In modern civilization, however, in spite of the enormous power of the State, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to enforce this rule. The State, with all its power, can not force its subjects to obey any law which they do not really want to obey—or perhaps I should say, which they want not to obey; and the growth of individualism has created a general distaste for any effort on the part of government to meddle directly in the affairs of citizens. Attempts to do so are likely to bring humiliation on the Government through its inability to enforce them, and to generate in the population a salutary disrespect for law; as the attempt to enforce the fourteenth and eighteenth Amendments has done in this country. With the decline of the patriarchal system, the contracting of marriage if not the status of marriage, is coming to be regarded as the exclusive concern of the individual. Many who would not for a moment tolerate compulsory marriage will tolerate a humiliating regulation of marriage; they will allow the State to make of marriage a life-long bondage, but they reserve the right to refuse to enter into bondage. The State may penalize celibacy by levying a special tax on unmarried persons; but it can no longer force people to abandon it.
Indeed, one may say without overmuch exaggeration that at present the preservation of marriage as an institution is almost solely due to its tenacity as an instinctive habit. For while marriage is the strongest bulwark of the State, the economic order for the sake of which the State exists tends nevertheless to discourage marriage because it progressively concentrates wealth in a few hands, and thus deprives the great mass of people of adequate means to rear and educate families. This condition is largely responsible for the fact that celibacy, illegitimacy and prostitution are on the increase in every civilized country; and that the average age at which marriage takes place tends steadily to become higher, as it takes longer to get into an economic position which makes possible the support of a family. In this connexion, Katharine Anthony’s statement that factory-girls and heiresses are the country’s youngest brides is significant. Neither the heiress nor the factory-girl has anything to gain by waiting: the heiress already has economic security and the factory-girl never will have it, for she and her husband—if she marries in her own class—will always be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in the labour-market. It should also be remarked that among the great middle class the standard of education for both sexes, but more particularly for women, is higher than among the very rich and the very poor; and this tends to advance the average age for marriage.
It tends as well to make children a heavy burden on the parents. Among primitive peoples, where difficulty in supporting a family is virtually unknown, where adjustment to the environment offers no complexities and childhood is therefore not so prolonged, and where, moreover, children through their labour become an economic asset, they are desirable.[16] But in a civilized society where the parental sense of responsibility has developed to the point where the child is reared for its own sake, where adaptation to the environment is a complex and lengthy process involving expensive education and prolonged dependence of the child upon the parents, and where the difficulty of getting a start in life tends also to lengthen the period of dependence; in such a society it is natural that the parental sense of responsibility should find expression in an artificial limitation of offspring to the number that the circumstances of the parents will enable them to educate properly. There is a further step that this feeling can suggest in these days of excessive economic exploitation and ruinous wars; that is, refusal to reproduce at all: and this step an increasing number of married people are taking, to the great distress of self-appointed guardians of our customs and morals.
Failure to perceive the decisive importance of the connexion between the economic condition of the parents and the proper equipment of children for making their way in life often leads to absurd contradictions; as for example in that staunch friend of childhood, the late Ellen Key. No one is more insistent than this writer upon the importance of rearing the child for its own good; yet she gravely declares that “from the point of view of the nation, always from that of the children, and most frequently from that of the parents, the normal condition must be, that the number of children shall not fall short of three or four.” Miss Key’s primary failure is one that must be judged with great severity because it is both fundamental and typical—it pervades and vitiates the whole body of feminist literature. It is a failure in intellectual seriousness. Miss Key is fully aware of a persistent economic dislocation bearing on her thesis—“At present there is a shortage of labour for those willing to work, of food for the hungry, of educational advantages for those thirsting for knowledge, of nursing for the sick, of care for the children. The circumstances of the majority are now such as to produce, directly or indirectly, crime, drunkenness, insanity, consumption, or sexual diseases in large sections of the population.” Again, “The struggle for daily bread, the cares of livelihood ... are now the stamp of public as well as private life.... Married people have no time to cultivate their feelings for one another.... Through the cares of livelihood parents have no time to live with their children, to study them in order to be able really to educate them.”[17] One must suspect a peculiar incapacity for logic in the writer who recognizes such conditions and still recommends three or four children as being the minimum number that people should have who wish to do their duty by their country, their children and themselves. Miss Key has been content to shirk inquiry into the fundamental cause of these conditions, and hence the means she recommends for their cure are silly and feeble. An international universal organization which is to regulate all competition and all co-operation; trade-unionism, the abolition of inheritances; the exercise of “collective motherliness” in public affairs; these are some of the means she offers for the regeneration of society. Probably never since the remark attributed to Marie Antoinette that if the starving populace could not get bread they should eat cake, has ineptitude gone further. If Miss Key’s call to duty were brought to the attention of the well-to-do married couple of the city of New York whose means are sufficient to permit them to occupy an apartment of, let us say, two or three or four rooms, often without kitchen, they might agree with her in principle; but they would probably not attempt to bring up three or four children in such straitened surroundings and to educate them over a long span of years, for a very doubtful future. If this example seem special and far-fetched, I would remind my readers that over fifty per cent of people in this country are urban dwellers, and that the vast majority of them are worse off for dwelling space, not better, than the hypothetical couple I have cited.
It is, of course, among those who are worse off that children are most numerous. Ignorance and religious scruples—for the Church is strongest among the ignorant because of their ignorance—combine to produce large families among the class that can least afford them. For civilization, although it denies these people most things, grants them too great a fecundity. Among primitive peoples fecundity is decreased by various causes, such as excessively hard work, childbearing at a too early age, and prolonged lactation during which continence is often the rule. The average number of children borne by a savage does not often exceed five or six, whereas the civilized woman may bear eighteen or twenty, and it is not at all exceptional for the woman of our slums to bear ten or twelve. Among west-side women of New York whom Katherine Anthony questioned concerning frequency of pregnancies, one reported fifteen in nineteen years, another ten in twelve years, and another six in nine years. Obviously, then, when eugenists and moralists deplore what they term the modern tendency to race-suicide, they refer to the educated classes. The moralist argues from prepossession and may be dismissed from consideration; but the eugenist has scientific pretensions which are not without a certain degree of validity and can therefore not be lightly passed over. So long as he argues for improvement in the quality of the race through the substitution of intelligence for blind instinct in propagation, he is on solid ground: no one unprepossessed by the sentimentalism which regards legitimate children, however untoward be the circumstances of their birth and breeding, as a direct visitation from God, can deny that voluntary and intelligent attention to the quality of offspring offers better prospects for civilization than hit-or-miss quantity-production. The eugenist deplores the fact that at present this exercise of intelligence is confined to the comparatively small class of the educated and well-to-do, and that therefore the birth-rate among that class is all too small to offset the unchecked propagation of the ignorant and unfit. This is unfortunately true; and it suggests the obvious question: Why is there in every modern State so large a class of ignorant and unfit persons as to constitute a menace to the vitality of that State? If it is solely because the unfit are allowed to propagate unchecked, then those eugenists who advocate the sterilization of paupers and imbeciles and the encouragement of propagation among the intelligent classes by an elaborate system of State subsidy, may be listened to with respect if not with perfect faith in the practicability of their proposals. But how about that large mass of the physically and mentally normal who live at the subsistence-level, and whose progeny, if economic pressure tighten a little, are likely to be forced down into the class of underfed beings, dulled and brutalized by poverty, from whose ranks our paupers, imbeciles and criminals are largely recruited? To ignore the existence of this perennial source of unfitness is levity. To recognize it, and to assume that it results from over-propagation is to assume at the same time that the earth’s population is too numerous for comfortable subsistence on the amount of cultivable land in existence. If this disproportion be real, the only hope lies in persuading this class to limit its offspring voluntarily to the number that the earth’s surface will comfortably support. If it be only an apparent disproportion due to an artificial shortage of land created by monopoly, then the eugenist’s program amounts simply to a recommendation that the population be somehow restricted to the number that can get subsistence on the terms of the monopolist. Henry George has conclusively disproved the validity of the Malthusian theory which underlies the assumption of over-population, while Oppenheimer’s figures show that if land were freely available for use, the earth’s present population might easily be supported on one-third of its arable surface.[18] Here, really, is the most convincing answer to the standard arguments for birth-control; yet so far as I know, the opponents of birth-control have never done much with it, whether out of ignorance or because of the profound economic readjustments that it implies. The eugenist, too, generally displays a constitutional aversion to attacking the problem of unfitness at the right end—which is, to inquire, first of all, why it exists. Hence the ineptitude of his proposals for social betterment: they would involve much unwieldy governmental machinery and considerably more intelligence than any State has ever displayed in dealing with social questions; and they would attack only the results of our social ills, leaving the causes freely operative.[19]
While those causes continue to operate, the support of a family, save in the comparatively small class of wealthy people, will be more or less of a burden. At present, this burden bears most heavily upon the middle-class man and the lower-class woman. Meretricious standards of respectability, among them the idea that a married woman must not work outside her home even when she is childless, tend to make marriage from the outset a burden on the man of the middle class. For it must be remembered that since the so-called feminine occupations have been taken out of the home, a man no longer gains an economic asset in taking unto himself a wife. Rather, he assumes a liability. This is especially true among the middle classes, where social standing has come to be gauged to some extent by the degree in which wives are economically unproductive. It is a commonplace in this country that women form the leisure class; and this leisure class of women, like leisured classes everywhere, has its leisure at the expense of other people, who in this case are the husbands. Moreover, it is among the middle classes that the standards of education are highest and the rearing of children therefore most expensive; and this burden is usually borne by the husband alone. Hence the emergence of the type of harassed pater familias at whom our comic artists poke much sympathetic fun, who meets his family now and then on Sundays, foots their bills, and is rewarded for his unremitting toil in their behalf by being regarded much in the light of a cash-register.
This sort of thing, of course, is not the invariable rule. There are many middle-class women who give their families untiring service, and an increasing number who, either from choice or necessity, engage in gainful occupations outside their homes. Of this country’s eight and one half million women breadwinners, two million are married; and it may be assumed that a fair percentage of these are of the middle class. The great majority, however, are of the labouring class; and upon these, economic injustice weighs most heavily. It is these women who bear most children; and it is they who, when their husbands are unable or unwilling to meet the growing expenses of the family, assume the double burden of “woman’s work” in the home and whatever they can get to do outside that will enable them to earn a few dollars a week, in order to “keep the family together.” Miss Katharine Anthony, in her book, “Mothers Who Must Earn,” gives a striking picture of the unskilled married women workers of west-side New York, victims of a crowded labour-market, who take the hardest jobs at the lowest pay, in order that they may give some few poor advantages to the children they have brought into the world unwillingly, knowing that they could not afford them. “The same mother,” says Miss Anthony, “who resents the coming of children and resigns them so apathetically to death, will toil fourteen hours a day and seven days a week to keep up a home for the young lives in her charge.”
Such testimony, and testimony of a similar kind from governmental investigators, somehow makes the general run of social criticism appear frivolous and superficial. The married wage-earner, worn with excessive childbearing, who still finds strength to work long hours in laundry or factory during the day and do her housework at night, hardly fits into the picture of selfish, emancipated women, wilfully deserting their proper sphere of domesticity either to seek pleasure or to maintain their economic independence. Indeed, the idea of economic independence is quite at variance with her notions of respectability. “Not to work,” says Miss Anthony, “is a mark of the middle-class married woman, and the ambitious west-side family covets that mark. Hence comes the attempt to conceal the mother’s employment, if she has one, which is one of the little snobberies of the poor.” The sole object of these women’s toil is to preserve the home, chief prop of a social order which bears upon it with crushing weight; and their adherence to a social philosophy which regards the preservation of the home as peculiarly the business of women is evident in the fact that they contribute the whole of their meagre earnings to its upkeep, whereas their husbands are likely to contribute only as much of their own earnings as they see fit.
It goes without saying that the conditions I have cited have a profound effect on the psychology of parents, and therefore on the lives of children. The rearing of children, if justice is to be done them, is one of the most exacting tasks that can be undertaken. The adjustment that is required to fit parents to the personalities of their children and children to those of their parents and of one another, is in itself a most delicate and difficult process, and one upon which the nature of the child’s adjustment to the larger world greatly depends. Such a process naturally involves friction, and therefore, if it is to be successful, calls for no little tact and patience in the parents; and cramped quarters, sordid poverty, and exhausting labour are hardly conducive to the possession of either of these qualities. Children of the middle class, it is remarked often enough, hardly know their harassed, overworked fathers; but children of the labouring class are likely to know neither of their parents, or to know them only as fretful, quarrelsome people, brutalized by overwork. “The strain of bringing up a family on the average workingman’s wage,” says Miss Anthony, “reduced as this is likely to be by unemployment, sickness, or drink, constitutes, indeed, the dark age of the tenement mother’s life. It is not strange that the good will existing between husband and wife often gives way beneath it. ‘I tell my husband,’ said Mrs. Gurney, ‘it’s not right for us to be quarreling all the time before the children. But it seems like we can’t help it. He’s so worried all the time and I’m so tired. If we were easy in our minds we wouldn’t do it.’”
Nor do the children of these people have anything much better to look forward to than such a lot as that of their parents, for poverty drives them too into the labour-market as soon as they are old enough to earn, to the profound distress of reformers who refuse to face the basic question of child-labour, namely: whether it is better for human beings, even if they be children, to work for their living or to starve. This applies not only to the children of our industrial labouring classes, but to those of the agricultural labourer and the tenant-farmer, who pay the same penalty for the exploitation of their parents. There is no little irony in the fact that our growing consciousness of the right of children to be well born and well reared proceeds hand in hand with an economic injustice which renders it impossible to secure that right for all children.