In primitive, as well as in civilized societies, the beginning of a new home is customarily celebrated with civil and religious ceremonies; customs and laws provide for the relative rights of the husband and wife to their persons, their children, their property, and the returns from their labor. Infidelity (particularly of the wife), common-law marriages (living as husband and wife without legal marriage), promiscuous relations, divorce, have generally been branded as anti-social and reprehensible, expressions of lack of self-control, altruism, and foresight.
Mankind is finding through the experience of the ages that monogamy best conserves child life, the home, the State, and individual happiness. It has found that irresponsible parenthood, shallowness of marital or parental affection, promiscuous relations, all endanger the life and welfare of the child. It has learned that marriage customs and laws requiring considerable formality and therefore deliberation of the contracting parties, reduced the proportion of hasty, unsatisfactory, and temporary unions with their uncertain responsibility for the children, and their quarrels over property. Many factors have contributed to the establishment of the really monogamous family and home as the social ideal and the increasing social practice. The lengthening period of infancy, with the consequent longer period of mutual coöperation of parents in nurture and training; realization of the Christ spirit of love for others, of respect for the value and individuality of every human life; the consequent refinement of the emotional life and social feeling, and the sublimating of sex instincts to the development of a richer personality, to mental creative work and to social service; the democratization of education and social status; freedom in choice of a marriage partner—all have contributed a part.
Freedom of choice has been far less prevalent than capture, purchase, or family contract, in marriages of the past. It is wearisome to even try to imagine the procession of brides, since those early days of the cavemen, who had no choice in the matter of their husbands. For what countless millions of brides was the marriage arranged by barter between their fathers and their future household lords, sometimes the father requiring a purchase price, sometimes the bridegroom demanding a dowry. What millions of girls have been selected while mere children as the future wives and slaves of their husbands and the family drudges of the household. How many millions of brides and bridegrooms have never been consulted as to their personal feelings or desires, but have been married because the elders of their families decreed it. Under all such conditions, if husband and wife developed affection for each other, that was so much of advantage to them from the combination; otherwise they must adapt themselves as best they could to the daily round of life in their common dwelling and throughout their family responsibilities.
Trial marriages have been an experiment in many societies. They are based upon suspicion and expectation of termination, instead of upon that whole-hearted confidence and expectation of endurance which is the basis of a permanent relation. Psychologically, therefore, their basis is false and weak. They presented a crude method of testing mutual adaptation and affection, which to-day may be gained by visiting a few weeks in each other’s families, by thorough preliminary discussion of problems of adjustment, and by consultation with a competent physician, biologist, and sociologist or a mature and thoughtful counsellor.
Thus has marriage evolved by stages from biological matings, based on physical attraction; to the business contract, based on economic relations; to the social contract, based on social advantage to the family, clan, or State; and finally to a spiritual relationship, based on mutual social and intellectual interests and ties. Romantic love as a general experience in marriage has developed only during the past few hundred years. No one of these phases—the biological, economic, social, or spiritual—can be ignored in marriage to-day without disaster, as divorce records and daily observation show so clearly. To ignore the higher relationships and base marriage simply on the biological or material is to revert back to a lower stage in human development. A marriage based simply on physical attraction soon loses its glamour, and is as a house built upon the sands. The enduring ties are those of spiritual comradeship. It is this spiritual-biological love, evolving with the personality and soul of man, that has inspired the great wealth of spiritual creations in poetry, music, drama, and painting.
The American young woman of to-day, especially of the middle classes, is economically, socially, and religiously free to choose from among her suitors the one she finds most congenial and whom she really loves. Legislators are providing in many States for the woman’s equal rights in marriage to her person, property, and children. Churches, associations, and parents are awakening to their responsibility in providing natural and wholesome social opportunities for young men and women to become acquainted. If a woman does not find her ideal in the community where she lives, she is socially free to migrate to any part of the country, enter any one of a thousand occupations, and seek until she finds a suitable helpmeet. In this country, in contrast to Europe, there is an excess of some two million men in the population. She will find a large proportion of young men of her social class and education, whose standards and habits of life are as fine as Sir Galahad’s, who have the economic ability to make a comfortable living, and who are ready to coöperate intelligently and whole-heartedly in home-making. The young man of to-day will find an increasing proportion of young women who combine physical charm, social gifts, intellectual comradeship, home-making instincts, and preparation.
Why Homes Are Broken. In a country where divorce is easily obtained by either husband or wife, for serious cause, the proportion of divorces is an index (1) to the percentage of dissatisfied couples (which will always be considerably higher than the percentage of divorces); and (2) to the intelligence and forethought with which young people enter marriage. The census of 1910 estimated one marriage in twelve ending in divorce, and counted as direct parties about one half of one per cent. of the population, something over three hundred thousand men and women, with children involved in about sixty per cent. of these families. The causes stated in the court records would, of course, be only those allowed in the laws as the legal grounds for granting a divorce. These, in the order of their frequency, were (1) desertion by the husband, (2) cruelty of the husband, (3) desertion by the wife, (4) non-support by the husband, (5) cruelty of the wife, (6) adultery. The most frequent real causes, as found by social investigation, are lack of self-control, lack of mutual ideals in regard to sex relations, ignorance of sex hygiene, use of alcohol, irresponsibility, economic extravagance, disagreement regarding the family income, hasty marriage after brief acquaintance. Among the other causes productive of discord are selfishness, insincerity, false pride, nagging, poor housekeeping, the husband’s lack of economic ability; marked differences in age, education, social status, religion; abnormal craving for social excitement; unnatural, crowded, unattractive homes.
How Homes Are Made Steadfast and a Benediction. The fundamental requisite of family happiness is love; not merely sex attraction, which may be wholly selfish, but love that is service, happier to give than to receive, willing to share. In some respects similarity between husband and wife is important in their social and intellectual tastes, moral standards, religious faith, refinement, love of children, rate of ability to progress, degree of seriousness or frivolousness, ardor and expression of affection. These make for congenial daily living. In some respects complementary qualities are desired. If one is impatient, the other may well possess a degree of patience and sense of humor to meet this; if one is extravagant, the other should be thrifty; if one is radical, the other may well be conservative, although marked extremes would always clash. The degree of positiveness in the one should approximate that in the other; if equal, neither is willing to yield; if very unequal, one domineers the other. These complementary traits make for balance of family life. The qualities that each should possess would include responsibility, self-control, sincerity, kindliness; freedom from drugs, conscientious abstinence from alcohol and from vicious habits; a degree of maturity and experience equal to the responsibilities of home-making (usually not under twenty years for women and twenty-one for men), love of home life and of children; good health, freedom from any serious germ disease, a family history free from criminal tendencies, alcoholism, mental defects, tuberculosis. A gambler, spendthrift, flirt, vacillating or superficial man or woman, or one who is “sowing wild oats” has not the qualifications for establishing a home. The man should be able to earn a comfortable living, and the woman to administer the household efficiently and smoothly. Every woman should have some means of making her livelihood at the time she marries; it will greatly increase her husband’s respect for her and be a source of confidence to herself. She usually cannot do better, from the economic aspect, than to become thoroughly skilled in phases of home-making.
How the family income should be divided, what share the wife shall have for household use and for her personal use, is so diplomatic and acute a problem that it should be as sincerely and frankly discussed as all these other phases.
Whether the wife should undertake work besides managing the home-making is a moot question. Certainly her first responsibility is to make a home not only comfortable but inspiring. She needs to have such opportunity for relaxation, meditation, reading, personal development, that however weary and tense her husband may return in the evening, she can give rest, good cheer, and refreshment of spirit, because of her reserve of vitality, and can send him each morning to his work with the courage and good spirits stimulated by her blitheness. She needs, also, to be storing reserve strength for her children.