[51] Ellen Key, Love and Marriage. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911
In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be allowed to live together unless they are unsexed.[53] Justice to future generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.
[52] See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society, especially files of The Eugenics Review, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London.
[53] Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New Jersey has just added the same to her statutes.
Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions. Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for two young lovers to live together outside them.
As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view, still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the home, pray and wait.
This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of promise.
In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that the peasant of the family, the Hausfrau, shall join with them and dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their equal share of opportunity.
But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete, and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life, the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.
In their reactions against old abuses, writers like Mrs. Gilman or Olive Schreiner try to create a world for women alone, on the political analogy. Men might be tolerated as fathers; but, to secure political freedom, these leaders would turn to that nebulous creation of social reformers, the state; and it should subsidize the mothers in their periods of need. But there are only two ingredients out of which a nation can be formed: one is women; the other is men. Shall woman in her time of need turn to a state made up of other women, or to a state made up of men? Obviously it must be to both; and if woman is to depend on men, she might as well depend on man. No, in the political revolutions we broke up artificial, outworn and unjust combinations; but in this domestic revolution we are breaking up and must readjust the fundamental unit of life.
Men and women must live and work together in the domestic unit, and they cannot do the same things. Nature has specialized their functions and each must supplement the other. Even in Germany, the Hausfrau is not going back to an exclusive service of children, cooking and church; nor in America will man continue to be merely the breadwinner and the father of children. With the enlightenment that is on the way, we shall see that husband and wife can have no antagonistic differences. Each profits in all that really benefits the other; and slowly we shall shape a new institution based on absolute equality, and at the same time on complementary service.
In this adjustment, legal forms can help or hinder; but they cannot prevent nor compel the final action of human beings. Sex instinct is stronger than any human law. The law can, however, help us in regulating conditions of marriage, in settling disputes about common property and children, and in determining how the contract may be set aside when that becomes necessary.
The right of the church to sanction or regulate the family, rests in a belief that marriage involves spiritual changes and obligations that make it a sacrament, in its nature inviolable, and to be administered only by the church, like the sacrament of baptism. This is a belief resting not in eugenic considerations, nor in the human needs of the persons involved, but in theological dogmas with which this chapter cannot deal. Hence we shall maintain that the church has no more right to control matters of marriage than it has to interfere in business or political relations.
The state, on the other hand, meaning by the state the whole community, must concern itself with the marriage of its individuals. The commonwealth must have future citizens, and these should be strong and intelligent; hence it must prevent the breeding of the unfit. If parents die, or fail in obligations, the community must care for the children. In case of disagreement between married people, the courts of the community must settle disputes about children and property; hence the state must know when a man and woman determine to live together. The regulation of marriage certainly belongs to the state, that is, to all of us.
Marriage should therefore always be a matter of definite and open record in the archives of the community. It should also be advertised, through the public record, for a considerable time, preferably six months or a year, before consummation, that the past experiences of contracting parties may be looked up by interested friends or officials, and the marriage of the unfit prevented; and so that mere caprice and passion shall have time to realize their mistake and turn away. The form which the final ceremony of marriage will take can well be left to the tastes and traditions of the contracting parties.
The question of rights in children, or in property acquired after marriage, should be settled by the state; and it is hard to see how it can ever be settled satisfactorily except on a basis of equal partnership. No man should be contented with a woman to bear and train his children, and create a social atmosphere for his home, who is not worth half of what he makes; and the same holds true of a woman. So with regard to children, while one parent or the other may, under certain conditions, be given the direction of the child's life, it is hard to imagine any circumstances that would justify society in refusing either father or mother the right frequently to see his child.
Since marriages must be contracted in youth and since inexperienced people must make mistakes and the wisest must sometimes change, it will sometimes happen that men and women must face the possibility of separation. The problem of divorce is very difficult.[54] In less than twenty years, from 1887 to 1906, 945,625 divorces were granted in the United States; so that probably to-day there are nearly one million divorced people in this country. Generally speaking, the divorce rate increases as one goes westward. In 1900, the State of Washington led the country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. Japan alone leads us with 215, while England and Wales had only 2. England grants divorce only for infidelity; and on the man's side it must be accompanied by cruelty; all divorce cases must be tried in London, and the expense, never less than two hundred dollars, is prohibitive for the poor. Meantime, England grants many separation orders; and it seems sure that the Royal Commission, which has been taking evidence for the past three years, will favor a freer system of divorce.
[54] See Statistics of Marriage and Divorce, prepared by the Bureau of the Census, beginning in 1906, and published in 1910.
While divorce is increasing steadily all over the world, and most rapidly in the most intelligent and progressive sections, the subject is so bound up with our most deep-seated prejudices that it is difficult to secure any intelligent thinking on the subject. Thus, most people think Sioux Falls, in South Dakota, and Reno, Nevada, are places of free divorce, but the fact is that twenty-one other States have a higher divorce rate than South Dakota; and fourteen have a higher rate than Nevada. So, too, the impression that divorces spring from hasty action is certainly wrong, for in 46.5 per cent. of those for which we have records there had been a separation of more than three years before the divorce was granted. The idea that people generally seek divorces that they may marry some one else seems also unfounded, since in the cases for which we have records, less than forty per cent. remarry within a year.
There are three main objections which one hears urged against free divorce. The first is that organized society rests on the family, and with free divorce anarchy would ensue. In reply, it is pointed out that the same argument was used to support kings, aristocracies and a universal church. All these have been set aside, in many parts of the earth, and society seems even more stable than before. The love of men and women is probably more powerful and less in need of adventitious support than either patriotism or religion.
In the second place, it is claimed that children will suffer when parents separate. It is replied that this is true, but they were already suffering when parents had ceased to love each other. The fact that children are involved in only two out of five divorces seems to indicate that children hold parents together when the opposition is not too strong; and when a separation occurs, those who favor divorce claim that a child is better off with either father or mother alone than with both if love is absent.
In the third place, it is pointed out that often only one desires the divorce and that this brings tragedy to the other life. In reply it is claimed that many of the tragedies of life have always gathered around the love of men and women, that when marriage is declined tragedy often follows, and that compelling a person to live with some one whom he does not love, and may even dislike, is more tragic than any separation.
In conclusion, advocates of free divorce claim that their proposals are profoundly conservative, that they are seeking to bring marriage back to its eternally binding realities. They say that under our present conditions of restricted divorce, we have wide-spread prostitution, constant irregularities that are tolerated and condoned, and a million divorced people, some prevented from remarrying and all socially ostracized, so that the whole group is a dangerous element in our midst. These advocates claim that with free divorce, granted some months after the determination to separate had been registered in the public records, the love of men and women and their mutual love for their children would be free to bind families together in permanent trust and open honesty; and that with all excuse for irregularity absent, the unfaithful man or woman would sink to the level of unfaithfulness in business or political life. With freedom to readjust their lives, if they preferred to keep what they had and get what they could, they would simply take their place among thieves and liars, and most of them would disappear.
All transitions are hard, and this one in which we are involved is most difficult of all; but no one can study the conditions around him without seeing that change is inevitable and that we are not going back to our earlier ideals. At the same time, no one can read the singularly scholarly and fair-minded presentations of Ellen Key[55] without feeling that she has a vision of the future.
[55] The Century of the Child. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1907. Love and Marriage, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911. Love and Ethics. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1911.
With regard to the nature of the material plant in which the family should live, there are also two widely different ideals struggling for favor in the public mind, and for realization in practice. The one ideal, while recognizing the changes necessitated by modern conditions, would still seek to retain those features which have been supposed to make for family privacy, the kitchen, the nursery, and the garden. The other would frankly accept our changed conditions, and pass on to the larger groups of socialized buildings, with common kitchens, day nurseries, and parks.[56]
[56] See Woman and Economics, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; and the writings of H.G. Wells.
This question has been discussed in the chapter on industry, and it will be considered again in the following chapter. Meantime there can be no doubt that love is reticent so far as the outside world is concerned; and domesticity must always demand a large measure of privacy. It still remains to be proved that this can be secured, in the absence of a private kitchen, nursery and garden. Children, too, seem to need the personal care and constant love of mothers, and women seem to need a long period of loving and caring for a family to round out a deeply significant life.
To summarize this chapter we may say that the realization of romantic love, under conditions of domesticity, is necessary for men and women, and for the well-being of the race. Our present marriage system is defective, and needs to be corrected through the creation of a eugenic conscience. It should be taken out of the hands of the church and made more difficult by the state. Women's property rights should be defined and safeguarded, and men and women should never live together when they are repugnant to each other.
The greatest of all wisdom is that which leads men and women to see the real significance of their lives while they are still living. Life's values, like the manna in the wilderness, must be gathered daily. If not nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring. Buddhism offers us eternal peaceful existence in Nirvana; Epicureanism offers pleasure, which is but an intensification of life; Stoicism offers us life freed from disturbing forces; and the great lure which Christianity has always held before humanity is life eternal. Life is its own justification.
We have maintained throughout this volume that complete self-realization is impossible for the half-units which we call men and women, when either lives alone. On every side of their natures they are complementary; and the unit of human life must be found in the family composed of a man and woman who love each other and the children born of their love. "There are two worlds below, the home and outside of it." It is in this unit, under the stress of sexual passion and maternal love, that all the finer forces of our civilization have had their origin. Unselfishness, devotion, pity and the higher altruisms all hark back to the home as their source.
But, meantime, evil counsels prevail and one hears everywhere of the antagonistic interests of men and women. There can be no real rivalry between a man's soul and his body, between science and religion, between man and woman. The trouble all rests back in the failure to realize the incompleteness of man or woman alone for any of the purposes of life. And there is that evil notion which still afflicts economics that when two trade one must lose. The fact is that, in all honest trade, buyer and seller gain alike; and fair exchange makes all who participate in it rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, association and coöperation lies strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and competition lie arid, poor, mean lives, egotistic and conceited, vapid and fickle.
In primitive life, the family furnished a full and adequate career for men and women alike. The political life was the family life; each family was a religious group; families mustered for war; and each family maintained within itself a wide range of industrial activity. But, because this unit was so basal, because all later special developments of state, church and industry came from it, it was steadily perverted. Warped from its original purpose, it has served in turn, as we have seen, to define and secure all our later institutions until it has become the servant of state, church, social ambition, property and industrial advance. Marriage and the birthrate are seldom discussed to-day from the point of view of individual needs; but are almost always considered from the point of view of national and industrial efficiencies.
To-day men and women are confronted by two tempters which constantly lure them away from the complete living of the family; one is work, and the other is comfort. With the majority of people in our modern industrial democracies work uses up the hours and the energy of life. We have passed into a time when our habitual material needs are great, and the products of work are shamelessly diverted to the excessive uses of comparatively few individuals and groups. Hence millions of workers march along the narrow dark roads that lead through factories and farms to the grave. Only little patches of their nervous systems are ever used, but all their energy flows through these sections day after day, leaving their lives dull and empty.
Marriage for these workers means decreased earning power for the woman, with increased needs for the family, especially when the children come. As one watches the procession of young factory and shop women, with Sunday finery and some leisure, passing over into draggled factory mothers, with no finery and no leisure, one marvels at the strength of the forces with which nature drives them to their destiny. And yet, even with these hopeless workers, marriage and children mark the heights of life.
With others, who are economically freer, work has become an obsession. A Charles Darwin or a Herbert Spencer turns all of life's forces to shaping facts into science; our industrial leaders mint their hours into dollars; our reformers give up their lives that social conditions may be changed; our society leaders trade life for triumphs. Meantime we all know, or would know if we stopped to consider, that we are here to live life fully and significantly day by day. But domesticity takes time and effort, and so the hurrying specialist follows the narrow line of success until he or she becomes a machine for manufacturing generalizations, for painting pictures, for performing surgical operations or for merely getting money. The richest woman in America said with approval recently that her son was too busy to fall in love.
As industry drives the mass of workers and specialists away from life's deepest realizations, so the desire to become comfortable, physically and mentally, through avoiding the deeper experiences of life, robs many of those who have a large measure of economic freedom. In all periods of great wealth this disease of ease has afflicted mankind. Life more abundantly comes only at the price of vigorous living; and love travels always in company with anxiety. It would be well, says Cicero, to have children, were it not for the fear of losing them. Let a man apply this principle to wife, friends, possessions and enthusiasm in general and life sinks into utter worthlessness.
The love of ease among women is in a measure independent of the emancipation movement, but the entry of great numbers of young women into lines of independent livelihood has placed them in a condition where the ideals of a materialistic and commercial civilization appeal to them with great force. Many of them have been liberally educated and are living lives of independence. They lodge in flats or boarding houses where they have no responsibilities for the routine work connected with daily living. They carry their own latch-keys; and no one interferes with their friendships or their pleasures. They read the books they like, attend the theaters that appeal to them, and avoid people who bore them. One can easily understand why these young women hesitate before abandoning their easy conditions for the uncertain economic position of wife and mother, with a man whose career lies in the future. And yet here, as everywhere, one must lose one's life to gain it.
What then does daily association of a man and woman who belong together do for them? It gives gladness and peace, and these are fundamental conditions for all good and healthful living. It gives incentive to effort, for a man or woman dares not fail before the one he or she loves; but, in case of failure, it gives comfort and support, for love understands and credits intent and effort as highly as achievement. It complements the powers, for it gives four eyes, four hands and two minds with but one aim. And in this it does not simply multiply by two, but the blended powers are far more than two times one. It calls into activity all the gracious, artistic and altruistic powers of the soul. Surely these are gifts for which we may well forego some material comforts, may well work, and even face anxieties unafraid.
Each part of the human unit must educate the other to a realization of the fulness of life. This education is not entirely dependent on physical intimacy. It is the development of soul and spirit. It polishes the manners, cultivates the voice, broadens the judgments, sharpens the wit. It makes conversation an art and discussion significant. A woman-hating man or a man-hating woman is an unpolished and half-alive creature, whether he be a mediæval saint, or she a militant suffragette, or they both be simply commonplace egoists.
Because married life is so perfect when it finds its highest levels, it is capable of sinking to any form of vulgarity, base betrayal and cynicism when realization fails. The God to whom noblest souls aspire in hours of deepest exaltation, is the God invoked by the ribald drunkard when he curses his comrade. The family life we are discussing is the subject of most of the vulgar and indecent jokes of the disappointed and the unfit. The earth which nourishes the nations, merely soils the boots of the boor who unthinkingly lives on her bounty.
On the working side the life of the family has an evil record for pettiness and monotony, but much of this is due to wrong comparisons. A woman who does her own housework would presumably have to work in any case. Is the work of the family more petty or monotonous than the work of the factory, shop or office? Surely the woman who spends her days looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and shop work is infinitely petty and mean. In the social life of friends, neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the factory worker. If the woman has the preparation required for teaching or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will relieve the routine of housework. And if the family has means to hire help, the wife has a position from which she can exercise social and political power superior to that of the foot-loose celibate.
Meantime, the housework grows steadily simpler and less exacting, even with the growing complexity of our modern life. Most of the primitive industries have left the home, and products come from the factory ready to use. Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved cooking conditions and many domestic inventions of our day are keeping housework well abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.
The fact that domestic servants are scarce and unwilling to do general housework, in no way disproves the soundness of these conclusions. The wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing no others, is working for those she loves, under conditions of free initiative. The general servant is working for those who will not even admit her right to participate in their social life, and instead of freedom in her industrial life, she must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices of an untrained mistress. Well-trained mistresses, who know how to work themselves and who have a democratic sense of human values, seldom have trouble in securing able servants, even in this transition time when the shops and factories are calling so loudly to working girls.
No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the handling of a family. Women spend most of the household money to-day, at least in lower and middle-class homes. To use wisely the family pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order. Problems in economics, sanitation, food-values and æsthetics confront the housewife at every turn of the day's work. "Even a slave need not work as a slave;" and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.
But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief. The housewife, or the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it. Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers.
To the man, family life, of the kind we are considering, brings a vital connection with the past and the future. Reputation, possessions, friends, all become deeply significant when a man becomes a link in the generations of men. In establishing his material home, and modifying it to the changing conditions of the family; in building up a social setting for the group; in projecting his work and his service into the future, he is held to highest standards by the fact that he is working with the partner of his choice, and for interests that are in harmony with the constitution of the universe.
Of the greater physical health of married people there can be no doubt. Statistics all show the greater longevity of married people, and insurance companies recognize it. The celibate type of physical degeneration is so well differentiated that it can generally be recognized even among strangers, at least after forty.[57] On the moral side, too, very few criminals are found among married people.
[57] Arnold Lorand, Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old Age and its Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures. F.A. Davis Co., 1911.
If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even intellectual life may shift to a higher level than was before possible. With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized. The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.
No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the intellectual life as growing up with one's children.
On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods, vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection, undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and libraries—everything that touches the social well-being—touches him vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away. The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the old and the young.
Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom bear them gaily along. Generally better educated than the men of their own class, habituated to a personal expenditure which would correspond with a large family expenditure, their intelligence prevents their falling desperately in love with the men whom they might marry. But in the thirties they have visions of the future which are deeply disturbing; and in the forties they face the tragedy of a lonely old age. Some men and women there must always be whose lives lack the fulfilment of family life because of ill health or the accidents of personal relations. But most women, if they are willing to pay the same price for a significant family life that they so gladly pay for professional success, will find the way open to live all of life. Why is it that women count it an honor to work and starve for an art, but dishonor to undergo privations for their children? All that is here said of women may be said of men, but the man's period of family life is longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely old age with him seems less overwhelming.
The old plea that we must have an army of celibate women because in civilized countries there is a preponderance of females does not hold at present in the United States. The census of 1910 shows an excess of 2,691,678 males in this country. Nor is this entirely due to immigration. More boys than girls are always born in civilized lands; and of native white people born of native parents in the United States there were, in 1910, 25,229,294 males and 24,259,147 females, a difference obviously due to natural causes. New England alone in America has a preponderance of females; and the excess there, as also in England and Germany, is needed all along the frontiers of civilization. With the industrial and social freeing of women now going on, we may reasonably hope that the communities of old maids left behind, through the emigration of young men, will be broken up.
Of course, it will be pointed out that many men and women who do marry fail to realize the ideal presented in these pages. Every form of living is dangerous and not every one can hope to be a successful husband and father or wife and mother. Even devotion to religion furnishes many inmates for insane asylums; athletic contests leave a line of cripples behind them; and railroad disasters fill thousands of graves annually. The institution of marriage has had no such intelligence applied to its improvement during the past years as has been given to perfecting railroads; and since founding a family is a more difficult undertaking than making a journey, one need not be astonished at the number of fatalities. Even if the institution of marriage were as intelligently and carefully brought up to date as railroad systems are, it would still remain dangerous to live either in or out of marriage.
And yet the danger could be greatly reduced by proper education of youth. At present we are educating 10,000,000 girls in the state schools of America, and as many boys. They are spending eight to twelve years, under the direction of celibate women teachers, sharpening their intelligence. Their most important work in life is to be the making of homes, but they are supposed to master this art through imitating the homes in which they grow up. Many of these are unworthy of imitation, and they are all in process of transition.
Every girl should be thoroughly trained in handling an income and in spending money wisely. She should have a general knowledge of household sanitation, of water-supply and sewage, of foods and their preparation. She should know about clothes, their cost, wearing qualities and decorative values. She should have a sense of the family and its significance in life; of at least the social relations that husband and wife must maintain toward each other if their partnership is to be happy and effective. She should have the beginnings of a eugenic conscience established in her, and she should know something of the care of infancy. All this should be given in the school, if it is not definitely given in the home, and no girl who goes through the eighth grade should escape it. Before the girl is married, she should have wise counsel from mature women who have lived and learned the art of living. Boys should, of course, also be trained in comparable directions for this great part of their lives.
Something is already being done in this direction through the establishing of special courses in domestic science, and allied branches in our schools. The fact that educational leaders are awake to the need was shown by the applause that followed Superintendent Harvey's plea for this training in his paper on the education of girls at the Superintendents' Association in St. Louis in February, 1912.[58] The leading educators of the country greeted his plea with an enthusiasm called out by no other paper of the session.
[58] See Report of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association, 1912.
Every woman, then, and every man, not debarred by disease or accident and not specially dedicated to a work which precludes marriage, should spend his life in a family group, not that the state may have more soldiers, or factory employees, but that he may realize the deepest significance of his life. In this life the woman should be as free as the man, an equal financial partner, and should share in all the social and political opportunities of the community. When she bears children, she should have special protection, support and reverence; and support should come from the father of her children. If he fails her, then the group, in its capacity as a state, should care for her honorably. But to justify this protection and reverence, she should bring to her special functions as mother of the generations a strong body, an intelligent mind, a eugenic conscience and an absolute devotion to the children born of her love.
The last two hundred years have revolutionized nearly all of our deepest conceptions concerning the relations of human beings to religion, government, property, and to each other. New knowledge has given us partial control over vast forces of nature; and has so increased our mobility as almost to free us from limitations of space. We have had wonderful visions of the possibilities that lie in intelligent human coöperation, and have begun to realize them in a hundred new forms. In the midst of these compelling changes, women could no more remain undisturbed, within the confines of kitchen and nursery, than men could remain on their little New England farms or cobbling shoes and making tin pans in the petty workshops of a century ago. But meantime the special interests of women have been sadly confused because of the larger changes in which all human relations have been involved in this time of readjustment. Instead of talking of unquiet women to-day, we should talk of an unquiet world.
In the midst of this confusion, most of those who have sought to secure a truer relation of women to the life around them have worked on the lines of minimizing sex differences. It has been felt that the educational, industrial, social and political limitations under which women rested were due to the desire of men to exploit them. Men, being free, had developed for themselves an ideal world of thought and work; and if women wished to be free and happy, they needed only to break down the barriers separating them from this man's world.
Most of these barriers are now down; but the women who study in universities, teach in the schools, maintain offices as doctors or lawyers, collect news for the press, tend spindles in a factory or sell ribbons at a counter have found that the man's world is far from ideal and that by entering it they have not escaped the special limitations of their sex. Everywhere the feeling is abroad that, instead of having arrived at a destination, women have embarked on a journey fraught with many uncertainties.
This volume has been written in the belief that men and women alike will achieve greatest freedom and happiness, not by minimizing sex differences, but by frankly recognizing them and using them. If we could reduce men and women to sameness, we should destroy at least half the values of human life. They are not alike; but they are perfectly supplementary. The unit can never be a man nor a woman; it must always be a man and a woman. This means that in all the activities essential to human development men and women must carefully study to find what each can best provide.
Thus we must some day have a Church, not composed exclusively of male priests and women worshipers, not confined to rationalistic appeal nor to ritualistic observance, but expressing the whole range of human aspiration toward the unknown. Rational men and women of feeling must combine with reverent men and intelligent women to create a belief and a service which will express all the longings of humanity toward perfection.
So in government, we must have a state which will be not only just but merciful; which will concern itself not only with militant economics but also with human well-being. If men are more capable in expressing the katabolic needs of aggression and protection, women must furnish the anabolic products of care and conservation. If women must help pay the bills and nurse the wounded, they must first have a voice in determining whether there shall be a war. Men and women must join their qualities in building and caring for cities, and in shaping nations, where they can both live their largest lives.
In education, we must devise institutions which will provide for the special needs of women; and we must have the combined qualities of men and women brought to bear on children of both sexes, and at all ages. The foster parents of the nation's children must be both men and women. The present attempt to exploit our twenty millions of boys and girls in the interest of a sex will be a crime against humanity when we are intelligent enough to see its real meaning.
The specialization going on in industry means infinite variety if we look at the whole field of activity. Some parts of the world's work are specially fitted for men; other parts to women. No intelligent division of labor has been attempted in the period since all work was transformed by our modern inventions. Possibly men should do most of the dressmaking, and women should make men's clothing, but no intelligent man or woman can doubt that most work falls naturally into the hands of one sex or the other. Some day we shall know enough so that there will be little or no industrial competition between men and women.
It is, however, in the family that both men and women must find their deepest supplementary values. Sex antagonism can do much to impoverish and ruin individual lives; but the monogamic and persistent union of lovers, surrounded by their children, will easily survive all the mistakes of a time of transition. In the meantime, those who would uphold the finest family ideals of the past have less cause to fear the militant agitator than they have to fear the idle, parasitic wife, who relies on her legal rights to give her luxuries without labor, position without leadership, and wifehood without the care and responsibility of children.
From the point of view of this book, all the efforts to open the doors of opportunity, through which women can pass into the man's world, are but preparations for the beginning of a journey. The sooner all such doors are opened the better, for then a great source of dangerous sex antagonism will pass away; and the energy of reformers will be set free to work out the difficult problem of supplementary sex adjustments.
And meantime, sex remains the greatest mystery and the most powerful thing in human life. Its deeper values are lost sight of when men and women are warring over work, wages, and votes, just as the meaning of religion has been lost when priests and laity sought to advance their meanly selfish interests. But in the crises of life it always comes back. When a great ship founders in midocean, and but a third of the people can be saved, there is then no question of woman's rights. In the darkness of early morning, eager men's hands place their women in the life-boats and push them off. The poorest peasant woman takes precedence over any man. Almost every woman there would prefer to stay and die with her man; would glory in staying and dying if he might thus be saved; but in her keeping are the generations of the future, and she is weak, therefore the strong gladly stand back and go down to death. The solution of woman's place in the society of the future must be based on a recognition of the supplementary forces that send women to undesired safety while men die.