Part 9 (1/2)

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 pa.s.sion 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 partners.h.i.+p. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Was.h.i.+ngton led the country with 184 divorces for each 100,000 of population. For the whole country we averaged 73 per 100,000 of population. j.a.pan 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 advent.i.tious 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 prost.i.tution, 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 pa.s.s 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.

X

Family Life as a Vocation

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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.e.xual pa.s.sion 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 partic.i.p.ate in it rich. It is so in all real relations between these half-creatures we call men and women. In agreement, a.s.sociation and cooperation lies strong and significant life for both. In antagonism, separation and compet.i.tion 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 inst.i.tutions 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.