or fail altogether, or in whatever measure they succeed or fail, it does not alter the fact that the family is weakening, dwindling, breaking up, disintegrating. The alternative to a planned and organized Socialism is not the maintenance of the present system, but its logical development, and that is all too plainly a growing complication of pretences as the old imperatives weaken and fade. We already live in a world of stupendous hypocrisies, a world wherein rakes and rascals champion the sacred institution of the family, and a network of sexual secrets, vaguely suspected, disagreeably present, and only half-concealed, pervades every social group one enters. Cynicism, a dismal swamp of base intrigues, cruel restrictions and habitual insincerities, is the manifest destiny of the present régime unless we make some revolutionary turn. It cannot work out its own salvation without the profoundest change in its determining ideas. And what change in those ideas is offered except by the Socialist?

In relation to all these most intimate aspects of life, Socialism, and Socialism alone, supplies the hope and suggestions of clean and practicable solutions. So far, Socialists have either been silent or vague, or—let us say—tactful, in relation to this central tangle of life. To begin to speak plainly among the silences and suppressions, the “find out for yourself” of the current time, would be, I think, to grip the middle-class woman and the middle-class youth of both sexes with an extraordinary new interest, to irradiate the dissensions of every bored couple and every squabbling family with broad conceptions, and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the Socialist movement at the present time.

Here ends the paper read by Mr. Wells to the Fabian Society, but in this that follows he sets out the Socialist conception of the new relations that must follow the old much more clearly.

II

I do not think that the general reader at all appreciates the steady development of Socialist thought during the past two decades. Directly one comes into close contact with contemporary Socialists one discovers in all sorts of ways the evidence of the synthetic work that has been and still is in process, the clearing and growth of guiding ideas, the qualification of primitive statements, the consideration, the adaptation to meet this or that adequate criticism. A quarter of a century ago Socialism was still to a very large extent a doctrine of negative, a passionate criticism and denial of the theories that sustained and excused the injustices of contemporary life, a repudiation of social and economic methods then held to be indispensable and in the very nature of things. Its positive proposals were as sketchy as they were enthusiastic, sketchy and, it must be confessed, fluctuating. One needs to turn back to the files of its every-day publications to realize the progress that has been made, the secular emergence of a consistent and continually more nearly complete and directive scheme of social reconstruction from the chaotic propositions and hopes and denials of the earlier time. In no direction is this more evident than in the steady clearing of the Socialistic attitude towards marriage and the family; in the disentanglement of Socialism from much idealist and irrelevant matter with which it was once closely associated and encumbered, in the orderly incorporation of conceptions that at one time seemed not only outside of, but hostile to, Socialist ways of thinking....

Nothing could have brought out this more clearly than the comical attempt made recently by the Daily Express to suggest that Mr. Keir Hardie and the party he leads was mysteriously involved with my unfortunate self in teaching Free Love to respectable working men. When my heat and indignation had presently a little subsided, I found myself asking how it came about, that any one could bring together such discrepant things as the orderly proposals of Socialism as they shape themselves in the projects of Mr. Keir Hardie, let us say, and the doctrine of sexual go-as-you-please. And so inquiring, my mind drifted back to the days—it is a hazy period to me—when Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft were alive, when Shelley explained his views to Harriet. These people were in a sort of way Socialists; Palaeo-Socialists. They professed also very distinctly that uncovenanted freedom of action in sexual matters which is, I suppose, Free Love. Indeed, so near are we to these old confusions that there is still, I find, one Palaeo-Socialist surviving—Mr. Belfort Bax. In that large undifferentiated past, all sorts of ideas, as yet too ill defined to eliminate one another, socialist ideas, communist ideas, anarchist ideas, Rousseauism, seethed together and seemed akin. In a sense they were akin in that they were the condemnation of the existing order, the outcome of the destructive criticism of this of its aspects or that. They were all breccia. But in all else, directly they began to find definite statement, they were flatly contradictory one with another. Or at least they stood upon different levels of assumption and application.