Still, birth control is not new. If it did not originate with the Indians, it did at least with the Puritans. As the census books and genealogy books show, every succeeding American generation has manifested a tendency to reduce the birth-rate. The new aspects of the situation are the acceleration of the tendency and the propaganda for family limitation by artificial methods. In the birth registration area, which includes twenty-three States, the number of births for the year 1919 compared with those for 1918 showed a slump of seven per cent. Also the current assumption that children are more numerous on farms, where they are an economic asset, than they are in cities, where they became an economic handicap, has recently received a startling correction through a survey made by the Department of Agriculture. Among the surprises of the study, says the report, was the small number of children in farm homes:—“Child life is at a premium in rural districts.” The farm is not the national child reserve it has been supposed to be. As far as the salaried class is concerned, it has stood out as the national pace-setter in family limitation. The editorial writer of the New York Times, who may be trusted for a fairly accurate statement of the standards of this group, justifies its conduct thus: “Unless the brain-worker is willing to disclass his children, to subject them to humiliation, he must be willing to feed, clothe, and educate them during many years. In such circumstances, to refuse parenthood is only human.” It therefore remains for the manual worker, who cannot obtain from his Church the same absolution that the suburban resident can obtain from his Times, to produce the bulk of the population. This, as a whole, is not yet stationary; the recent census estimates an annual excess of births over deaths throughout the United States amounting to about one per cent. What will the next decade do with it?
A peculiar feature of the American propaganda for birth control is its specific advocacy of artificial methods. The defenders of this cause have been compelled, it appears, to define a position which would be self-evident in any society not incorrigibly Puritan. People who regard celibacy as a state of grace and celibacy within marriage as a supreme moral victory are still growing, it would seem, on every bush. This unwholesome belief must have its effect upon the birth control methods of the married population. It is a matter of speculation how many marriages succumb to its influence, especially after the birth of a second or third child; but there is reason to believe that the ascetic method is by no means uncommon. You cannot hold up an ideal before people steadily for forty years without expecting some of them to try to follow it. This kind of rigorous negativism passes for morality in America and finds its strongest devotees among the middle-aged and the heads of families. Such people are greatly shocked at the wild conduct of the young who are certainly out of bounds since the war; but the most striking feature of the current wave of so-called immorality is the exposure of the bankruptcy of ideals among the older generation. There are thirty million families in the United States; presumably there are at least sixty million adults who have experimented with the sexual relationship with the sanction of society. But experience has taught them nothing if one may judge by the patented and soulless concepts which still pass for sexual morality among people who are surely old enough to have learned about life from living it.
The population policies of the government are confined to the supply through immigration. A few years ago, an American president enunciated population policies of his own and conducted an energetic though solitary campaign against “race suicide.” But no faction rallied to his standard, no organization rose up to speed his message. His bugle-call was politely disregarded as the personal idiosyncrasy of a popular president who happened to be the proud father of six children. Mr. Roosevelt was evidently out of tune with his own generation, as, no doubt, Mr. Washington was with his, for exactly the opposite reason. But the more retiring nature of our first president saved him from the egoistic error of regarding his own familial situation as the only proper and desirable example. The complete failure of Mr. Roosevelt’s crusade is significant. There are clerical influences in America which actively fight race suicide, but with these obscurantist allies the doughty son of a Dutch Reform family had too little else in common. Among the men of his own class he stirred not an echo. Is it because the American husband is too uxorious or too indifferent? I have heard a married man say, “It is too much to expert of any woman;” and still another one explain, “The Missis said it was my turn next and so we stopped with one.” Or is there any explanation in the fact that the American father tends more and more to spend his life in a salaried job and has little land or business to bequeath? Whatever the reason, the Business Man is in accord with the Club Woman on the subject of birth control, in practice if not in theory.
So far as relative distribution of income is concerned, the families of the United States fare much as those in the industrial countries of Europe. In 1910, the same relative inequality of wealth and income existed in feudal Prussia and democratic America. The richest fifth of the families in each country claimed about half the income while the poorest two-thirds of the families were thankful for about one-third. The same law of economic relativity falls alike on the just American and the unjust Prussian. But the American family, it appears, is in every case two or three times better off than the corresponding family in Prussia. You must multiply Herr Stinnes by two to get a Judge Gary and the wealth of a Silesian child labourer is only half that of a Georgia mill-child. This economic advantage of our American rich and poor alike is measured chiefly in dollars and marks and not in actual standards of living. It is apparently difficult to get real standards of living out into the open; otherwise the superior fortune of American families of every estate might be less evident. Some of us who may have visited middle-class Prussian people only half as well off as ourselves probably did not commiserate the poor things as they deserved. My hostess, I recall, had eight hundred dollars a year on which she maintained an apartment of two rooms, bath, and kitchen; kept a part-time maid; bought two new suits’ a year; drove out in a hired carriage on Sunday; and contributed generously to a society which stirred up women to call themselves Frau instead of Fräulein. Any “single woman” in an American city of equal size who could have managed as much in those days on fifteen hundred a year would certainly have deserved a thumping thrift-prize.... And then there were all those poor little children in a Black Forest village, who had to put up with rye bread six days in the week and white bread only on Sundays. Transported to America, they might have had package crackers every day and ice-cream sandwiches on Sunday. One wonders whether the larger income of the American family is not largely spent on things of doubtful value and pinchbeck quality.
According to theory, the income of the family normally belongs to the man of the house. According to theory, he has earned it or derived it from some lawful business enterprise. “The head of the family ordinarily divides income between himself and his various dependents in the proportion that he deems best,” says Mr. Willford King. The American husband has a peculiarly unblemished reputation as a provider—and probably deserves it. Certainly few husbands in the world are so thoughtful of their widows; they invest extensively in life insurance but rarely in annuities against a period of retirement. Trust Companies remind them through advertisements every day to make their wills, and cemetery corporations nag them incessantly to buy their graves. “Statistics show that women outlive men!” says the promoter of America’s Burial Park. “They show that the man who puts off the selection of a burial place leaves the task to the widow in her grief. For the man it is easy now—for the woman an ordeal then.” The chivalry of the business man leads him to contrive all sorts of financial mechanisms for his widow’s convenience and protection. His will, like his insurance policy, is in her favour. Unlike the European husband, he hates to leave the man’s world of business and to spend his declining years in the society of his wife. After he is dead, she is welcome to his all, but so long as he lives he keeps business between them.
Though in life and death a generous provider, he is not a systematic one. Financial arrangements between husband and wife are extremely casual. As the dowry hardly exists, so a regular cash allowance is very rare. He loves to hold the purse-strings and let her run the bills. This tendency is known in the outside business world, and the American wife, therefore, enjoys a command of credit which would amaze any solvent foreign housekeeper. She has accounts on every hand. She orders food by telephone or through the grocer’s boy and “charges it.” The department store expects her to have a charge account, and gives her better service if she does. For instance, the self-supporting woman who is, for obvious reasons, more inclined to pay as she goes, finds herself discriminated against in the matter of returning or exchanging goods. In numerous ways, the charge account has the inside track. This would not seem strange if credit were limited to the richest fraction. But that is not the case; almost every housewife in the country has credit, from the Newport ladies to the miners’ wives who “trade at the company store.” The only difference is that, in the case of these two extremes—Newport and the company store—longer credit than ususal seems to be the rule. In the meantime, the preaching of thrift to the American housewife goes on incessantly by apostles from a business world which is largely organized on the assumption that she does not possess it and which would be highly disconcerted if she actually developed it. American business loves the housewife for the same reason that it loves China—that is, for her economic backwardness.
The record of the American husband as a provider is not uniform for all classes. In Congress it is now and then asserted with appropriate oratory that there are no classes in America. This is more or less true from the point of view of a Cabin Creek vote-getter, who lives in a factitious political world, where economic realities fail to penetrate; to him middle-class and working-class are much the same since they have equal rights not to “scratch the ticket.” But the economist finds it convenient, as has been said, to classify the totality of American families in definite income-groups corresponding to the Prussian classes. As one descends the income scale one finds that the American husband no longer fulfils his reputation for being sole provider for his family. According to Edgar Sydenstricker, “less than half of the wage-earners’ families in the United States, whose heads are at work, have been found to be supported by the earnings of the husband or father.” The earnings of the mother and the children are a necessary supplement to bring the family income up to the subsistence level. Half the workingmen, who have dutifully “founded” families, cannot support them. According to the latest figures published, it costs $2,334 a year to keep a family of five in New York. Have the young Lochinvars of the tenements never heard of those appalling figures? Very likely they have a premonition, if not an actual picture of the digits. In any case they have their mothers to warn them. “Henry’s brought it on himself,” said the janitress. “He had a right not to get married. He had his mother to take care of him.” If he had only chosen bachelorhood, he might have lived at home in comfort and peace on his twenty-five a week. But having chosen, or been chosen by, Mrs. Henry instead, it is now up to the latter to go out office-cleaning or operating, which she very extensively does. It is estimated that since the war fully one-third of all American women in industry are married.
Going back up the scale to the middle-class wife, we find new influences at work upon her situation. Custom has relaxed its condemnation of the economically independent wife, and perhaps it is just as well that it has done so. For this is the class which has suffered the greatest comparative loss of fortune, during the last fifteen years. “If all estimates cited are correct,” writes Mr. Willford King, “it indicates that, since 1896, there has occurred a marked concentration of income in the hands of the very rich; that the poor have relatively lost but little; but that the middle class has been the principal sufferer.” It is, then, through the sacrifices of our middle-class families that our very richest families have been able to improve their standard of living. The poor, of course, have had no margin on which to practise such benevolence, but the generous middle-class has given till it hurts. The deficit had to be relieved, the only possible way being through the economic utilization of the women. At first daughters became self-supporting, while wives still tarried in the odour of domestic sanctity; then wives came to be sporadically self-supporting. The war, like peace still bearing hardest on the middle-class, enhanced all this. Nine months after the armistice, fifty per cent. more women were employed in industry than there were in the year before the war.
In America, we have no surplus women. The countries of western Europe are each encumbered with a million or two, and their existence is regarded as the source of acute social problems. What shall be done with them is a matter of earnest consideration and anxious statecraft. America has been spared all this. She has also no surplus men—or none that anybody has ever heard of. It is true that the population in 1910 consisted of ninety-one millions, of whom forty-seven millions were men and forty-four were women. There were three million more men than women, but for some reason they were not surplus or “odd” men and they have never been a “problem.” The population figures for 1920,—one hundred and five millions,—have not yet been divided by sexes, but the chances are that there is still a man for every woman in the country, and two men apiece for a great number of them. However, no one seems to fear polyandry for America as polygamy is now feared in Europe.
The situation is exceptional in New England where the typical European condition is duplicated. Beyond the Berkshire Hills, all the surplus women of America are concentrated. In the United States as a whole there are a hundred and five men for each one hundred women, but in New England the balance shifts suddenly to the other side. Within the present century, a gradual increase has taken place in the masculine contingent owing to immigration. But the chances of marriage have not correspondingly improved, for matches are rarely made between New England spinsters and Armenian weavers or Neapolitan bootblacks.