Part 3 — CHAPTER XVIII PROBLEMS OF MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY (continued 2)

The achievement of a wisely conceived and carefully drafted uniform law for the entire country, would be of great advantage, although it might not directly cause a very great decrease in the average divorce rate, and certainly would not produce the same rate for the individual states.[780] How may such a uniform law be secured? The method of procuring the enactment of a federal law under a constitutional amendment—once much in favor[781]—has for the present been almost abandoned by active workers. Instead, it is preferred, through the state commissions on uniform legislation, to urge the adoption of a model statute by the separate commonwealths. These commissions, now thirty-five in number, have prepared a bill for a law governing divorce procedure; and its temperate and practical provisions ought to gain its general adoption.[782] All this is well; but it is still more needful to strive for a common marriage law. In the end it may be found necessary, under a constitutional amendment, to appeal to the federal power. What service could a national legislature render more beneficent than the creation of a code embracing every division of the intricate law of marriage and divorce? Aside from its educational value as a moral force, such a code in material ways would prove a powerful guaranty of social order and stability.

In the meantime it is essential to fix the attention upon causes rather than effects. For the wise reformer, who would elevate and protect the family, the center of the problem is marriage and not divorce.

II. THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION

It is needful in the outset, as already suggested, frankly to accept marriage and the family as social institutions whose problems must be studied in connection with the actual conditions of modern social life. It is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very different conditions. The guiding light will come, not from authority, but from a rational understanding of the existing facts. Small progress can be expected while leaning upon tradition. The appeal to theological criteria is, no doubt, matter of conscience on the part of many earnest men. Nevertheless the vast literature which seeks to solve social questions through the juggling with ancient texts seems in reality to be largely a monument of wasted energy. Much of it is sterile, or but serves to retard progress or to befog the issue. Witness the perennial discussion of the "scriptural" grounds of divorce, or of the Levitical sanction or condemnation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister! Witness the vapid homilies and treatises on the wedded life! There is, in truth, urgent need that the moral leaders of men should preach actual instead of conventional social righteousness. It is high time that the family and its related institutions should be as freely and openly and unsparingly subjected to scientific examination as are the facts of modern political or industrial life.

From the infancy of the human race, we have already seen, the monogamic family has been the prevailing type. There have been, it is true, many variations, many aberrations, from this type under diverse conditions, religious, economic, or social. Under changing influences the interrelations of the members of the group—of husband and wife, of parent and child—and their relations individually and collectively to the state, have varied from age to age or from people to people. There have been wife-capture, wife-purchase and the patria potestas. But in essential character—at first for biological, later for ethical or spiritual reasons—the general tendency has always been toward a higher, more clearly differentiated type of the single pairing family. Moreover, setting aside all question of special priestly sanctions, the healthiest social sentiment has more and more demanded that the "pairing" should be lasting. Whether of Jew or gentile, the highest ideal of marriage has become that of a lifelong partnership. Are these tendencies to remain unbroken? Is the stream of evolution to proceed, gaining in purity and strength? Are marriage and the family doomed; or are they capable of adaptation, of reform and development, so as to satisfy the higher material and ethical requirements of the advancing generations? Seemingly they are now menaced by serious dangers. Some of them have their origin in the new conditions of a society which is undergoing a swift transition, a mighty transformation, industrially, intellectually, and spiritually; while others, perhaps the more imminent, are incident to the institutions themselves as they have been shaped or warped by bad laws and false sentiments. Apparently, if there is to be salvation, it must come through the vitalizing, regenerative power of a more efficient moral, physical, and social training of the young. The home and the family must enter into the educational curriculum. Before an adequate sociological program can be devised the facts must be squarely faced and honestly studied. In the sphere of domestic institutions, even more imperatively than in that of politics or economics, there is need of light and publicity.

The family, it is alleged, is in danger of disintegration through the tendency to individualism which in many ways is so striking a characteristic of the age.[783] Within the family itself there are, indeed, signs that a rapid transition from status to contract is taking place in a way which Maine scarcely contemplated; for he appears to have imagined that precisely in this sphere the process was already virtually complete. The bonds of paternal authority are becoming looser and looser. In America in particular young men and even young women earlier than elsewhere tend to cut their parental moorings and to embark in independent business careers. So also more and more clearly the wife is showing a determination to escape entirely from manu viri—still sustained by the relics of mediæval law and sentiment—and to become in reality as well as in name an equal partner under the nuptial contract. The state also has intervened to abridge the parental authority. Minor children are no longer looked upon as the absolute property of the father. For the purpose of education, society removes them for a considerable part of the period of nonage from home and immediate parental control; and, on the other hand, it forbids their employment in mines, factories, or other injurious vocations during their tender years. Under child-saving laws they may even be removed from home, when they are cruelly treated or exposed to vicious influences, and placed under the protection of the state. Thus, little by little, to use the phrase of a thoughtful writer, the original "coercive" powers of the family under the patriarchal régime have been "extracted" and appropriated by society. In the education of the young the family retains the lesser part. "The state has here interfered in the private ordering of the household by taking the child from its parents for one-third of its waking hours, and has introduced order and system into the training of children, together with the assertion of rights on their part. The family becomes therefore less a coercive institution, where the children serve their parents, and more a spiritual and psychic association of parent and child based on persuasion. A more searching interference on the part of the state, together with a new set of governmental organizations for its enforcement, is found in the boards of children's guardians, the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, orphans' asylums, state public schools, with their investigating and placing-out agents, empowered under supervision of the courts to take children away from parents and to place them in new homes. A large part of the unlimited coercion of the patria potestas is here extracted from the family and annexed to the peculiar coercive institution where it is guided by notions of children's rights, and all families are thereby toned up to a stronger emphasis on persuasion as the justification of their continuance."[784] Here we catch a glimpse of the direction of future evolution in the family. At the same time it appears that the disintegration of paternal and marital coercive power is not a serious menace to the family. It has cleared the way for a higher and nobler spiritual domestic life. The real danger is that the family and the home will surrender an undue share of their duty and privilege to participate in the culture and training of the young. This function for the good of society may be vastly developed, though mainly on new lines bearing directly on the nature of marriage and the family. Of this function some further mention will presently be made.

More threatening to the solidarity of the family is believed to be the individualistic tendencies arising in existing urban and economic life.[785] With the rise of corporate and associated industry comes a weakening of the intimacy of home ties. Through the division of labor the "family hearth-stone" is fast becoming a mere temporary meeting-place of individual wage-earners. The congestion of population in cities is forcing into being new and lower modes of life. The tenement and the "sweating system" are destructive of the home. Neither the lodging-house, the "flat," nor the "apartment" affords an ideal environment for domestic joys. In the vast hives of Paris, London, or New York even families of the relatively well-to-do have small opportunity to flourish—for self-culture and self-enjoyment. To the children of the slum the street is a perilous nursery. For them squalor, disease, and sordid vice have supplanted the traditional blessings of the family sanctuary. The cramped, artificial, and transient associations of the boarding-house are a wretched substitute for the privacy of the separate household.[786] For very many men club life has stronger allurements than the connubial partnership. Prostitution advances with alarming speed. For the poor, sometimes for the rich, the great city has many interests and many places more attractive than the home circle. The love of selfish indulgence and the spirit of commercial greed, not less than grinding penury, restrain men and women from wedlock. Yet the urban environment has also the opposite effect. In the crowded, heterogeneous, and shifting population of the great towns marriages are often lightly made and as lightly dissolved. Indeed, the remarkable mobility of the American people, the habit of frequent migration, under the powerful incentives of industrial enterprise, gold-hunting, or other adventure, and under favor of the marvelously developed means of swift transportation, will account in no small degree for the laxity of matrimonial and family ties in the United States. May not one gather courage even from this untoward circumstance? Assuredly the present thus clearly appears to be an age of transition to a more stable condition of social life. Furthermore, the perils to the family of the kind under review need not be fatal. They are inherent mainly in economic institutions which may be scientifically studied and intelligently brought into harmony with the requirements of the social order. Already in great municipal centers, through improved facilities for rapid transit, the evils resulting from dense population are being somewhat ameliorated. Of a truth, every penny's reduction in street-railway fares means for the family of small means a better chance for pure air, sound health, and a separate home in the suburbs. The dispersion of the city over a broader area at once cheapens and raises the standard of living. Every hour's reduction in the period of daily toil potentially gives more leisure for building, adorning, and enjoying the home.

To the socialist the monogamic family in its present form is decidedly a failure. "To those who would substitute common ownership for industrial liberty, the institution of the family presents one of the most persistent obstacles. Domestic unity is inconsistent with the absolute social unity vested in the state."[787] The larger social body must be composed of individual members, free and equal; and it will not tolerate within itself a smaller body with special group-interests of its own, much less with any vestige of coercive authority over its constituent parts. There must be no imperium in imperio. Writers like Engels[788] seek consolation and support in Bachofen's theory of a universal stage of mother-right before the monogamic family with the institution of private property had brought domestic slavery into the world. They "hold that the monogamic family is a relic of decaying civilization. All ideas on which it rests, the subordination and dependence of women, the ownership of children, the belief in the sacredness of marriage as a divine institution, above all respect for the individual ownership of property and the rights of inheritance as permanent elements in our social organization—have been undermined. The foundations are sapped and the superstructure is ready to topple in."[789]

Woman in particular has been the devoted victim of the greed of individual possession upon which the monogamic family rests. "Far back in history," according to Edward Carpenter, "at a time when in the early societies the thought of inequality had hardly arisen, it would appear that the female, in her own way—as sole authenticator of birth and parentage, as guardian of the household, as inventress of agriculture and the peaceful arts, as priestess and prophetess or sharer in the councils of the tribe—was as powerful as man in his, and sometimes even more so. But from thence down to today what centuries of repression, of slavehood, of dumbness, of obscurity have been her lot!"[790]

Under socialism, declare Morris and Bax, marriage and the family will be affected "firstly in economics and secondly in ethics. The present marriage system is based on the general supposition of economic dependence of the woman on the man, and the consequent necessity of his making provision for her." In the new social order this degrading condition must disappear. "Property in children would cease to exist, and every infant that came into the world would be born into full citizenship, and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parents might be. Thus a new development of the family would take place, on the basis, not of a predominant life-long business arrangement, to be formally and nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party." Thus a higher morality would be sanctioned. There would be no "vestige of reprobation for dissolving one tie and forming another."[791]

A similar demand for liberty is made by Laurence Gronlund. Economically "the coming commonwealth" will place woman "on an equal footing with man." But she will be "equal," not "alike;" for in the new society the sexes will no longer be free industrial competitors, but each will have its special vocation. Physiological differences will not be ignored. "Woman will become a functionary, she will have suitable employment given her, and be rewarded according to results, just the same as men." Like men she will have suffrage, not as a right or a privilege, but as a trust. "The new order will necessarily, by the mere working of its economic principles, considerably modify" the marriage relation; and "is that relation such an ideal one now, that it would be a sacrilege to touch it? Is marriage not now, at bottom, an establishment for the support of woman? Is not maintenance the price which the husband pays for the appendage to himself? And because the supply generally exceeds the demand—that is, the effective demand—has woman not often to accept the offer of the first man who seems able to perform this pecuniary obligation?" If it be objected that this is taking "rather a commercial view" of the "holy" relation, is not, "as a matter of fact, marriage regarded by altogether too many as a commercial institution? Do not, in fact, the total of young women form a matrimonial market, regulated by demand and supply?" "Now the Co-operative Commonwealth will dissipate this horror," enabling every healthy adult man and woman to find a mate. Thus, contrary to false charges, socialists are not trying to destroy the family: "they want to enable every man and woman to form a happy family!" Modern democracy revolts against the patriarchal constitution of the family, upon whose model all feudal and ancient societies were organized. In the "very nature of things family-supremacy will be absolutely incompatible with an interdependent, a solidaric, commonwealth; for in such a state the first object of education must be to establish in the minds of the children an indissoluble association between their individual happiness and the good of all."[792]

The manifold social evils which take their rise directly or indirectly in marriage as it is—be the actual causes what they may—have always justly aroused the unsparing criticism of socialistic writers. Thus to Robert Owen—whose pure life was unreservedly and courageously devoted to the social good, as he understood it—marriage was a member of his "trinity of causes of crime and immorality among mankind."[793] With almost the fanatical zeal of an apostle of a new religion, he railed at the "single" family.[794] He proclaimed the glad tidings of the swift approach of the new moral order. Then "the imaginative laws of the marriages of the priesthood must be among the first to be abolished, by reason of their extended injurious influence upon human nature, poisoning all the sources of the most valuable qualities which Nature has given to infant man. These marriages have dried up the fountain of truth in human nature; they perpetually insinuate that man can love and hate at his pleasure, and that to be virtuous he must live according to the dictates of the laws and ceremonies devised by the priesthood, that he must hate according to the same dictation, and that if he does not thus love and hate, he is vicious, and he will be eternally punished in another world," while on earth he will suffer from the human laws and by the public opinion which priests have inspired.[795] Under the new moral order all this will be changed. Marriages will be more lasting than now. "Every individual will be trained and educated, to have all his powers cultivated in the most superior manner known; cultivated too under a new combination of external objects, purposely formed, to bring into constant exercise the best and most lovely qualities only of human nature." Wealth for all will be "produced in superfluity." Therefore all will be "equal in their education and condition," and without any distinction except as to age. "There will be then no motive or inducement for any parties to unite, except from pure affection arising from the most unreserved knowledge of each other's character.... There will be no artificial obstacles in the way of permanent happy unions of the sexes; for ... the affections will receive every aid which can be devised to induce them to be permanent;" and the wedded pair "will be placed as far as possible in the condition of lovers during their lives." In "some partial instances," however, happiness might not even thus be secured. In such event, "without any severance of friendship between the parties, a separation may be made, the least injurious to them and the most beneficial to the interests of society."[796] In fine, Robert Owen's book, although often vague in expression and violent in tone, contains in its statements, and still more in its suggestions, practically the whole program of later socialistic writings on the subject of marriage and the family, except the argument based on historical evolution.[797]

Robert Dale Owen followed in his father's footsteps. He finds even the Haytian institution of "placement"—an informal union made and dissolved at the pleasure of the contracting persons—far superior in its morality and its stability to the sacramental marriage which exists by its side.[798]

August Bebel, in his able book on Woman and Socialism, draws a powerful indictment of matrimonial relations under the existing order. To this source, in his view, may be traced the prevalence of sexual crimes and the most dangerous tendencies now threatening the integrity of society. Infanticide, abortion, and prostitution; the decline in the birth and marriage rates; the increase in the number of divorces; the subjection of woman—all these, he says, are due mainly to the influence of the present "coercive marriage." This is so because that "marriage is an institution bound up in the closest way with the existing social order and with it must stand or fall." Coercive marriage is the creature of economic conditions, the "normal marriage" of the present bourgeois society; and with that society it is already in process of disruption. "Since all these unnatural conditions, being especially harmful to woman, are grounded in the nature of the bourgeois society and are growing with its duration, that society is proving itself incapable of remedying the evil and of emancipating woman. Another social order is therefore needful for this purpose." In the new state, economically and socially, woman will be entirely independent. She will no longer be the subject of authority and of exploitation; but, free and equal by man's side she will become "mistress of her own destiny."[799]

Whatever may be thought of the remedy suggested by socialistic writers, whether or not our only hope lies in the co-operative commonwealth, it is certain that they have rendered an important public service. They have earnestly studied and set forth the actual facts. With unsparing hand they have laid bare the flaws in our domestic institutions as they really exist. They have clearly proved that the problems of marriage and the family can be solved only by grasping their relations to the economic system. They have shown that progress lies along the line of the complete emancipation of woman and the absolute equality of the sexes in marriage. In accomplishing all this they have in effect done much to arouse in the popular mind a loftier ideal of wedded life.

The liberation of woman in every one of its aspects profoundly involves the destiny of the family. It signifies in all the larger activities of life the relative individualization of one-half of human kind. This means, of course, a weakening of the solidarity of the family group, so far as its cohesion is dependent on the remnants of mediæval marital authority. Will the ultimate dissolution of the family thus become the price of equality and freedom? Or rather, is it not almost certain that in the more salubrious air of freedom and equality there is being evolved a higher type of the family, knit together by ties—sexual, moral, and spiritual—far more tenacious than those fostered by the régime of subjection? How remarkable, in England as well as in America, is the revolution already accomplished! Few facts in social history are more instructive than the change which has taken place in the tone of the literature dealing with woman and her relations to marriage and the family. In the eighteenth century and until far down into the nineteenth it is for the most part utterly frivolous or sentimental. Vapid satire abounds. Erotic or facetious verse at the expense of the "fair sex" or "wedded love" finds ready popular response. Even in what is meant for earnest discussion woman is treated as a helpless being, to be petted, cajoled, or corrected, not too harshly, by her superior lord; or else she is edified with endless lectures on the sacred duty of guarding her virtue—a fact which throws a lurid and unintentional light on the moral standards of the age. Imagine an Essay on Old Maids,[800] tediously spun out in three volumes; or a book like Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator,[801] which, although in four volumes, had already reached its seventh edition in 1771.

Nevertheless, the beginning of an efficient agitation for woman's rights was then made. As early as 1696 appeared Mary Astell's vigorous Defense of the Female Sex, further developing views which she had expressed two years earlier.[802] The next year Defoe, advocating an "academy for women," made a strong plea for the equal education of the sexes.[803] A singularly clear and incisive exposure of the Hardships of the English Laws in relation to Wives was published in 1735. The writer, apparently a woman, while protesting that her adversaries for want of arguments resort to "points of wit, smart jests, and all-confounding laughter," presents many striking proofs from judicial annals and elsewhere to show that in England the "estate of wives is more disadvantageous than slavery itself;" that they "may be made prisoners for life at the discretion of their domestick governors;" and that they "have no property, neither in their own persons, children, or fortunes."[804] In 1739 an anonymous writer, signing herself "Sophia," produced a forceful Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem with the Men, in which, appealing to "rectified reason," she urged that difference in sex relates to the "propagation of human nature," whereas in "soul there is no sex," and diversity must therefore come from education and environment.[805] Mary Wollstonecraft's better known and much more elaborate Vindication of the Rights of Woman,[806] published in 1792, was therefore not without helpful predecessors. But it is immensely superior to them in its literary power and its intellectual grasp. The fearless, direct, and unaffected way in which the subject is handled, especially the questions of sex and education, discloses the dawn of a new era of discussion. More clearly than ever before the liberation of woman appears as a sociological problem of the greatest moment to mankind. True, much space is devoted to combating objections which may now seem trivial; but to the average mind of Mary Wollstonecraft's day they were by no means trivial, and they had to be cleared away before the full light could come in.

The foundations were thus laid upon which, chiefly during the last half-century,[807] a vast literary superstructure—controversial, historical, and scientific—has been erected; a many-sided literature worthily embodying the thought of a great transitional stage in social progress. The opponents of woman's liberation have been forced to choose new weapons. Satire and mockery are no longer in vogue. Both sides are very much in earnest. The tone of present discussion is nothing if not serious. Moreover, while the battle for sexual equality in the family and in the state is very far from being yet fought out, the ultimate victory seems already assured.

It would, indeed, be very strange if some incidental harm should not result from the veritable revolution in the condition of American women which little more than a generation has produced. This is the inevitable penalty which social progress has always to pay. Yet in the present case the transitional loss to the family or to the larger social body is exceedingly slight compared even with the immediate gain. This is especially true of woman's new intellectual life with all its manifold activities. It matters not whether she is showing herself mentally man's equal. If any justification of her new rôle were needed it might suffice to affirm that she has precisely the same right as man to free and unhampered self-development in whatever direction and in whatever manner she herself shall find most conducive to her happiness. But it is amply justified by its social results. It cannot be seriously doubted that woman's admission to equal privilege of higher education is enabling her better to share with man in doing the world's work. Besides, in spite of the vain imaginings of misogynistic philosophers,[808] the problem of special sexual function in its relation to mental capacity is being settled in woman's favor. "Science," declares Lourbet, in completing his valuable survey, "is incapable of demonstrating the 'irremediable' mental inferiority of woman.... The pretended antagonism between mental power and sexual power, which does not withstand rigorous analysis, appears definitively to be destroyed by experience, by the tangible facts which incessantly strike the eye."[809] Herbert Spencer reaches the conclusion that "were liberties to be adjusted to abilities, the adjustment, even could we make it, would have to be made irrespective of sex."[810]

It is singular what acute anxiety is felt by adherents of the old régime[811] lest woman's new intellectual life should prove disastrous to her physical constitution, unmindful of the fact that even now for the majority of married women the burdens of the orthodox "natural sphere" are far more harmful. The tables are decidedly turned by a radical writer who with truth declares that "evidence is rapidly accumulating which makes it almost impossible to deny that the feminine constitution has been disastrously injured during the long ages of patriarchal rule, and that this beloved 'sphere' of woman, where she was thought so safe and happy, has, in fact, been a very seed-bed of disease and misery and wrong;" that "through these ages of overstrain of every kind—physical, emotional, nervous—one set of faculties being in perpetual activity while the others lay dormant, woman has fallen into a state that is more or less ailing and diseased; that upon her shoulders has been laid the penalty of the injustice and selfishness of men."[812] Even if the participation of woman in the mental activities and the public vocations which men have hitherto monopolized should prove harmful to her, has she not a right to discover the fact by experience? "I consider it presumptuous," said John Stuart Mill in the outset of the organized emancipation movement, "in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised, and no one can safely pronounce that if woman's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves."[813]

It is vain for "scientific optimism" to seek in "nature" a justification for woman's sexual subjection. "Independently ... of its false facts and false premises, this pretended scientific defense of the undue inequality of the sexes in man is fundamentally unsound in resting upon a thoroughly false assumption, which is only the more pernicious because widely prevalent. It assumes that whatever exists in nature must be the best possible state.... The only practical use to which we put science is to improve upon nature, to control all classes of forces, social forces included, to the end of bettering the conditions under which we inhabit the earth. This is true civilization, and all of it."[814]

The fear that the education of woman, in connection with her growing economic independence, will prove harmful to society through her refusal of matrimony or maternity appears equally groundless. According to Dike, "the demand for her enfranchisement, either as a right or on the ground of expediency, grows out of this way of treating her as an individual whose relations to society are less a matter of condition and more of personal choice. And this principle is carried into a sphere entirely her own. A partial loss of capacity for maternity has, it is said, already befallen American women; and the voluntary refusal of its responsibilities is the lament of the physician and the moralist."[815] It is true that the birth-rate is falling.[816] So far as this depends upon male sensuality, a prevalent cause of sterility; upon selfish love of ease and luxury—of which men even more than women are guilty; or upon the disastrous influence of the present extremes of wealth and poverty—of which women as well as men are the victims—it is a serious evil which may well cause us anxiety; but so far as it is the result of the desire for fewer but better-born children—for which, let us hope, the advancing culture of woman may in part be responsible—it is in fact a positive social good.[817] It is true also that, while fewer and fewer marriages in proportion to the population are taking place, men as well as women are marrying later and later in life.[818] Here again, for the reasons just mentioned, the results are both good and bad. Certain it is that early marriages and excessive child-bearing have been the twin causes of much injury to the human race. "To the superficial observer," declares a writer very conservative as to the effects of woman's emancipation, "it may appear that every marriage must enrich the state, and that early marriages must lessen the amount of sexual immorality, but inquiry will prove conclusively how fallacious are those views. Early marriages certainly tend to the production of large families, but then a family, to be a source of wealth to the state, must at least be self-supporting, which is exactly what the feeble, degenerate children of the great mass of our early marriages are not. They are brought forth ill-developed and unhealthy; their immature, improvident parents are unable to either feed or educate them as they ought to be fed and educated; hence, instead of being a source of wealth to the state, they prove a serious drain upon her resources. A large percentage of these miserable children succumb during infancy, but a great number drag out a pitiful existence, only to become inmates of our workhouses and infirmaries, our asylums and prisons, and, after being supported at the public expense for a longer or shorter period, to die prematurely, leaving the state poorer than they found it and no better. It is indeed a small percentage of the children of the immature that ever become robust useful, self-supporting citizens."[819]

It is not marriage or maternity which educated women are shunning; but they are declining to view marriage as their sole vocation or to become merely child-bearing animals. Let us not worry about the destiny of college women.[820] It is simply wrong wedlock which they are avoiding. They have, suggests Muirhead, a careful regard for the "kind" of marriage. They are determined to have only "the genuine article." They "look in marriage not only for the old fashioned 'union of hearts,' but for the union of heart and head in some serious interest which will survive the mere attractions of sex and form a solid bond of union even in the absence of others which, like the birth of children, depend on fortune." So "far from being hostile" to the family, "they are only preparing the way for a purer and more beneficent form of family life." The "maternal instinct is happily not confined to the uneducated."[821] The rise of a more refined sentiment of love has become at once a check and an incentive to marriage.[822] Long ago Mrs. John Stuart Mill explained how essential are knowledge and equality to render woman the real companion of man in the struggle for existence; how the subjection and ignorance of the wife degrade not only her own character, but that of the husband as well. "There is hardly any situation more unfavorable to the maintenance of elevation of character, or force of intellect, than to live in the society, and seek by preference the sympathy, of inferiors in mental endowments."[823]

If woman's even partnership with man in the nurture of the family and in facing the exigencies of external life depends mainly on equal education, never was such education more urgently required than at the present hour. Social and industrial problems are constantly demanding higher and higher mental training for their solution. The same is true of the problem of the family. It is very largely a question of reform and development in home education. Clearly, then, husband and wife have great need of intelligent sympathy and counsel in the discharge of their joint, yet partially differentiated, tasks. Hence, it should be the high function of public education to promote this healthy companionship in social duty. Furthermore, American experience appears to show that it can best do so by training young men and women together. Indeed, in this regard the sociological value of coeducation is very important. Theoretically it seems reasonable to assume that those who are to work together in later life may gain some advantage by spending the years of study side by side. The practical result of coeducation in the western states, where it has been given the freest opportunity, appears to demonstrate that such is actually the case. The majority of those who have had extended experience, after making all due allowance for special difficulties to be surmounted, are emphatic in their opinion that mentally and morally both sexes are the gainers by it, as compared with training in separate institutions.[824] It is true that eventually marriages very often result from such associations. That is precisely the gist of the matter. Are not the conditions entirely favorable to the fostering of happy unions? Under what better auspices can attachments be formed than when young men and women are learning to gauge each other's character through the varied social and intellectual rivalries of the years of scholastic life?

Educational equality, however, is but one aspect of the movement for woman's liberation. There are other factors of the ideal partnership of the sexes in the uplifting of society. Intellectual emancipation is proceeding, and necessarily must proceed, hand in hand with political and economic emancipation. The three movements are in large measure blended and interdependent. The participation of woman in the new vocations—industrial, artistic, professional, or administrative—implies a great advance in mental training. It means a distinct unfoldment of faculties and character. "No sociological change equal in importance to this clearly marked improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one century."[825] It is a revolution in which one-half of the human race is becoming an equal factor with the other in intellectual and economic production. At last woman is gaining a share in the social consciousness; she is entering into the social organization as a new and regenerative force. Doubtless, in the process of readjusting new functions and conditions to the old some temporary harm may ensue. Yet happily the alarm is subsiding lest by her entrance on the new vocations woman should permanently wreck her physical constitution, refuse to marry, or cause industrial disaster through over-competition.[826] With far greater justice a century ago it was complained that the "intrusion of men-traders" into woman's work was driving her to destitution and thus fostering the "social evil."[827] The callings into which women are charged with "intruding" were, many of them, women's callings before they were men's.

It is within the family itself that the growing economic independence of woman is producing the highest sociological results. Under the old domestic régime on both sides of the sea the woman who married entered legally, potentially, upon a life of financial bondage. In the theory of the common law the wife, with her children, her goods, and the fruits of her toil, was the sole property of the husband. Only in 1886 did the mother in England gain legal capacity for the partial custody of her offspring;[828] and in but few of the American states has she been placed on equal footing with the father in this regard.[829] Even now the "husband in England can claim damage from the man who has ruined his family life, but the woman can claim none from the rival who has supplanted her."[830] In both England and the United States notable progress has already been made in equalizing the property rights of the sexes; but the process is yet far from complete. The prevailing conception of marriage as a status in which the wife is "supported" by the husband is degrading in its influence on the woman's character. It tends to deaden her moral perceptions and to paralyze her mental powers. Girls are trained, or they are forced by poverty, to look upon wedlock as an economic vocation, as a means of getting a living. The result is that under the old order marriage tends to become a species of purchase-contract in which the woman barters her sex-capital to the man in exchange for a life-support. The man—not the woman as originally—has become the chooser in sex-selection. In the family, therefore, the sex-motive has become excessively pronounced, thrusting into the background higher social and spiritual ideals.[831] The liberation movement thus means in a high degree the socialization of one-half of the human race. Woman declines longer to be restricted to the dwarfing environment of sexual seclusion; and demands the means and the privilege of engaging in the larger activities of self-conscious society.[832]

We are thus confronted by still another phase of the emancipation movement—the divorce problem. In this problem woman has a peculiar interest. The wife more frequently than the husband is seeking in divorce a release from marital ills; for in her case it often involves an escape from sexual slavery. The divorce movement, therefore, is in part an expression of woman's growing independence. In this instance as in others it does not, of course, follow that the individualistic tendency is vicious. Nowhere in the field of social ethics, perhaps, is there more confusion of thought than in dealing with the divorce question. Divorce is not favored by anyone for its own sake. Probably in every healthy society the ideal of right marriage is a lifelong union. But what if it is not right, if the marriage is a failure? Is there no relief? Here a sharp difference of opinion has arisen. Some persons look upon divorce as an evil in itself; others as a "remedy" for, or a "symptom" of, social disease. The one class regard it as a cause; the other as an effect. To the Roman Catholic, and to those who believe with him, divorce is a sin, the sanction of "successive polygamy,"[833] of "polygamy on the instalment plan."[834] At the other extreme are those who, like Milton and Humboldt,[835] would allow marriage to be dissolved freely by mutual consent, or even at the desire of either spouse. Nay, there are earnest souls, shocked by the intolerable hardships which wives may suffer under the marital yoke, who, pending a reform in the marriage law, would, like the Quakers of earlier days, ignore the present statutory requirements and resort to private contract.[836] According to the prevailing opinion, however, as expressed in modern legislation, divorce should be allowed, with more or less freedom, under careful state regulation. Whatever degree of liberty may be just or expedient in a more advanced state of moral development, it is felt that now a reasonable conservatism is the safer course. Yet divorce is sanctioned by the state as an individual right; and there may be occasions when the exercise of the right becomes a social duty. The right is, of course, capable of serious abuse. Loose divorce laws may even invite crime. Nevertheless, it is fallacious to represent the institution of divorce as in itself a menace to social morality. It is not helpful to allege, as is often done, that with the increase of divorce certain crimes wax more frequent, thus insinuating the effect for the cause. It is just as illogical to assume that the prevalence of divorce in the United States is a proof of moral decadence as compared with other countries in which divorce is prohibited or more restricted. To forbid the use of a remedy does not prove that there is no disease. Is there any good reason for believing that what Tocqueville said fifty years ago is not true today? "Assuredly," he declares, "America is the country in the world where the marriage tie is most respected and where the highest and justest idea of conjugal happiness has been conceived."[837] It is remarkable, says Lecky, "that this great facility of divorce should exist in a country which has long been conspicuous for its high standard of sexual morality and for its deep sense of the sanctity of marriage."[838] Bryce passes a similar judgment: "So far as my own information goes, the practical level of sexual morality is at least as high in the United States as in any part of northern or western Europe (except possibly among the Roman Catholic peasantry of Ireland)." There "seems no ground for concluding that the increase of divorce in America necessarily points to a decline in the standard of domestic morality, except perhaps in a small section of the wealthy class, though it must be admitted that if this increase should continue, it may tend to induce such a decline."[839] Even more emphatic is Commissioner Wright. After eloquently describing the relatively high place which woman has reached in our land, he continues: "I do not believe that divorce is a menace to the purity and sacredness of the family; but I do believe that it is a menace to the infernal brutality, of whatever name, and be it crude or refined, which at times makes a hell of the holiest human relations. I believe the divorce movement finds its impetus outside of laws, outside of our institutions, outside of our theology; that it finds its impetus in the rebellion of the human heart against that slavery which binds in the cruelest bonds of the cruelest prostitution human beings who have, by their foolishness, by their want of wisdom, or by the intervention of friends, missed the divine purpose, as well as the civil purpose of marriage. I believe the result will be an enhanced purity, a sublimer sacredness, a more beautiful embodiment of Lamartine's trinity,—the trinity of the father, the mother, and the child"—to preserve which "in all its sacredness, society must take the bitter medicine labelled 'Divorce.'"[840]

This brings us to the root of the matter: the need of a loftier popular ideal of the marriage relation. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." While bad legislation and a low standard of social ethics continue to throw recklessly wide the door which opens to wedlock, there must of necessity be a broad way out. How ignorantly, with what utter levity,[841] are marriages often contracted; how many thousands of parents fail to give their children any serious warning against yielding to transient impulse in choosing a mate; how few have received any real training with respect to the duties and responsibilities of conjugal life! What proper check is society placing upon the marriage of the unfit? Is there any boy or girl so immature if only the legal age of consent has been reached; is there any "delinquent" so dangerous through inherited tendencies to disease or crime; is there any worn out debauchee, who cannot somewhere find a magistrate or a priest to tie the "sacred" knot? It is a very low moral sentiment which tolerates modern wife-purchase or husband-purchase for bread, title, or social position. "As our laws stare us in the face," exclaims an eloquent writer, "there is no man so drunken, so immoral, so brutal, so cruel, that he may not take to himself the purest, the most refined, the most sensitive of women to wife, if he can get her. There is no woman so paltry, so petty, so vain, so inane, so enfeebled in body and mind by corsets or chloral, flirtation, or worse, that she may not become the wife of an intellectual, honorable man, and the mother of his doomed children. There is no pauper who may not wed a pauper and beget paupers to the end of his story. There is no felon returned from his prison, or loose upon society uncondemned, who may not make a base play at wedlock, and perpetuate his diseased soul and body in those of his descendants, without restraint. There is no member of what we call our 'respectable' classes who may not, if he choose, make a mock of the awful name of marriage, in sacrilege to which we are so used that we scarcely lift an eyelid to suppress surprise or aversion at the sickening variety of the offence."[842]

It is vain to conceal from ourselves the fact that here is a real menace to society. Marriages thus formed are almost sure to be miserable failures from the start. It is the simple truth, as earnest writers have insisted, that often under such conditions the nuptial ceremony is but a legal sanction of "prostitution within the marriage bond," whose fruit is wrecked motherhood and the feeble, base-born children of unbridled lust. The command to "be fruitful and multiply," under the selfish and thoughtless interpretation which has been given it, has become a heavy curse to womanhood and a peril to the human race.[843] On the face of it, is it not grotesque to call such unions holy or to demand that they shall be indissoluble? What chance is there under such circumstances for a happy family life or for worthy home-building? In sanctioning divorce the welfare of the children may well cause the state anxiety; but are there not thousands of so-called "homes" from whose corrupting and blighting shadow the sooner a child escapes the better for both it and society?

How shall the needed reform be accomplished? The raising of ideals is a slow process. It will not come through the statute-maker, though he can do something to provide a legal environment favorable for the change. It must come through an earnest and persistent educational effort which shall fundamentally grapple with the whole group of problems which concern the related, though distinct, institutions of marriage, the home, and the family. In this work every grade in the educational structure, from the university to the kindergarten and the home circle, must have its appropriate share. Already a few of our higher institutions have made a worthy beginning. Departments of physical culture, economics, history, and sociology are providing instruction of real value. But the movement should become universal; and the curriculum should be broadened and deepened. The actual concrete problems must be dealt with frankly and without flinching. To gain the right perspective it is highly important that a thorough historical basis should be laid through the study of ethnology, comparative religion, and the evolution of cultural, economic, and matrimonial institutions. Moreover, the elements of such a training in domestic sociology should find a place in the public school program. If need be, a little more arithmetic or a little more Latin may be sacrificed. Where now, except perhaps in an indirect or perfunctory way, does the school boy or girl get any practical suggestion as to home-building, the right social relations of parent and child, much less regarding marriage and the fundamental questions of the sexual life? In this field the home, as the complement or coadjutor of the school and the state, has a precious opportunity. Indeed, our inspiring hope lies in the fact that, in spite of unfavorable conditions, many homes, presided over by enlightened parents, are discharging worthily, if not yet ideally, the high function of social training. Here father, mother, and child are equal members of the "trinity." Here it is held as binding an obligation and as joyous a privilege for the parents to honor their children as for the children to honor their parents. Of a truth, is there anything on earth more beautiful and inspiring than the real companionship of parent and child; than a home life in which the characters of the young are molded and their faculties drawn out by free and frank discussion with their elders; where mutual love is based on mutual respect? But what shall be said of the opposite picture—of the countless families in which mother and child still cower before the paternal despot; where authority and not reason prevails; where, as in the good old colonial days, the child is harshly thrust into the background and his insistent individualism is insulted and repressed? Before the home can become a healthful school for social education, parents must themselves be trained; they must become aware of their real place in the social order.

In the future educational program sex questions must hold an honorable place. Progress in this direction may be slow, because of the false shame, the prurient delicacy, now widely prevalent touching everything connected with the sexual life. Nor is it a light matter to brave orthodox sentiment in this regard. It is not always safe for the teacher, even in institutions deeming themselves modern, to deal frankly with the organic facts which are of vital concern to the human race. The folly of parents in leaving their children in ignorance of the laws of sex is notorious. Yet how much safer than ignorance is knowledge as a shield for innocence. The daughter will face the vicissitudes of life more securely if she has been told of the destiny that awaits her as wife and mother; if she has been warned of the snares with which lust has beset the path of womanhood. The son is likely to live a nobler life if he has learned to repudiate the dual standard of sexual morality which a spurious philosophy has set up; if he understands that "instincts" may be safely controlled; if he has been warned that selfish excesses within or without the marriage bond must be dearly paid for by the coming generations. Indeed, it is of the greatest moment to society that the young should be trained in the general laws of heredity. Everywhere men and women are marrying in utter contempt of the warnings of science. Domestic animals are literally better bred than human beings. Through ignorance and defiance of the rules of health, we are destroying our physical constitutions. Under the plea of "romantic love" we blindly yield to sexual attractions in choosing our mates, selfishly ignoring the welfare of the race. Is there not a higher ideal of conjugal choice? Experience shows that in wedlock natural and sexual selection should play a smaller and artificial selection a larger rôle.[844] The safety of the social body requires that a check be put upon the propagation of the unfit. Here the state has a function to perform. In the future much more than now, let us hope, the marriage of persons mentally delinquent or tainted by hereditary disease or crime will be legally restrained. Yet law can do relatively little. A reform of this kind must of necessity depend mainly upon a better educated popular sentiment; upon a higher altruism which shall be capable of present sacrifice for the permanent good of the race. "When human beings and families rationally subordinate their own interests as perfectly to the welfare of future generations as do animals under the control of instinct the world will have a more enduring type of family life than exists at present. This can only be accomplished by the development of controlling ideals which are supported not only by reason and intelligence but by ethical impulse and religious motive. This larger altruism which protects the permanent interests of the future against the more temporary values of the present must be of the heart as much as of the head.... In the mating of men and women, money, social position, worldly expediency, the conventional and fictitious values so influential in these days, will count for much less, while organic health and efficiency, character, unselfish devotion to high ideals, to the great world interests will count for far more. In this obedience to ideals so farsighted, romantic love will not be lost in any way, as some seem to fear. Men and women will not choose one another in cold blood simply because intelligence and reason point the way, but human sentiment and every romantic quality will be enhanced when permanent and future interests are furthered by a saner and finer human choice."[845]

There is then no need to despair of the future. It is vain to turn back the hand on the dial. The problem of individual liberty has become the problem of social liberty. Individualization for the sake of socialization must continue its beneficent work. There must be growth, constant readjustment. Marriage will in truth be holy if it rests on the free trothplight of equals whose love is deep enough to embrace a rational regard for the rights of posterity. The home will not have less sanctity when through it flows the stream of the larger human life. The family will, indeed, survive; but it will be a family of a higher type. Its evolution is not yet complete. Coercive ties will still further yield to voluntary spiritual ties; for individual liberty appears to be the essential condition of social progress.