Circumspection towards women, in travel or elsewhere, or, better still, indifference towards women, is the standardized attitude of American husbands. In marriage, too, a relationship of status rather than of attention to the fluctuations of personality, indifference to psychical experience, is a not uncommon marital trait. American men in general, as Europeans have noted, are peculiarly indifferent to the psychology of women. They are also peculiarly sentimental about women, a trait quite consistent with indifference or ignorance, but one which, in view of American prostitution and the persistent exclusion of many women from equal opportunities for education and for life, gives an ugly look of hypocrisy to the trumpeters of American chivalry.
And yet subject the American concept of chivalry to a little scrutiny and the taunt, at least of hypocrisy, will miss the mark. For the concept is, both actually and historically, a part of the already noted classification of women as more or less sequestered, on the one hand, and unsequestered or loose on the other, as inexperienced and over-experienced or, more accurately, partially over-experienced. In this classification the claims of both classes of women are settled by men on an economic basis, with a few sentimentalities about womanhood, pure or impure, thrown in for good measure. The personality of the woman a man feels that he is supporting, whether as wife or prostitute, may, theoretically, be disregarded and, along with her personality, her capacity for sexual response. Whether as a creature of sin or as an object of chivalry, a woman becomes a depersonalized, and, sexually, an unresponsive being.
People sometimes forget this when they discuss the relations between men and women in this country, and especially the sexlessness or coldness of American women. They forget it in arguing against the feminizing of education, the theatre, literature, etc., meaning, not that women run the schools or are market for the arts, but that immature, sexless women are in these ways too much to the fore. In part at least it is thanks to chivalry or to her “good and considerate husband” that the American woman, the non-wage earner at least, does not grow up, and that it is possible for so many women to marry without having any but the social consequences of marriage in mind. One surmises that there are numbers, very large numbers, of American women, married as well as unmarried, who have felt either no stirring of sex at all or at most only the generalized sex stir of pre-adolescence. What proportion of women marry “for a home” or to escape from a home, or a job, and what proportion marry for love? After marriage, with the advent of children, what of these proportions?
Marriage for a home or for the sake of children, chivalry, “consideration” for the wife, all these attitudes are matters of status, not of personality, and to personality, not to status, love must look, since love is an art, not a formula. It often seems that in American culture, whether in marriage or out, little or no place is open to this patient, ardent, and discerning art, and that lovers are invariably put to flight. Even if they make good their escape, their adventure is without social significance, since it is perforce surreptitious. Only when adventurers and artists in love are tolerated enough to be able to come out from under cover, and to be at least allowed to live, if only as variants from the commonplace, may they contribute of their spirit or art to the general culture.
Elsie Clews Parsons
THE FAMILY
The American family is the scapegoat of the nations. Foreign critics visit us and report that children are forward and incorrigible, that wives are pampered and extravagant, and that husbands are henpecked and cultureless. Nor is this the worst. It only skims the surface by comparison with the strictures of home-grown criticism. Our domestic arbiters of every school have a deeper fault to find: they see the family as a crumbling institution, a swiftly falling bulwark. Catholic pulpits call upon St. Joseph to save the ruins and Puritan moralists invoke Will Carlton, believing in common with most of our public guardians that only saints and sentimentalism can help in such a crisis. Meanwhile the American family shows the usual tenacity of form, beneath much superficial change, uniting in various disguises the most ancient and the newest modes of living. In American family life, if anywhere, the Neolithic meets the modern and one needs to be very rash or very wise to undertake the nice job of finding out which is which. But one at least refuses to defeat one’s normal curiosity by joining in the game of blind-man’s buff, by means of which public opinion about the family secures a maximum of activity along with a minimum of knowledge.
A little science would be of great help. But popular opinion does not encourage scientific probing of the family. In this field, not honesty but evasion is held to be the best policy. Rather than venture where taboo is so rife and the material so sensitive, American science would much rather promote domestic dyes and seedless oranges. It is true that we have the Federal Census with its valuable though restrained statistics. But even the census has always taken less interest in family status and family composition, within the population, than in the classification of property and occupation and the fascinating game of “watching Tulsa grow.” In no country is the collection of vital statistics so neglected and sporadic and the total yield of grab-bag facts so unamenable to correlation. Through the persistent effort of the Children’s Bureau, this situation has been considerably improved during the past ten years; so that now there exist the so-called “registration areas” where births, marriages, and deaths are actually recorded. For the country as a whole, these vital facts still go unregistered. The prevailing sketchiness in the matter of vital statistics is in distinct contrast to the energy and thoroughness with which American political machinery manages to keep track of the individual who has passed the age of twenty-one.
One of the tendencies, statistically verified, of the native family is its reduction in size. In the first place the circumference of the family circle has grown definitely smaller through the loss of those adventitious members, the maiden aunt and the faithful servant. The average number of adult females in the typical household is nowadays just one. The odd women are out in the world on their own; they no longer live “under the roofs” of their brothers-in-law. Miss Lulu Bett is almost an anachronism in 1920. The faithful servant has been replaced by the faithless one, who never by any chance remains long enough to become a familial appendage, or else she has not been replaced at all. Even “Grandma” has begun to manifest symptoms of preferring to be on her own. Thus the glory of the patriarchal household has visibly departed, leaving only the biological minimum in its stead.
In the dwindling of this ultimate group lies the crux of the matter. The American grows less and less prolific, and panicky theorists can already foresee a possible day when the last 100 per cent. American Adam and the last 100 per cent. American Eve will take their departure from our immigrationized stage. It is providentially arranged—the maxim tells us—that the trees shall not grow and grow until they pierce the heavens; but is there any power on the job of preventing the progressive decline of the original Anglo-Saxon stock even to the point of final extinction? This is a poignant doubt in a country where the Anglo-Saxon strain enjoys a prestige out of all proportion to its population quota. The strain may derive what comfort it can from the reflection that the exit of the Indian was probably not due to birth control.