Civilization in the United States: An inquiry by thirty Americans

by Unknown

In America only the very rich and the very poor marry early. Factory girls and heiresses are, as a rule, the youngest brides. It is generally assumed that twenty-four for women and twenty-nine for men are the usual ages for marriage the country over. Custom varies enormously, of course, in so polyglot a population. Now and then an Italian daughter acquires a husband before the compulsory education law is through with her. In such cases, however, there is apparently a gentleman’s agreement between the truant officer and the lady’s husband which solves the dilemma. At the opposite extreme from these little working-class Juliets are the mature brides of Boston. As the result of a survey covering the last ten years, the registrar of marriage licenses discovered that the women married between twenty-seven and thirty-three and the men between thirty and forty. Boston’s average marriage age for both sexes is over thirty. This does not represent an inordinate advance upon the practice of the primitive Bostonians. According to certain American genealogists, the Puritans of the 17th century were in no great haste to wed—the average age of the bride being twenty-one and of the bridegroom twenty-five. The marriage age in the oldest American city has moved up about ten years in a couple of centuries. The change is usually ascribed to increasing economic obstacles, and nobody questions its desirability. Provided that celibacy is all that it seems to be, the public stands ready to admire every further postponement of the marriage age as evidence of an ever-growing self-control and the triumphant march of civilization.

In the majority of marriages, the American wife outlives her husband. This is partly because he is several years older than she and partly because she tends to be longer-lived than he. Americans of the second and third generation are characterized by great longevity,—the American woman of American descent being the longest-lived human being on earth. Consequently the survivors of marriage are more likely to be widows than widowers. In the census of 1910, there were about two million and a half widows of forty-five or over as compared with about one million widowers of corresponding age. Nor do they sit by the fire and knit as once upon a time; they too must “hustle.” Among the working women of the country are a million and a quarter who are more than forty-five and who are probably to a very large extent—though the census provides no data on the subject—economically independent widows. As was said before, “Grandma” too is on her own nowadays.

The widow enjoys great honour in American public life, although it usually turns out to be rather a spurious and sentimental homage. Political orators easily grow tearful over her misfortunes. For generations after the Civil War, the Republican Party throve on a pension-system which gathered in the youngest widow of the oldest veteran, and Tammany has always understood how to profit from its ostentatious alms-giving to widows and orphans. From my earliest childhood, I can recollect how the town-beautifiers, who wanted to take down the crazy board fences, were utterly routed by the aldermen who said the widow’s cow must range and people must therefore keep up their fences. Similarly, the Southern States have never been able to put through adequate child labour laws because the widow’s child had to be allowed to earn in order to support his mother. All this sentimentalism proved to be in time an excellent springboard for a genuine economic reform—the widow’s pension systems of the several states which would be more accurately described as children’s pensions. The legislatures were in no position to resist an appeal on behalf of the poor widow and so nicely narcotized were they by their traditional tender-heartedness that they failed to perceive the socialistic basis of this new kind of widow’s pensions. Consequently America has achieved the curious honour of leading in a socialistic innovation which European States are now only just beginning to copy. Maternity insurance, on the other hand, has made no headway in America although adopted years and even decades ago in European countries. With us the obstacle seems to be prudishness rather than capitalism—it makes a legislator blush to hear childbirth spoken of in public while it only makes him cry to hear of widowhood.

One aspect of widowhood is seldom touched upon and that is its prevention. Aged widows, on the whole, in spite of their soap-boxing and their wage-earning, are a very lonely race. Why must they bring it on themselves by marrying men whose expectation of life is so much less than theirs? And yet so anxious are the marrying people to observe this conventional disparity of age, that if the bride happens to be but by three months the senior of the bridegroom, they conceal it henceforth as a sort of family disgrace. Even if this convention should prove to be immutable, is there nothing to be done about the lesser longevity of the American male? There is a life extension institute with an ex-president at the head but, as far as I am aware, it has never enlisted the support of the millions reported by the census as widows, who surely, if anybody, should realize the importance of such a movement. It is commonly assumed that the earlier demise of husbands is due to the hazardous life they lead in business and in industry; but domestic life is not without its hazards, and child-bearing is an especially dangerous trade in the United States, which has the highest maternal death-rate of seventeen civilized countries. If American husbands were less philosophical about the hardships of child-bed—the judgment of Eve and all that sort of thing—and American wives were less philosophical about burying their husbands—the Lord hath given and the Lord hath taken away and so on—it might result in greater health and happiness for all concerned.

But the main trouble with American marriage, as all the world knows, is that divorce so often separates the twain before death has any chance to discriminate between them. The growing prevalence of divorce is statistically set forth in a series of census investigations. In 1890, there was one divorce to every sixteen marriages; in 1900, there was one to every twelve marriages; and in 1916, there was one to every nine marriages. The number of marriages in proportion to the population has also increased during the same period, though not at a rate equal to that of divorce. But divorce, being so much younger than marriage, has had more room to grow from its first humble scared beginnings of fifty years ago. Queen Victoria’s frown had a very discouraging effect on divorce in America; and Mrs. Humphry Ward, studying the question among us in the early 20th century, lent her personal influence towards the arrest of the American evil. We also have raised up on this side of the water our own apostles against divorce, among whom Mr. Horace Greeley perhaps occupies the first and most distinguished place. But in spite of all heroic crusades, divorce has continued to grow. One even suspects that the marked increase in the marriage rate is partly—perhaps largely—due to the remarriage of the divorced. At any rate, they constitute new and eligible material for marriage which formerly was lacking.

The true cause of the increase of divorce in America is not easy to come by. Commissions and investigations have worried the question to no profitable end, and have triumphantly come out by the same door by which they went in. That seems to be the test of a successful divorce inquiry; and no wonder, for the real quest means a conflict with hypocrisy and prejudice, fear and taboo, which only the intrepid spirit of a John Milton or a Susan B. Anthony is able to sustain. The people who want divorces and who can pay for them seem to be able to get them nowadays, and since it is the truth only that suffers the situation has grown more tolerable.

In the meantime, there are popular impressions and assumptions which do not tally with the known facts. It is assumed that divorce is frequent in America because it is easy, and that the logical way to reduce it would be to make it difficult. Certain States of the West have lenient divorce laws but other States have stringent laws, while South Carolina abolished divorce entirely in 1878. On the whole, our laws are not so lenient as those of Scandinavia, whose divorce rate is still far behind that of the United States. Neither is divorce cheap in America; it is enormously expensive. Therefore for the poor it is practically inaccessible. The Domestic Relations Courts do not grant divorce and the Legal Aid Societies will not touch it. The wage-earning class, like the inhabitants of South Carolina, just have to learn to get along without it. Then there is another belief, hardly justified by the facts, that most divorced wives get alimony. Among all the divorces granted in 1916, alimony was not even asked for by 73 per cent. of the wives and it was received altogether by less than 20 per cent. of them. The statistics do not tell us whether the actual recipients of alimony were the mothers of young children or whether they were able-bodied ladies without offspring. The average American divorce court could not be trusted to see any difference between them.

The war has naturally multiplied the actions for divorce in every country. It was not for nothing that the British government called the stipends paid to soldiers’ wives “separation allowances.” The war-time conditions had a tendency to unmake marriages as well as to make them. The momentary spread of divorce has revived again the idea of a uniform divorce law embodied in an amendment to the Federal Constitution. As no reasonable law can possibly be hoped for, the present state of confusion is infinitely to be preferred as affording at least some choice of resources to the individual who is seeking relief. If there were any tendency to take divorce cases out of the hands of the lawyers, as has been done with industrial accidents, and to put it into domestic relations courts where it belongs; if there were the least possibility of curbing the vested interest of the newspapers in divorce news; if there were any dawning appreciation of the absurdity of penalizing as connivance the most unanswerable reason for divorce, that is, mutual consent; if there were any likelihood that the lying and spying upon which divorce action must usually depend for its success would be viewed as the grossest immorality in the whole situation; if there were any hope whatever that a statesman might rise up in Congress and, like Johan Castberg of Norway, defend a legal measure which would help ordinary men and women to speak the truth in their personal relationships—if there were any prospect that any of these influences would have any weight in the deliberations of Congress, one might regard the possibilities of Federal action with a gleam of hope. But since nothing of the kind can be expected, the best that can happen in regard to divorce in the near future is for Congress to leave it alone. There is a strong tradition in the historical suffrage movement of America which favours liberal divorce laws and which makes it improbable that a reactionary measure could gain sufficient support from the feminine electorate. Since the majority of those who seek divorce in this country are women, it seems to put them logically on the side of dissoluble marriage.

Though home is a sacred word in America, it is a portable affair. Migration is a national habit, handed down and still retained from the days when each generation went out to break new ground. The disasters of the Civil War sent Southern families and New England families scurrying to the far West. The development of the railway and express systems produced as a by-product a type of family life that was necessarily nomadic. The men of the railway “Brotherhoods” have always been marrying men, and their families acquired the art of living on wheels, as it were. Rich farmers of the Middle West retire to spend their old age in a California cottage surrounded by an orange grove—and the young farmers move to the city. The American family travels on any and every excuse. The neurotic pursuit of health has built up large communities in Colorado, Arizona, and other points West. Whole families “picked up,” as the saying goes, and set out for the miraculous climate that was to save one of its members from the dreaded tuberculosis—and then later had to move again because somebody’s heart couldn’t stand the “altitude.” The extreme examples of this nomadic habit are found among the families of the very poor and the very rich, who have regular seasonal migrations. The oyster canners and strawberry-pickers have a mobility which is only equalled by that of the Palm Beachers. And finally there is the curious practice of New England which keeps boarders in the summer-time in order that it may be boarded by Florida in the winter-time.

By contrast with all this geographical instability, the stable sway of convention and custom stands out impressively. With each change of environment, family tradition became more sacred. Unitarians who moved to Kansas were more zealous in the faith than ever, and F.F.V.’s who settled in Texas were fiercely and undyingly loyal to the memory of Pocahontas. Families that were always losing their background, tried to fixate in some form the ancestral prestige which threatened always to evaporate. Organizations composed of the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, of the descendants of the Pilgrims, of Civil War Veterans, of the Scions of the Confederacy, and so on, sprang up and flourished on the abundant soil of family pride. All of which means that pioneering brought no spiritual independence or intellectual rebirth, and that new conditions were anxiously reformulated under the sanction of the old. Above all, sanction was important. That incredible institution, the “society column” of the local newspaper, took up the responsibility where the Past laid it down. Stereotyped values of yesterday gave way to stereotyped values of to-day. This was the commercial opportunity of a multitude of home journals and women’s magazines which undertook—by means of stories, pictures, and advertisements—to regiment the last detail of home life. But the perforated patterns, the foods “shot from guns,” and all the rest of the labour-saving ingenuities which came pouring into the home and which were supposed to mean emancipation for mothers and their families, brought little of the real spirit of freedom in their wake. Our materialistic civilization finds it hard to understand that liberty is not achieved through time-saving devices but only through the love of it.