The family in its moral aspects has one end, the common good of all its members, but this has three aspects. (1) Marriage converts an attachment between man and woman, either of passion or of friendship, into a deliberate, intimate, permanent, responsible union for a common end of mutual good. It is this common end, a good of a higher, broader, fuller sort than either could attain in isolation, which lifts passion from the impulsive or selfish to the moral plane; it is the peculiar intimacy and the peculiar demands for common sympathy and co-operation, which give it greater depth and reach than ordinary friendship. (2) The family is the great social agency for the care and training of the race. (3) This function reacts upon the character of the parents. Tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrifice, steadiness of purpose, responsibility, and activity, are all demanded and usually evoked by the children. A brief sketch of the development of the family and of its psychological basis, will prepare the way for a consideration of its present problems.

§ 1. HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTS OF THE MODERN FAMILY

The division of the sexes appeals to the biologist as an agency for securing greater variability, and so greater possibility of adaptation and progress. It has also to the sociologist the value of giving greater variety in function, and so a much richer society than could exist without it. Morally, the realization of these values, and the further effects upon character noted above, depend greatly upon the terms under which the marriage union is formed and maintained. The number of parties to the union, the mode of forming it, its stability, and the relations of husband and wife, parents and children, while in the family relation, have shown in western civilization a tendency toward certain lines of progress, although the movement has been irregular and has been interrupted by certain halts or even reversions.

The Maternal Type.—The early family, certainly in many parts of the world, was formed when a man left his father and mother to "cleave unto his wife," that is, when the woman remained in her own group and the man came from his group to live with her. This tended to give the woman continued protection—and also continued control—by her own relatives, and made the children belong to the mother's clan. As recent ethnologists seem inclined to agree, this does not mean a matriarchal family. The woman's father and brothers, rather than the woman, are in the last analysis the authority. At the same time, at a stage when physical force is so large a factor, this type of family undoubtedly favors the woman's condition as compared with the next to be mentioned.

The Paternal Type.—When the woman leaves her own group to live in the house of her husband, it means a possible loss of backing and position for her. But it means a great gain for the influence which insures the wife's fidelity, the father's authority over the children and interest in them, and finally the permanence of the family. The power of the husband and father reached its extreme among western peoples in the patriarchate at Rome, which allowed him the right of life and death. At its best the patriarchal type of family fostered the dignity and power of a ruler and owner, the sense of honor which watched jealously over self and wife and children to keep the name unsullied; finally the respective attitudes of protector and protected enhanced the charm of each for the other. At its worst it meant domineering brutality, and either the weakness of abject submission or the misery of hopeless injustice.

Along with this building up of "father right" came variations in the mode of gaining a wife. When the man takes a wife instead of going to his wife, he may either capture her, or purchase her, or serve for her. In any of these cases she may become to a certain extent his property as well as his wife. This does not necessarily imply a feeling of humiliation. The Kafir women profess great contempt for a system in which a woman is not worth buying. But it evidently favors a commercial theory of the whole relation. The bride's consent may sometimes be a necessary part of the transaction, but it is not always.

Effects of Father Right.—This family of "father right" is also likely to encourage a theory that the man should have greater freedom in marriage than the woman. In the lowest types of civilization we often find the marital relations very loose from our point of view, although, as was noted in Chapter II., these peoples usually make up for this in the rigidity of the rules as to who may marry or have marriage relations. With some advance in civilization and with the father right, we are very apt to find polygamy permitted to chiefs or those who can afford it, even though the average man may have but one wife. In certain cases the wives may be an economic advantage rather than a burden. It goes along with a family in which father and children are of first importance that a wife may even be glad to have her servant bear the children if they may only be reckoned as hers. The husband has thus greater freedom—for polyandry seems to have been rare among civilized peoples except under stress of poverty. The greater freedom of the husband is likely to appear also in the matter of divorce. Among many savage peoples divorce is easy for both parties if there is mutual consent, but with the families in which father right prevails it is almost always easier for the man. The ancient Hebrew might divorce his wife for any cause he pleased, but there is no mention of a similar right on her part, and it doubtless did not occur to the lawgiver. The code of Hammurabi allows the man to put away the mother of his children by giving her and her children suitable maintenance, or a childless wife by returning the bride price, but a wife who has acted foolishly or extravagantly may be divorced without compensation or kept as a slave. The woman may also claim a divorce "if she has been economical and has no vice and her husband has gone out and greatly belittled her." But if she fails to prove her claim and appears to be a gadder-about, "they shall throw that woman into the water." India and China have the patriarchal family, and the Brahmans added the obligation of the widow never to remarry. Greater freedom of divorce on the part of the husband is also attended by a very different standard for marital faithfulness. For the unfaithful husband there is frequently no penalty or a slight one; for the wife it is frequently death.

The Roman Family.—The modern family in western civilization is the product of three main forces: the Roman law, the Teutonic custom, and the Christian Church. Early Roman law had recognized the extreme power of the husband and father. Wife and children were in his "hand." All women must be in the tutela of some man. The woman, according to the three early forms of marriage, passed completely from the power and hand of her father into that of her husband. At the same time she was the only wife, and divorce was rare. But by the closing years of the Republic a new method of marriage, permitting the woman to remain in the manus of her father, had come into vogue, and with it an easy theory of divorce. Satirists have charged great degeneracy in morals as a result, but Hobhouse thinks that upon the whole the Roman matron would seem to have retained the position of her husband's companion, counselor, and friend, which she had held in those more austere times when marriage brought her legally under his dominion.[249]

The Germanic Family.—The Germanic peoples recognized an almost unlimited power of the husband. The passion for liberty, which CÆsar remarked as prevalent among them, did not seem to require any large measure of freedom for their women. In fact, they, like other peoples, might be said to have satisfied the two principles of freedom and control by allotting all the freedom to the men and all, or nearly all, the control to the women. Hobhouse thus summarizes the conditions:

Two Lines of Church Influence.—The influence of the church on marriage and family life was in two conflicting lines. On the one hand, the homage and adoration given to Mary and to the saints, tended to exalt and refine the conception of woman. Marriage was, moreover, treated as a "sacrament," a holy mystery, symbolic of the relation of Christ and the church. The priestly benediction gave religious sacredness from the beginning; gradually a marriage liturgy sprang up which added to the solemnity of the event, and finally the whole ceremony was made an ecclesiastical instead of a secular function.[250] The whole institution was undoubtedly raised to a more serious and significant position. But, on the other hand, an ascetic stream of influence had pursued a similar course, deepening and widening as it flowed. Although from the beginning those "forbidding to marry" had been denounced, it had nearly always been held that the celibate life was a higher privilege. If marriage was a sacrament, it was nevertheless held that marriage made a man unfit to perform the sacraments. Woman was regarded as the cause of the original sin. Marriage was from this standpoint a concession to human weakness. "The generality of men and women must marry or they will do worse; therefore, marriage must be made easy; but the very pure hold aloof from it as from a defilement. The law that springs from this source is not pleasant to read."[251] It must, however, be noted that, although celibacy by a selective process tended to remove continually the finer, more aspiring men and women, and prevent them from leaving any descendants, it had one important value for woman. The convent was at once a refuge, and a door to activity. "The career open to the inmates of convents was greater than any other ever thrown open to women in the course of modern European history."[252]

Two important contributions to the justice of the marriage relation, and therefore to the better theory of the family, are in any case to be set down to the credit of the church. The first was that the consent of the parties was the only thing necessary to constitute a valid marriage. "Here the church had not only to combat old tradition and the authority of the parents, but also the seignorial power of the feudal lord, and it must be accounted to it for righteousness that it emancipated the woman of the servile as well as of the free classes in relation to the most important event of her life."[253] The other was that in maintaining as it did the indissolubility of the sacramental marriage, it held that its violation was as bad for the husband as for the wife. The older theories had looked at infidelity either as an injury to the husband's property, or as introducing uncertainty as to the parenthood of children, and this survives in Dr. Johnson's dictum of a "boundless" difference. The feelings of the wife, or even of the husband, aside from his concern for his property and children, do not seem to have been considered.

The church thus modified the Germanic and Roman traditions, but never entirely abolished them, because she was divided within herself as to the real place of family life. Protestantism, in its revolt from Rome, opposed both its theories of marriage. On the one hand, the Reformers held that marriage is not a sacrament, but a civil contract, admitting of divorce. On the other hand, they regarded marriage as the most desirable state, and abolished the celibacy of the clergy. The "subjection of women," especially of married women, has, however, remained as the legal theory until very recently. In England it was the theory in Blackstone's time that "The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything." According to the old law, he might give her "moderate correction." "But with us in the politer reign of Charles II., this power of correction began to be doubted." It was not until 1882, however, that a married woman in England gained control of her property. In the United States the old injustice of the common law has been gradually remedied by statutes until substantial equality in relation to property and children has been secured.

§ 2. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF THE FAMILY

The psychology of family life may be conveniently considered under two heads: that of the husband and wife, and that of parents and children, brothers and sisters.

1. The complex sentiment, love, which is found in the most perfect family life, is on the one hand (1) a feeling or emotion; on the other (2) a purpose, a will. Both these are modified and strengthened by (3) parenthood and (4) social and religious influences.

(1) The Emotional and Instinctive Basis.—As feeling or emotion love may have two roots. A mental sympathy, based on kindred tastes and interests, is sometimes present at the outset, but in any case it is likely to develop under the favoring conditions of a common life, particularly if there are either children or a common work. But it is well known that this is not all. A friend is one thing; a lover another. The intimacy involved requires not only the more easily described and superficial attraction of mind for mind; it demands also a deeper congeniality of the whole person, incapable of precise formulation, manifesting itself in the subtler emotional attitudes of instinctive reaction. This instinctive, as contrasted with the more reflective, attraction is frequently described as one of opposites or contrasting dispositions and physical characteristics. But this is nothing that enters into the feeling as a conscious factor. The only explanation which we can give in the present condition of science is the biological one. From the biological point of view it was a most successful venture when Nature, by some happy variation, developed two sexes with slightly different characters and made their union necessary to the continuance of life in certain species. By uniting in every new individual the qualities of two parents, the chances of variation are greatly increased, and variation is the method of progress. To keep the same variety of fruit the horticulturist buds or grafts; to get new varieties he plants seed. The extraordinary progress combined with continuity of type, which has been exhibited in the plant and animal world, has been effected, in part at least, through the agency of sex. This long process has developed certain principles of selection which are instinctive. Whether they are the best possible or not, they represent a certain adjustment which has secured such progress as has been attained, and such adaptation to environment as exists, and it would be unwise, if it were not impossible, to disregard them. Marriages of convenience are certainly questionable from the biological standpoint.

But the instinctive basis is not in and of itself sufficient to guarantee a happy family life. If man were living wholly a life of instinct, he might trust instinct as a guide in establishing his family. But since he is living an intellectual and social life as well, intellectual and social factors must enter. The instinctive basis of selection was fixed by conditions which contemplated only a more or less limited period of attachment, with care of the young for a few years. Modern society requires the husband and wife to contemplate life-long companionship, and a care for children which implies capacity in the father to provide for a great range of advantages, and in the mother to be intellectual and moral guide and friend until maturity. To trust the security of these increased demands to instinct is to invite failure. Instinct must be guided by reason if perfect friendship and mutual supplementation in the whole range of interests are to be added to the intenser, but less certain, attraction.

(2) The Common Will.—But whether based on instinct or intellectual sympathy, no feeling or emotion by itself is an adequate moral basis for the life together of a man and a woman. What was said on p. 249, as to the moral worthlessness of any mere feeling abstracted from will, applies here. Love or affection, in the only sense in which it makes a moral basis of the family, is not the "affection" of psychological language—the pleasant or unpleasant tone of consciousness; it is the resolute purpose in each to seek the other's good, or rather to seek a common good which can be attained only through a common life involving mutual self-sacrifice. It is the good will of Kant specifically directed toward creating a common good. It is the formation of a small "kingdom of ends" in which each treats the other "as end," never as means only; in which each is "both sovereign and subject"; in which the common will, thus created, enhances the person of each and gives it higher moral dignity and worth. And, as in the case of all purpose which has moral value, there is such a common good as the actual result. The disposition and character of both husband and wife are developed and supplemented. The male is biologically the more variable and motor. He has usually greater initiative and strength. Economic and industrial life accentuates these tendencies. But alone he is apt to become rough or hard, to lack the feeling in which the charm and value of life are experienced. On the other hand, the woman, partly by instinct, it may be, but certainly by vocation, is largely occupied with the variety of cares on which human health, comfort, and morality depend. She tends to become narrow, unless supplemented by man. The value of emotion and feeling in relation to this process of mutual aid and enlargement, as in general, is, as Aristotle pointed out, to perfect the will. It gives warmth and vitality to what would otherwise be in any case partial and might easily become insincere. There was a profound truth which underlay the old psychology in which "the heart" meant at once character and passion.

(3) The Influence of Parenthood.—Nature takes one step at a time. If all the possible consequences of family life had to be definitely forecasted, valued, and chosen at the outset, many would shrink. But this would be because there is as yet no capacity to appreciate new values before the actual experience of them. "Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want." Parental affection is not usually present until there are real children to evoke it. At the outset the mutual love of husband and wife is enough. But as the first, more instinctive and emotional factors lose relatively, the deeper union of will and sympathy needs community of interest if it is to become permanent and complete. Such community of interest is often found in sharing a business or a profession, but under present industrial organization this is not possible as a general rule. The most general and effective object of common interest is the children of the family. As pointed out by John Fiske, the mere keeping of the parents together by the prolongation of infancy in the human species has had great moral influence. Present civilization does not merely demand that the parents coÖperate eight or ten years for the child's physical support. There has been a second epoch in the prolongation. The parents now must coÖperate until the children are through school and college, and in business or homes of their own. And the superiority of children over the other common interests is that in a different form the parents repeat the process which first took them out of their individual lives to unite for mutual helpfulness. If the parents treat the children not merely as sources of gratification or pride, but as persons, with lives of their own to live, with capacities to develop, the personality of the parent is enlarged. The affection between husband and wife is enriched by the new relationship it has created.

(4) Social and Religious Factors.—The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, are the most intimate of personal relations, but they are none the less relations of social interest. In fact, just because they are so intimate, society is the more deeply concerned. Or, to put it from the individual's standpoint, just because the parties are undertaking a profoundly personal step, they must take it as members of a moral order. The act of establishing the family signifies, indeed, the entrance into fuller participation in the social life; it is the assuming of ties which make the parties in a new and deeper sense organic parts of humanity. This social and cosmic meaning is appropriately symbolized by the civil and religious ceremony. In its control over the marriage contract, and in its prescriptions as to the care and education of the children, society continues to show its interest. All this lends added value and strength to the emotional and intellectual bases.

2. Parent and Child.—The other relationships in the family, those of parents and children, brothers and sisters, need no elaborate analysis. The love of parents for children, like that of man and woman, has an instinctive basis. Those species which have cared for their offspring have had a great advantage in the struggle for existence. Nature has selected them, and is constantly dropping the strains of any race or set which cares more for power, or wealth, or learning than for children. Tenderness, courage, responsibility, activity, patience, forethought, personal virtue—these are constantly evoked not by the needs of children in general, but by the needs of our own children. The instinctive response, however, is soon broadened in outlook and deepened in meaning. Intellectual activity is stimulated by the needs of providing for the physical welfare, and, still more, by the necessity of planning for the unfolding mind. The interchange of question and answer which forces the parent to think his whole world anew, and which with the allied interchange of imitation and suggestion produces a give and take between all members of the family, is constantly making for fluidity and flexibility, for tolerance and catholicity. In the thoughtful parent these educative influences are still further enriched by the problem of moral training. For in each family, as in the race, the need of eliciting and directing right conduct in the young is one of the most important agencies in bringing home to the elders the significance of custom and authority, of right and wrong. It is natural enough, from one standpoint, to think of childhood as an imperfect state, looking forward for its completeness and getting its value because of its rich promise. But the biologist tells us that the child is nearer the line of progress than the more developed, but also more rigidly set, man. And the lover of children is confident that if any age of humanity exists by its own right, and "pays as it goes," it is childhood. It is not only meet, but a joy, that the fathers labor for the children. Many, if not most, of the objects for which men and women strive and drudge seem less satisfactory when obtained; because we have meanwhile outgrown the desire. Children afford an object of affection which is constantly unfolding new powers, and opening new reaches of personality.[254] Conversely, an authority which is also tender, patient, sympathetic, is the best medium to develop in the child self-control. The necessity of mutual forbearance where there are several children, of sharing fairly, of learning to give and take, is the best possible method of training for membership in the larger society. In fact, from the point of view of the social organism as a whole, the family has two functions; as a smaller group, it affords an opportunity for eliciting the qualities of affection and character which cannot be displayed at all in the larger group; and, in the second place, it is a training for future members of the larger group in those qualities of disposition and character which are essential to citizenship.[255]

§ 3. GENERAL ELEMENTS OF STRAIN IN FAMILY RELATIONS

Difference in Temperament.—While there are intrinsic qualities of men and women that bring them together for family life, and, while there is in most cases a strong reËnforcement afforded by the presence of children, there are certain characteristics which tend just as inevitably to produce tension, and those forces of tension are strengthened at the present time by certain economic, educational, and cultural conditions. The differences between men and women may be at the basis of their instinctive attraction for each other; they certainly have possibilities of friction as well. A fundamental difference already noted is that the male is more variable, the female more true to the type. Biologically at least, the varium et mutabile is applied by the poet to the wrong sex. Applied to the mind and disposition, this means probably not only a greater variation of capacity and temper as a whole,—more geniuses and also more at the other extreme than among women,—but also a greater average mobility.

Differences Accentuated by Occupation.—From the early occupations of hunting and fishing, to the modern greater range of occupations, any native mobility in man has found stimulation and scope, as compared with the energies of women which have less distinct differentiation and a more limited contact with the work of others. And there is another industrial difference closely connected with this, which has been pointed out by Ellis,[256] and Thomas.[257] Primitive man hunted and fought. Much of primitive industry, the prototype, so far as it existed, of the industrial activity of the modern world, was carried on by woman. Industrial progress has been signalized by the splitting off of one phase of woman's work after another, and by the organization and expansion of this at the hands of man. Man's work has thus become more specialized and scientific; woman's has remained more detailed, complex, and diffused. Her work in the family of ordering the household, caring for the children, securing the health and comfort of all its members, necessarily involves personal adjustment; hence it resists system. As a result of the differentiation man has gained in greater and greater degree a scientific and objective standard for his work; woman neither has nor can have—at least in the sphere of personal relations—the advantage of a standard. Business has its ratings in the quantity of sales or the ratio of net profits. The professions and skilled trades have their own tests of achievement. A scientist makes his discovery, a lawyer wins his case, an architect builds his bridge, the mechanic his machine; he knows whether he has done a good piece of work, and respects himself accordingly. He can appeal from the man next to him to the judgment of his profession. Conversely, the standard of the trade or profession helps to lift the individual's work. It is a constant stimulus, as well as support. A woman's work in the family has no such professional stimulus, or professional vindication. If the family is lenient, the work is not held up to a high level. On the other hand, it must make its appeal to the persons immediately concerned, and if they do not respond, the woman feels that she has failed to do something really worth while. If her work is not valued, she feels that it is not valuable. For there is no demonstrative proof of a successful home any more than there is of a good work of art. It is easy enough to point out reasons why the picture or the home should please and satisfy, but if the work itself is not convincing, no demonstration that similar works have satisfied is of any avail.

The way in which men and women come into contact with others is another element in the case. Man comes into contact with others for the most part in an abstract way. He deals not with men, women, and children, but with employers or employed, with customers or clients, or patients. He doesn't have to stand them in all their varied phases, or enter into those intimate relations which involve strain of adjustment in its fullest extent. Moreover, business or professional manner and etiquette come in to relieve the necessity of personal effort. The "professional manner" serves the same function in dealing with others, which habit plays in the individual life; it takes the place of continual readjustment of attention. When a man is forced to lay this aside and deal in any serious situation as "a human being," he feels a far greater strain. The woman's task is less in extension, but great in intension. It obliges her to deal with the children, at any rate, as wholes, and a "whole" child is a good deal of a strain. If she does not see the whole of the husband, it is quite likely that the part not brought home—the professional or business part of him—is the most alert, intelligent, and interesting phase. The constant close-at-hand personal relations, unrelieved by the abstract impersonal attitude and the generalizing activity which it invites, constitute an element of strain which few men understand, and which probably few could endure and possess their souls. The present division of labor seems, therefore, to make the man excessively abstract, the woman excessively personal, instead of supplementing to some extent the weak side of each.

Difference in Attitude toward the Family.—As if these differences in attitude based on disposition and occupation were not enough, we have a thoroughgoing difference in the attitude of men and women toward the very institution which invites them. The man is ready enough to assent to the importance of the family for the race, but his family means not an interference with other ambitions, but usually an aid to their fulfillment. His family is one interest among several, and is very likely subordinate in his thought to his profession or his business. In early ages to rove or conquer, in modern life to master nature and control her resources or his fellowmen—this has been the insistent instinct which urges even the long-tossed Ulysses from Ithaca and from Penelope again upon the deep. Woman, on the other hand, if she enters a family, usually abandons any other ambition and forgets any acquired art or skill of her previous occupation. To be the mistress of a home may be precisely what she would choose as a vocation. But there is usually no alternative if she is to have a home at all. It is not a question of a family in addition to a vocation, but of a family as a vocation. Hence woman must regard family life not merely as a good; it must be the good, and usually the exclusive good.

If, then, a woman has accepted the family as the supreme good, it is naturally hard to be in perfect sympathy with the man's standard of family life as secondary. Of course a completer vision may find that a division of labor, a difference of function, may carry with it a difference in standards of value; the mastery of nature and the maintenance of the family may be neither an absolute good in itself, but each a necessity to life and progress. But neither man nor woman is always equal to this view, and to the full sympathy for the relative value of the other's standpoint. Where it cuts closest is in the attitude toward breach of faith in the family tie. Men have severe codes for the man who cheats at cards or forges a signature, but treat much more leniently, or entirely ignore, the gravest offenses against the family. These latter do not seem to form a barrier to political, business, or social success (among men). Women have a severe standard for family sanctity, especially for their own sex. But it would probably be difficult to convince most women that it is a more heinous offense to secrete a card, or even with Nora in The Doll's House, to forge a name, than to be unfaithful. It is not meant that the average man or woman approves either form of wrongdoing, but that there is a difference of emphasis evidenced in the public attitude. In view of all these differences in nature, occupation, and social standard it may be said that however well husband and wife may love each other, few understand each other completely. Perhaps most men do not understand women at all. Corresponding to the "psychologist's fallacy," whose evils have been depicted by James, there is a "masculine fallacy" and a "feminine fallacy."

Difference in Age.—The difference in age between parents and children brings certain inevitable hindrances to complete understanding. The most thoroughgoing is that parent and children really stand concretely for the two factors of continuity and individual variation which confront each other in so many forms. The parent has found his place in the social system, and is both steadied and to some extent made rigid by the social tradition. The child, though to some extent imitating and adopting this tradition, has as yet little reasoned adherence to it. The impulses and expanding life do not find full expression in the set ways already open, and occasionally break out new channels. The conservatism of the parent may be a wiser and more social, or merely a more hardened and narrow, mode of conduct; some of the child's variations may be irrational and pernicious to himself and society; others may promise a larger reasonableness, a more generous social order—but meanwhile certain features of the conflict between reason and impulse, order and change, are constantly appearing. Differences in valuation are also inevitable and can be bridged only by an intelligent sympathy. It is easy to consider this or that to be of slight importance to the child when it is really his whole world for the time. Even if he does "get over it," the effect on the disposition may remain, and affect the temper or emotional life, even though not consciously remembered. Probably, also, most parents do not realize how early a crude but sometimes even passionate sense for "fairness" develops, or how different the relative setting of an act appears if judged from the motives actually operative with the child, and not from those which might produce such an act in a "grown-up." Most parents and children love each other; few reach a complete understanding.

§ 4. SPECIAL CONDITIONS WHICH GIVE RISE TO PRESENT PROBLEMS

In addition to the more general conditions of family life, there are certain conditions at present operative which give rise to special problems, or rather emphasize certain aspects of the permanent problems. The family is quite analogous to political society. There needs to be constant readjustment between order and progress, between the control of the society and the freedom of the individual. The earlier bonds of custom or force have to be exchanged in point after point for a more voluntary and moral order. In the words of Kant, heteronomy must steadily give place to autonomy, subordination of rank or status to division of labor with equality in dignity. The elements of strain in the family life at present may fairly be expected to give rise ultimately to a better constitution of its relations. The special conditions are partly economic, partly educational and political, but the general process is a part of the larger growth of modern civilization with the increasing development of individuality and desire for freedom. It is sometimes treated as if it affected only the woman or the children; in reality it affects the man as well, though in less degree, as his was not the subordinate position.

The Economic Factors.—The "industrial revolution" transferred production from home to factory. The household is no longer as a rule an industrial unit. Spinning, weaving, tailoring, shoemaking, soap-making, iron- and wood-working, and other trades have gone to factories. Men, young unmarried women, and to some extent married women also, have gone with them. Children have lost association with one parent, and in some cases with both. The concentration of industry and business leads to cities. Under present means of transportation this means apartments instead of houses, it means less freedom, more strain, for both mother and children, and possible deteriorating effects upon the race which as yet are quite outside any calculation. But leaving this uncertain field of effects upon child life, we notice certain potent effects upon men and women.

It might be a difficult question to decide the exact gains and losses for family life due to the absence of the man from home during the day. On the one hand, too constant association is a source of friction; on the other, there is likely to result some loss of sympathy, and where the working-day is long, an almost absolute loss of contact with children. If children are the great natural agencies for cultivating tenderness and affection, it is certainly unfortunate that fathers should be deprived of this education. The effect of the industrial revolution upon women has been widely noted. First of all, the opening of an increasing number of occupations to women has rendered them economically more independent. They are not forced to the alternative of marriage or dependence upon relatives. If already married, even although they may have lost touch to some extent with their former occupation, they do not feel the same compulsion to endure intolerable conditions in the home rather than again attempt self-support. An incidental effect of the entrance of women upon organized occupations, with definite hours and impersonal standards, is to bring out more strongly by contrast the "belated" condition of domestic work. It is difficult to obtain skilled workers for an occupation requiring nearly double the standard number of hours, isolation instead of companionship during work, close personal contact with an employer, a measure of control over conduct outside of the hours on duty, and finally the social inferiority implied by an occupation which has in it survivals of the status of the old-time servant. Indeed, the mistress of the house, if she "does her own work," doesn't altogether like her situation. There is now no one general occupation which all men are expected to master irrespective of native tastes and abilities. If every male were obliged to make not only his own clothing, including head- and foot-wear, but that of his whole family, unassisted, or with practically unskilled labor, there would probably be as much misfit clothing as there is now unsatisfactory home-making, and possibly there would be an increase of irritability and "nervousness" on the one side and of criticism or desertion on the other, which would increase the present strain upon the divorce courts. To an increasing number of women, the position of being "jack-at-all-trades and master-of-none" is irritating. The conviction that there is a great waste of effort without satisfactory results is more wearing than the actual doing of the work.

For the minority of women who do not "keep house," or who can be relieved entirely of domestic work by experts, the industrial revolution has a different series of possibilities. If there is a decided talent which has received adequate cultivation, there may be an opportunity for its exercise without serious interference with family life, but the chances are against it. If the woman cannot leave her home for the entire day, or if her husband regards a gainful occupation on her part as a reflection upon his ability to "support the family," she is practically shut out from any occupation. If she has children and has an intelligent as well as an emotional interest in their welfare, there is an unlimited field for scientific development. But if she has no regular useful occupation, she is not leading a normal life. Her husband very likely cannot understand why she should not, in the words of Veblen, perform "vicarious leisure" for him, and be satisfied therewith. If she is satisfied, so much the worse. Whether she is satisfied or not, she is certainly not likely to grow mentally or morally in such an existence, and the family life will not be helped by stagnation or frivolity.

In certain classes of society there is one economic feature which is probably responsible for many petty annoyances and in some cases for real degradation of spirit. When the family was an industrial unit, when exchange was largely in barter, it was natural to think of the woman as a joint agent in production. When the production moved to factories and the wage or the wealth was paid to the man and could be kept in his pocket or his check-book, it became easy for him to think of himself as "supporting" the family, to permit himself to be "asked" for money for household expenses or even for the wife's personal expenses, and to consider money used in these ways as "gifts" to his wife or children. Women have more or less resistingly acquiesced in this humiliating conception, which is fatal to a real moral relation as well as to happiness. It is as absurd a conception as it would be to consider the receiving teller in a bank as supporting the bank, or the manager of a factory as supporting all the workmen. The end of the family is not economic profit, but mutual aid, and the continuance and progress of the race. A division of labor does not give superiority and inferiority. When one considers which party incurs the greater risks, and which works with greater singleness and sincerity for the family, it must pass as one of the extraordinary superstitions that the theory of economic dependence should have gained vogue.

Cultural and Political Factors.—Educational, cultural, and political movements reËnforce the growing sense of individuality. Educational and cultural advance strengthens the demand that woman's life shall have as serious a purpose as man's, and that in carrying on her work, whether in the family or without, she may have some share in the grasp of mind, the discipline of character, and the freedom of spirit which come from the scientific spirit, and from the intelligent, efficient organization of work by scientific methods. Political democracy draws increasing attention to personal dignity, irrespective of rank or wealth. Increasing legal rights have been granted to women until in most points they are now equal before the law, although the important exception of suffrage still remains for the most part. Under these conditions it is increasingly difficult to maintain a family union on any other basis than that of equal freedom, equal responsibilities, equal dignity and authority. It will probably be found that most of the tension now especially felt in family life—aside from those cases of maladaptation liable to occur under any system—results either from lack of recognition of this equality, or from the more general economic conditions which society as a whole, rather than any particular family, must meet and change.

§ 5. UNSETTLED PROBLEMS: (1) ECONOMIC

The family as an economic unit includes the relation of its members to society both as producers and as consumers.

The Family and Production.—We have noted the industrial changes which have seemed to draw the issue sharply between the home and outside occupations. We have seen that the present organization of industry, business, and the professions has separated most of the occupations from the family, so that woman must choose between family and a specific occupation, but cannot ordinarily combine the two. We have said that in requiring all its women to do the same thing the family seems to exclude them from individual pursuits adapted to their talents, and to exclude them likewise from the whole scientific and technical proficiency of modern life. Is this an inevitable dilemma? Those who think it is divide into two parties, which accept respectively the opposite horns. The one party infers that the social division of labor must be: man to carry on all occupations outside the family, woman to work always within the family. The other party infers that the family life must give way to the industrial tendency.

(1) The "domestic theory," or as Mrs. Bosanquet styles it, the "pseudo-domestic" theory, is held sincerely by many earnest friends of the family in both sexes. They feel strongly the fundamental necessity of family life. They believe further that they are not seeking to subordinate woman to the necessities of the race, but rather to give her a unique position of dignity and affection. In outside occupations she must usually be at a disadvantage in competition with men, because of her physical constitution which Nature has specialized for a different function. In the family she "reigns supreme." With most women life is not satisfied, experience is not full, complete consciousness of sex and individuality is not attained, until they have dared to enter upon the full family relations. Let these be preserved not merely for the race, but especially for woman's own sake. Further, it is urged, when woman enters competitive occupations outside the home, she lowers the scale of wages. This makes it harder for men to support families, and therefore more reluctant to establish them. Riehl urges that not only should married women remain at home; unmarried women should play the part of "aunt" in some one's household—he says alte Tante, but it is not necessary to load the theory too heavily with the adjective.

(2) The other horn of the dilemma is accepted by many writers, especially among socialists. These writers assume that the family necessarily involves not only an exclusively domestic life for all women, but also their economic dependence. They believe this dependence to be not merely a survival of barbarism, but an actual immorality in its exchange of sex attraction for economic support. Hence they would abandon the family or greatly modify it. It must no longer be "coercive"; it will be coercive under present conditions.

Fallacies in the Dilemma.—Each of these positions involves a fallacy which releases us from the necessity of choosing between them. The root of the fallacy in each case is the conception that the economic status determines the moral end, whereas the moral end ought to determine the economic status.

The fallacy of the pseudo-domestic theory lies in supposing that the home must continue its old economic form or be destroyed. What is essential to the family is that man and wife, parents and children, should live in such close and intimate relation that they may be mutually helpful. But it is not essential that present methods of house construction, domestic service, and the whole industrial side of home life be maintained immutable. There is one fundamental division of labor between men and women. The woman who takes marriage at its full scope accepts this. "The lines which it follows are drawn not so much by the woman's inability to work for her family in the outside world—she constantly does so when the death or illness of her husband throws the double burden upon her; but from the obvious fact that the man is incapable of the more domestic duties incident upon the rearing of children."[258] But this does not involve the total life of a woman, nor does it imply that to be a good wife and mother every woman must under all possible advances of industry continue to be cook, seamstress, housemaid, and the rest. True it is that if a woman steps out of her profession or trade for five, ten, twenty years, it is in many cases difficult to reËnter. But there are some occupations where total absence is not necessary. There are others where her added experience ought to be an asset instead of a handicap. A mother who has been well trained ought to be a far more effective teacher in her wholesome and intelligent influence. She ought to be a more efficient manager or worker in the great variety of civic and social enterprises of both paid and unpaid character. There is no doubt that the present educational and social order is suffering because deprived of the competent service which many married women might render, just as women in their turn are suffering for want of congenial occupation, suited to their capacities and individual tastes. A growing freedom in economic pursuit would improve the home, not injure it. For nothing that interferes with normal development is likely to prove beneficial to the family's highest interest.

The fallacy of those who would abolish the family to emancipate woman from economic dependence is in supposing that because the woman is not engaged in a gainful occupation she is therefore being supported by the man for his own pleasure. This is to adopt the absurd assumptions of the very condition they denounce. This theory at most, applies to a marriage which is conceived from an entirely selfish and commercial point of view. If a man marries for his own pleasure and is willing to pay a cash price; if a woman marries for cash or support and is willing to pay the price, there is no doubt as to the proper term for such a transaction. The result is not a family in the moral sense, and no ceremonies or legal forms can make it moral. A family in the moral sense exists for a common good, not for selfish use of others. To secure this common good each member contributes a part. If both husband and wife carry on gainful occupations, well; if one is occupied outside the home and the other within, well also. If there are children, the woman is likely to have the far more difficult and wearing half of the common labor. Which plan is followed, i.e., whether the woman works outside or within the home, ought to depend on which plan is better on the whole for all concerned, and this will depend largely on the woman's own ability and tastes, and upon the number and age of the children. But the economic relation is not the essential thing. The essential thing is that the economic be held entirely subordinate to the moral conception, before marriage and after.

The Family as Consumer.—The relation of the family as consumer to society and to the economic process at large involves also an important moral problem. For while production has been taken from the home, the selective influence of the family over production through its direction of consumption has proportionally increased. And in this field the woman of the family is and should be the controlling factor. As yet only the internal aspects have been considered. Most women regard it as their duty to buy economically, to secure healthful food, and make their funds go as far as possible. But the moral responsibility does not stop here. The consumer may have an influence in helping to secure better conditions of production, such as sanitary workshops, reasonable hours, decent wages, by a "white label." But this is chiefly valuable in forming public opinion to demand workrooms free from disease and legal abolition of sweatshops and child labor. The greater field for the consumers' control is in determining the kind of goods that shall be produced. What foods shall be produced, what books written, what plays presented, what clothing made, what houses and what furnishing shall be provided—all this may be largely determined by the consumers. And the value of simplicity, utility, and genuineness, is not limited to the effects upon the family which consumes. The workman who makes fraudulent goods can hardly help being injured. The economic waste involved in the production of what satisfies no permanent or real want is a serious indictment of our present civilization. It was said, under the subject of the economic process, that it was an ethically desirable end to have increase of goods, and of the kind wanted. We may now add a third end: it is important that society should learn to want the kinds of goods which give happiness and not merely crude gratification. Men often need most what they want least. Not only the happiness of life but its progress, its unfolding of new capacities and interests, is determined largely by the direction of the consumption. Woman is here the influential factor.

If there were no other reason for the better and wider education of woman than the desirability of more intelligent consumption, society would have ample ground to demand it.

§ 6. UNSETTLED PROBLEMS: (2) POLITICAL

The family may be regarded as a political unit, first in its implication of some control of the members by the common end, and in the second place in its relation to the authority of the State.

1. Authority within the Family.—If the political character of the family were kept clearly in mind, the internal relations of the members of the family would be on a far more moral basis and there would be less reason for friction or personal clashes. If there is a group of persons which is to act as a unity, there must be some leadership and control. In many cases there will be a common conviction as to the fittest person to lead or direct, but where the group is a permanent one with frequent occasions for divergent interests, unity has been maintained either by force or by some agency regarded by the people as embodying their common will. In the earliest forms of society this, as we have seen, was not clearly distinguished from personal and individual command. But as the conception of the political worked free from that of the personal agent, it could be recognized more and more that the ruler was not the man—not Henry or William,—but the King or the Parliament, as representing the nation. Then government became a more consciously moral act. Obedience was not humiliating, because the members were sovereign as well as subject. It was not heteronomy but autonomy. In the family the personal relation is so close that this easily overshadows the fact that there is also a family relation of a political sort. The man in the patriarchal family, and since, has exercised, or has had the legal right to exercise authority. And with the legal theory of inequality to support him it is not strange that he should often have conceived that obedience was due to him as a person, and not to him as, in certain cases, best representing the joint purpose of the family, just as in other cases the woman best represents this same purpose.

Equality or Inequality.—But even when there had been recognition of a more than personal attitude the question would at once arise, are the members of a family to be considered as of equal or unequal importance? The answer until recently has been unequivocal. In spite of such apparent exceptions as chivalry, and the court paid to beauty or wit, or the honor accorded to individual wives and mothers, woman has seldom been taken seriously in the laws and institutions of society. Opportunities for education and full participation in the thought and life of civilization are very recent. Public school education for girls is scarcely a century old. College education for women, in a general sense, is of the present generation. But the conviction has steadily gained that democracy cannot treat half the race as inferior in dignity, or exclude it from the comradeship of life. Under primitive society a man was primarily a member of a group or caste, and only secondarily a person. A woman has been in this situation as regards her sex. She is now asserting a claim to be considered primarily as a person, rather than as a woman. This general movement, like the economic movement, has seemed to affect the attitude of unmarried women, and to a less degree, of men, toward marriage, and to involve an instability of the family tie. The question is then this: does the family necessarily involve inequality, or can it be maintained on a basis of equality? Or to put the same thing from another angle: if the family and the modern movement toward equality are at variance, which ought to give way?

The "pseudo-domestic" theory on this point is suggested by its general position on the economic relations of the family as already stated. It believes that the family must be maintained as a distinct sphere of life, coÖrdinate in importance for social welfare with the intellectual, artistic, and economic spheres. It holds, further, that the family can be maintained in this position only if it be kept as a unique controlling influence in woman's life, isolated from other spheres. This of course involves an exclusion of woman from a portion of the intellectual and political life, and therefore an inferiority of development, even if there is not an inferiority of capacity. Some of this school have maintained that in America the rapid advance in education and intelligence among women has rendered them so superior to the average man who has to leave school for business at an early age that they are unwilling to marry. A German alliterative definition of woman's "sphere" has been found in "the four K's"—Kirche, Kinder, KÜche, und Kleider.

If the permanence of the family rests on the maintenance of a relation of inferiority, it is indeed in a perilous state. All the social and political forces are making toward equality, and from the moral standpoint it is impossible successfully to deny Mill's classic statement, "The only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals." But some of the advocates of equality have accepted the same fallacious separation between the family and modern culture. They have assumed that the family life must continue to be unscientific in its methods, and meager in its interests. Some women—like some men—undoubtedly place a higher value on book learning, musical and dramatic entertainment, and other by-products of modern civilization than on the elemental human sympathies and powers which these should serve to enrich. It is too easily granted that the opportunity and duty of woman as wife and mother are limited to a purely unscientific provision for physical wants to the exclusion of scientific methods, intellectual comradeship, and effective grappling with moral problems.

Isolation Not the Solution.—The solution for the present unrest is therefore to be found not in forcing the separation between the family on the one hand and the intellectual, political, and other aspects of civilization on the other, but in a mutual permeation. They think very lightly of the elemental strength of sex and parental instincts who suppose that these are to be overslaughed in any great portion of the race by cultural interests. And it is to ignore the history of political progress to suppose that organic relations founded on equality and democracy are less stable than those resting on superiority and subordination. The fact is that there is no part of life so much in need of all that modern science can give, and no field for intellectual penetration and technological organization so great as the family. Correlative with its control over economic processes through its position as consumer, is its influence over social, educational, and political life, through its relation to the children who are constantly renewing the structure. To fulfill the possibilities and even the duties of family life under modern conditions requires both scientific training and civic activity. Provisions for health and instruction and proper social life in school, provisions for parks and good municipal housekeeping, for public health and public morals,—these demand the intelligent interest of the parent and have in most cases their natural motive in the family necessities. A theory of the family which would limit the parent, especially the mother, to "the home" needs first to define the limits of "the home." To measure its responsibilities by the limit of the street door is as absurd as to suppose that the sphere of justice is limited by the walls of the courtroom. A broader education for women is certainly justified by precisely this larger meaning of the care of children and of the family interests. The things of greatest importance to human life have scarcely been touched as yet by science. We know more about astrophysics than about health and disease; more about waste in steam power than about waste in foods, or in education; more about classical archÆology than about the actual causes of poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, and childlessness, the chief enemies of home life. In the light of the actual possibilities and needs of family life two positions seem equally absurd: the one that family life can be preserved best by isolating it, and particularly its women, from culture; the other, that it does not afford an opportunity for a full life. Neither of these errors can be corrected apart from the other. It is in the mutual permeation and interaction of the respective spheres of family and cultural life, not in their isolation, that the family is to be strengthened. Here, as in the economic field, no one family can succeed entirely by itself. The problem is largely a social one. But every family which is free and yet united, which shows comradeship as well as mutual devotion, is forcing the issue and preparing the way for the more perfect family of the future.

2. Authority over the Family: Divorce.—The strains which have been noticed in the foregoing paragraphs have centered public attention on the outward symptoms of unrest and maladaptation. Current discussions of family problems are likely to turn largely upon the increase of divorce. For the reasons which have been given there has doubtless been increasing tendency to seek divorce, and this may continue until more stable conditions are reached. Now that the authority of the church is less implicitly accepted, individuals are thrown back upon their own voluntary controls, and whether marriages are arranged by parents as in France, or formed almost solely on the initiative and unguided will of the parties as in America, the result is much the same. Two classes of persons seek divorce. Those of individualistic temperament, who have formed the marriage for selfish ends or in frivolous moments, are likely to find its constraints irksome when the expected happiness fails to be realized and the charm of novelty is past. This is simply one type of immoral conduct which may be somewhat checked by public opinion or legal restraint, but can be overcome only by a more serious and social attitude toward all life. The other class finds in the bond itself, under certain conditions, a seemingly fatal obstacle to the very purpose which it was designed to promote: unfaithfulness, cruelty, habitual intoxication, and other less coarse, but equally effective modes of behavior may be destructive of the common life and morally injurious to the children. Or alienation of spirit may leave external companionship empty of moral unity and value, if not positively opposed to self-respect. This class is evidently actuated by sincere motives. How far society may be justified in permitting dissolution of the family under these conditions, and how far it may properly insist on some personal sacrifice for the sake of larger social ends is simply another form of the problem which we considered in the economic field—the antithesis between individual rights and public welfare. The solution in each case cannot be reached by any external rule. It will be found only in the gradual socializing of the individual on the one hand, and in the correlative development of society to the point where it respects all its members and makes greater freedom possible for them on the other. Meanwhile it must not be overlooked that the very conception of permanence in the union, upheld by the state, is itself effective toward thoughtful and well-considered action after as well as before marriage. Some causes of friction may be removed, some tendencies to alienation may be suppressed, if the situation is resolutely faced from the standpoint of a larger social interest rather than from that of momentary or private concern.

General Law of Social Health.—Divorce is a symptom rather than a disease. The main reliance in cases of family pathology, as for the diseases of the industrial and economic system, is along the lines which modern science is pursuing in the field of medicine. It is isolating certain specific organisms which invade the system under favorable circumstances and disturb its equilibrium. But it finds that the best, and in fact the only ultimate protection against disease is in the general "resisting power" of the living process. This power may be temporarily aided by stimulation or surgery, but the ultimate source of its renewal is found in the steady rebuilding of new structures to replace the old stagnation; the retention of broken-down tissues means weakness and danger. The social organism does not escape this law. Science will succeed in pointing out the specific causes for many of the moral evils from which we suffer. Poverty, crime, social injustice, breaking down of the family, political corruption, are not all to be accepted simply as "evils" or "wickedness" in general. In many cases their amount may be greatly reduced when we understand their specific causes and apply a specific remedy. But the great reliance is upon the primal forces which have brought mankind so far along the line of advance. The constant remaking of values in the search for the genuinely satisfying, the constant forming, criticizing, and reshaping of ideals, the reverence for a larger law of life and a more than individual moral order, the outgoing of sympathy and love, the demand for justice—all these are the forces which have built our present social system, and these must continually reshape it into more adequate expressions of genuine moral life if it is to continue unimpaired or in greater vigor.

We do not know in any full sense whence the life of the spirit comes, and we cannot, while standing upon the platform of ethics, predict its future. But if our study has shown anything, it is that the moral is a life, not a something ready made and complete once for all. It is instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it to higher levels. Ethical science tracing this process of growth, has as its aim not to create life—for the life is present already,—but to discover its laws and principles. And this should aid in making its further advance stronger, freer, and more assured because more intelligent.