Part 8 (2/2)
A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in the inflexibility of the inst.i.tution of the family, under which lovers are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of mediaeval disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism, culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.
They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might wors.h.i.+p in peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of men and women who wished to live together and rear children.
But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords; even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat down the older political inst.i.tutions with their swords. Finally the movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the industrial inst.i.tution which shall give us freedom and security in our work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious ways into religious freedom where men can wors.h.i.+p as they will.
Of all these older inst.i.tutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this inst.i.tution and strengthened its resisting power. The church increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the family and made it the standard for respectability.
Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible to students of inst.i.tutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage between a broken-down old n.o.ble and a young and inexperienced girl of seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148 feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]
[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. G.o.dDARD, New York: Macmillan Company, 1912.
Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence, her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order for legalized rape, under the name of rest.i.tution of marital rights?
Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women are trying to live their lives in spite of this mediaeval inst.i.tution. So far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.
Our own att.i.tude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President Eliot has called ”the conspiracy of silence touching matters of s.e.x”
must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with Ellen Key that ”In love humanity has found the form of selection most conducive to the enn.o.blement of the species.”[51]
[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 uns.e.xed.[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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s which combined with the peasants to overthrow the older privileges; and now all cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.s of wives has grown up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers did in political life, and these emanc.i.p.ated 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 a.n.a.logy is mischievous. The a.s.sumption 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 a.s.sumption of physical and mental difference, but there was and must always be the infinite difference of s.e.x. 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 s.e.x 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 a.n.a.logy. 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 inst.i.tution 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. s.e.x 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.
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