[248] Cf. Hadley, Economics, p. 159.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE FAMILY
The family in its moral aspects has one end, the common good of all its members, but this has three aspects. (1) Marriage converts an attachment between man and woman, either of passion or of friendship, into a deliberate, intimate, permanent, responsible union for a common end of mutual good. It is this common end, a good of a higher, broader, fuller sort than either could attain in isolation, which lifts passion from the impulsive or selfish to the moral plane; it is the peculiar intimacy and the peculiar demands for common sympathy and co-operation, which give it greater depth and reach than ordinary friendship. (2) The family is the great social agency for the care and training of the race. (3) This function reacts upon the character of the parents. Tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrifice, steadiness of purpose, responsibility, and activity, are all demanded and usually evoked by the children. A brief sketch of the development of the family and of its psychological basis, will prepare the way for a consideration of its present problems.
§ 1. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF THE MODERN FAMILY
The division of the sexes appeals to the biologist as an agency for securing greater variability, and so greater possibility of adaptation and progress. It has also to the sociologist the value of giving greater variety in function, and so a much richer society than could exist without it. Morally, the realization of these values, and the further effects upon character noted above, depend greatly upon the terms under which the marriage union is formed and maintained. The number of parties to the union, the mode of forming it, its stability, and the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, while in the family relation, have shown in western civilization a tendency toward certain lines of progress, although the movement has been irregular and has been interrupted by certain halts or even reversions.
The Maternal Type.—The early family, certainly in many parts of the world, was formed when a man left his father and mother to "cleave unto his wife," that is, when the woman remained in her own group and the man came from his group to live with her. This tended to give the woman continued protection—and also continued control—by her own relatives, and made the children belong to the mother's clan. As recent ethnologists seem inclined to agree, this does not mean a matriarchal family. The woman's father and brothers, rather than the woman, are in the last analysis the authority. At the same time, at a stage when physical force is so large a factor, this type of family undoubtedly favors the woman's condition as compared with the next to be mentioned.
The Paternal Type.—When the woman leaves her own group to live in the house of her husband, it means a possible loss of backing and position for her. But it means a great gain for the influence which insures the wife's fidelity, the father's authority over the children and interest in them, and finally the permanence of the family. The power of the husband and father reached its extreme among western peoples in the patriarchate at Rome, which allowed him the right of life and death. At its best the patriarchal type of family fostered the dignity and power of a ruler and owner, the sense of honor which watched jealously over self and wife and children to keep the name unsullied; finally the respective attitudes of protector and protected enhanced the charm of each for the other. At its worst it meant domineering brutality, and either the weakness of abject submission or the misery of hopeless injustice.
Along with this building up of "father right" came variations in the mode of gaining a wife. When the man takes a wife instead of going to his wife, he may either capture her, or purchase her, or serve for her. In any of these cases she may become to a certain extent his property as well as his wife. This does not necessarily imply a feeling of humiliation. The Kafir women profess great contempt for a system in which a woman is not worth buying. But it evidently favors a commercial theory of the whole relation. The bride's consent may sometimes be a necessary part of the transaction, but it is not always.