Part 6 (1/2)
=Savage Treatment of the Old.=--In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty h.o.a.rd that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting, the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the old.
=The Relation of Ancestor-wors.h.i.+p to Respect for Aged Men.=--Two things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life developed toward civilization. One was ancestor-wors.h.i.+p, which made the father and the grandfather a link, indispensable and therefore honored, in the chain of blood relations.h.i.+p which carried on the generations. This type of religious belief and practice did not, however, work to ease the lot of old women. If the young wife did not have a child, especially a son, she could be repudiated often, and lose her standing in the family relation and hence be subjected to hards.h.i.+ps that made her early old and often ended her life while still in middle age. If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has yet lived who could manage una.s.sisted a group of women, such as legal polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of her children.
=The Position of Chief-mother in Ancient Family.=--These facts often made the position of the chief-mother in a family one of such importance that they became her insurance against want and ill-treatment. The position of the chief-mother in the collective family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to adjust the family system to modern ideas. The father's power is so much a delegated responsibility and the relations.h.i.+p between the lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students in an American university has drawn up include such as the following: ”Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the authority of the mother-in-law?” The mother-in-law in such cases being usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the grandmother-in-law.
=Memory of the Aged Valued in Primitive Life.=--The position of aged men in primitive life secured some advantages because of the dependence upon memory for the carrying on of continued and conscious social existence before literature was born. The aged man who had been an important member of some military order or ”fraternity” and remembered the exact words and motions of a valued ritual could be sure of having his continued life provided for by all those who desired to learn and to retain the means of perpetuating the religious cult thus expressed. Also those who remembered vital tribal occurrences and dealings with other tribes and could rehea.r.s.e the same with exactness must have been considered of social use, and the older they were the more their memory gathered and the more their recital seemed sacred and hence the more the reciter was cherished.
Nothing corresponding to this social value of the aged man, who could make permanent in ritual or in song or in story the experiences of the group, can be traced in the valuation of the experience of the aged woman in the periods before written literature. There were, however, as we can clearly see, traditions and customs, taboos and permitted familiarities so many and varied that old women with good memories and a personality that commanded attention must have had some accepted value within the inner circles of family experience. We get from folk-lore some clear intimations of this prestige and power of the ancient old woman in intimate social relations.h.i.+p.
The power of old men received a great accession when political and religious orders and legal rules began to make social organization more definite and precise. ”Old men for council; young men for war”
had an early meaning. ”The venerable Senate” is not a modern phrase.
The ”reverend father of the church” is an ancient allusion to the respect for and leaders.h.i.+p of the aged in religious circles. The Popes of to-day begin their high service at an age that is in many positions a ”dead line.” The hardening of the social arteries in religion, government, politics, and law, however, while making old men more sure of their place in life, made old women less valued and worse treated.
The ages of mediaeval experience and of the feudal order, until chivalry began to affect the s.e.x-relation, show almost unbelievable cruelty toward many aged women. The idea of the church fathers that women were, at best, a necessary evil and at worst the form most often a.s.sumed by the Devil of temptation, made it seem that all divergence from the purely domestic type was proof of collusion with evil powers.
And all nervous ailments were once deemed a sign of the witches compact with Satan. Hence, since the unmitigated drudgery and the hard conditions of the lives of most women made them not only prematurely old but also given to nervous prostration (before that t.i.tle appeared in the medical lists), the numbers of old women tortured, burned, drowned, beaten, and stoned to death, and otherwise destroyed, seems almost incredible to modern ideas, although so well authenticated in history.
=Old Women and the Witchcraft Delusion.=--The young woman, being necessary for the bearing and rearing of children and the carrying on of important, although despised, labors, might escape active ill treatment. The old woman, old at thirty-five or forty, often, was not only considered a useless burden but a positive nuisance if she were at all ”highstrung” or ”meddling.” Hence the natural conception, in a time of superst.i.tious fear of evil spirits, of her complicity with those spirits made her seem a danger to society. The history of the witchcraft delusion and the cruelties that were a part of that delusion show that aged women almost alone suffered from that nightmare of human ignorance.
Doubtless, however, there were even in those days grandmothers beloved and protected, busy even to the last with caretaking of childhood and the rites of hospitality; grandmothers whom their sons and even their sons-in-law revered for some quality of gentleness and sympathy found useful in family emergencies; grandmothers whose shrewd wisdom of experience and fine gift of understanding made them invaluable members of the family circle. Folk-lore and ancient song give hint of these.
The waste of old age in women, however, is, as has been indicated elsewhere by the writer, the greatest of all social wastes since time began. The idea that women were serviceable only for the procreative function and the hardest drudgery of family service, and that they lost all social value when they ceased to be attractive to the senses of men or ended their personal ministrations to their own little children, long obtained. This idea is responsible for the further conception of old women as not only useless but a disagreeable burden.
Hence, while old men rose during many ages in social regard and protection and care, old women became more and more miserable and ill-treated where the collective family was superseded by the newer type of individualistic bond between one man, one woman, and their children. In the ancient patriarchal and collective family the oldest mother might reign as queen. In the more modern type of family, made the social fas.h.i.+on by what is called Christian civilization, the aged woman, the grandmother, unless exceptionally attractive and sweet-tempered and exceptionally able to help in the household tasks, was the victim of the change from one system to the other. The fact that women, if well-developed and well-treated, are younger at seventy than are men and that more women than men live to be aged than when the conditions of living were less favorable to the weak and delicate, gave early in our civilization what must have seemed far too many old women.
While women had the constant burden of a ”steady job” within the home, harder and more continuous than men had in their handicraft labor, yet men were killed in battle in large numbers, and were physically able to dangerously overdo in some labor ”spurt” and hence more women than men lived to be old. Hence, again, there were far more grandmothers than grandfathers in the family in all mediaeval life. This led to many cruelties to old women who were deemed ”superfluous.” While, however, the actual experience of common people made conditions so hard for grandmothers, the idealism within the religious field was favorable to the mother of any age. The same church fathers who shunned marriage as a cowardly concession to the body, and who wrote flaming animadversions upon women in general, gave the Virgin and Child their adoration and made a place of honor and of comfort to those women who chose the religious vocation outside the home.
=Older Women in Religious Vocations Honored in Middle Ages.=--These women, the Ladies of the Abbeys and the special servitors of the Church, reached the first independent places of distinction which women in Christian civilization attained and to them, at least, age added power and veneration. Hence, even while they ignored their relations.h.i.+p to common womanhood, they often allayed superst.i.tious cruelty toward other old women.
Whenever any subject cla.s.s develops within it a genius or a quality of talent or a specialty of activity that gives personal prestige, that cla.s.s as a whole gains recognition. The Carlisle Indian who beats at the game of football; the Afric-American artist whose works claim admiration; the representative of the backward nation who shows power of achievement formerly supposed to be the sole accomplishment of the conquering peoples, not only makes a place for himself, he opens the door to wider opportunity for his cla.s.s. So the woman of the religious orders, when of scholarly achievement and of commanding intellect, showed these qualities in increasing example as she grew older and more experienced, and so worked to make a place for the older woman in every sphere of life.
Slowly it began to dawn upon the common consciousness that the individualistic family of one young couple and their children needed props from within if it had lost those from without--those ancient props which sustained as well as controlled young fathers and mothers in the collective family. Hence grandmothers, and grandfathers, as well, became of recognized use in the care and upbringing of children.
The picture of the grandmother by the fireside holding the youngest baby and the grandfather coming in with a gift for the young mother, who is manifestly pleased, with the young father in the background delighted at the family welcome for his offspring, is not only old but the theme of many of the world's best-loved paintings and stories.
=To-day Comparatively Few Really Old at Seventy.=--To-day there has come about a wholly new condition in the most advanced centres of social life in respect to the aged. In the first place, there are few ”old” grandmothers left. There are grandmothers, but they are sprightly and give little token of being pa.s.see or laid on the shelf.
There are few old men left. There are those who have pa.s.sed the allotted term of threescore years and ten, but they well know and make all others understand that this was a mistaken limit to human powers.
They look forward to usefulness until eighty, at least, and now are encouraged to feel that one hundred years is the natural span of life.
There are, it is true, few really important studies of how to keep people from growing senile and really old before the time now set for failure of powers. Such studies, however, are prophesied in a small ”endowment for the study of diseases of the aged” already given, and more in the statement of appeals for increase of such endowment. The tendency now is setting strongly not only toward the lengthening of life but toward the lengthening of the mental and physical power that alone makes long life desirable.
We shall see more and more of this interest as medical science reaches out further and further toward lessening all the ills that flesh is heir to.
Meanwhile, what is the actual condition in the various strata of life, in our own country, for example, in respect to the protection, the care, the comfort, the happiness, and the general welfare of the aged?
In the first place, the speeding up of machinery has made many manual workers prematurely old. The worst thing, perhaps, about child-labor has been that, owing to premature ”laying off” of the fathers, the children have been set to earn money for family needs, and have acquired, with their pay envelope, a contempt or disrespect for the father in ways that have reversed the natural relations.h.i.+p and given society much use for the Children's Court. This disrespect shown the father, even when he is only of middle age, pa.s.ses on in increased measure to the grandfather who has been pushed aside from self-support and family support while still comparatively young and has never been able to again catch on to the wheels of industry. The fact that he eats and does not work; that he takes s.p.a.ce in the crowded tenement and does not aid in paying its rent; that he has no light employment that can give his fading mental powers an impulse toward ambition and energy, all make the position of the grandfather in many homes of struggling poverty a most unhappy one. In such homes the grandmother is often still seen to be really useful. She may make it possible for the young mother to earn outside the home. She may, if skilled in sewing, ease the expense of ready-made clothes. She may, at least, and usually does, relieve the mother of much care of the babies. There are several reasons why more aged men are sent to public inst.i.tutions for final care than aged women of the same general type of family, but the most important reason is that most women have skill in domestic matters; and domestic service is needed everywhere, no matter how many unemployed walk the streets. Needed most in the poorest home, the help of the grandmother is often appreciated in inverse ratio to the income.
In the circles above the poverty line there is much variety in the estimation and in the treatment of grandfathers and grandmothers. The ideal picture of a family always has in its background, if not in the very front, an old man and an old woman, benevolent and sweet-natured, who can be depended upon to be more indulgent to the children than even the father or mother and who appear always in family emergencies to renew their youth of service in behalf of the younger generation.
What is thus ideally pictured is a fact in thousands of families. No one can say that it is always best to have three generations under one roof, but all who have had a happy family experience believe that the grandparents should be ”handy by,” to use the Scotch phrase. The grandparents' house in the country is best of all, where all family and national holidays can be celebrated with due form and in accordance with ancient tradition. The grandparents' house for the city children is next best, if in a suburb near by where more s.p.a.ce and independence of movement are possible than in the city residence.
The grandparents' house or apartment in the same or a near-by city is, however, not at all to be despised as a refuge when ”Mother does not understand,” or ”Father is so particular.”
=Is Any House Large Enough for Two Families?=--Although the proverb says, ”No house was yet made large enough for two families,” the residence of one grandparent (oftener the mother than the father) within the family circle has often proved highly successful if only a few rules have been observed. One of these rules is that each adult person shall have one place strictly his of her own. Another is a rule, so difficult for some aged persons of both s.e.xes to obey, namely, that each person married is doubly ent.i.tled to individual choices in action without interference even from parents, since each such married person has to adjust his or her ideas to another person.
To work out full agreement between themselves is all that any married couple should be expected to accomplish. Hence, in the nature of things, the grandparents who are so near the new family that they know and see everything have a far more difficult role to play than do the grandparents who have their own home and simply visit and are visited.