CHAP. XLIX

The
Supreme
Question

is the Fu-
ture of
Durable

Monogamy

Expansion of Wom

ing Opportunities Outside

in respect to the production of the social traits of character, so that society has good reason to treat it as a social institution rather than a personal concern.

ECONOMIC CHANGES AFFECTING THE FAMILY

There is hardly an imaginable form of sex relation or of parentchild relation which has not prevailed somewhere in the world sometime. Nevertheless, the queer and even (to us) shocking forms which crop up here and there in the childhood of peoples have no significance for the future. Over most of the world the durable monogamic family has triumphed, so that the real question is, What modifications is monogamy undergoing, or likely to undergo? Since the middle of the last century the family, which appeared to have reached its fixed and final form, has been played upon by so many transforming forces that it has become an active mutant. The machine in the factory has filched from the home most of the industrial processes — spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, brewing, pickling, curing and preserving — which made the wife nearly equal with her husband as a prop to the prosperity of the household. One result is a growing economic dependence of the home-staying wife which makes her discontented with the slowly-narrowing round of domestic duties. If, on the other hand, the wife engages in paid work outside the home, the unity of the family is apt to suffer.

Thanks to the march of invention, the volume of light-running an's Earn- machinery has become so great that industry offers an illimitable field for the employment of girls and women. On account of being able to accept a lower wage than the man, especially the man of family, requires, they are continually substituted for men in the industrial field and rarely experience lack of employment. With more than ten million females above sixteen years of age earning outside the home, women's participation in industry is momentous enough; but it is access to industry, even more than participation, which reacts upon the family. The open door to self-support lessens woman's interest in the protected economic position of the wife. She is harder to win and harder to keep than when matrimony was the sole career open to her.

City Life
Tells
Against
Domes-

ticity

The engulfing of population in the maw of cities is unfavorable to the family institution. On the farm the family is the convenient unit for life and work; in the city, however, celibacy is

made easy and comfortable, while the couple with small children can scarcely find shelter. The working members of the city family are rarely at the same task, while the worker who lives remote from his job may never see his children awake save on Sundays and holidays.

SPIRITUAL CHANGES AFFECTING THE FAMILY

After all, however, these changes are external. They remove some of the hoops which once helped bind the members of the family together, but they leave untouched the ties of affection and loyalty uniting its members. More serious are certain spiritual changes which attack the family from the inside and work against its success and stability.

One of these is the decay of religious belief. Fraternal religion is stronger than ever among us, but fewer people are willing to bear conjugal unhappiness because they believe it to be God's will. For myriads the religious sanction to marriage has crumbled away, leaving it a galling yoke if they are not well-mated.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century the reigning social philosophy in America was individualistic. In the field of domestic relations this implies: absolute freedom of matrimonial choice; mating in obedience to romantic love; marriage the opening of the door to "wedded bliss "; rights uppermost in the mind rather than duties; and slight appreciation of the significance of the family for racial and social welfare.

СНАР.

XLIX

The Faming its Religious Sanction

ily is Los

Individual.

ism Works

Havoc in the Family

Formerly the unity and stability of the family were achieved, Feminism not by equal sacrifices of the spouses, but chiefly by the sacrifice of the wife's wishes and personality. This is what one sees still in Central Europe and South America and even more in China. Now the education and mental emancipation of women results in the husband being called upon to bear his share of the sacrifices domestic harmony requires; but often he, bred to a belief in the superior worth of the male, refuses. Among Americans two Contendideals of the family struggle for mastery - the semi-patriarchal of Marfamily, of Roman origin and ecclesiastical sanction, based on the authority of the husband and the merging of the wife's legal personality in his, and the democratic family of Germanic origin based on the consenting and harmonious wills of two equals. In proportion as women escape from abject mental dependence on men and find a point of view of their own, they spurn patriarchal

ing Ideals

riage

СНАР.
XLIX

Indications of Growing

Instability

in the Family

Unfavor

able to Family Stability

claims and expect marriage to be the union of equal wills. Nevertheless. many of the men they wed cherish the conviction that the husband is the rightful "head" of the family. This clash of ideals is none the less disastrous because it is but an incident of a transition process in social evolution.

SINISTER TENDENCIES

Owing to these causes we find the family now less stable than it has been at any time since the beginning of the Christian era. The development is world-wide, but it has reached its most advanced stage in the United States. Even in 1885 this country granted more divorces than all the rest of Christendom, while in 1905 it granted 68,000 divorces as against 40,000 for the rest of the Christian civilized world. At the latter date the divorce rate of the United States was twice that of Switzerland, thrice that of France, five times that of Germany and forty times that of England. In 1916 in the United States as a whole there was one divorce to every nine marriages, while in two far-Western states there was one divorce to three marriages. Between 1887 and 1906, while population gained a half, the number of divorces increased 160 per cent. It has been computed that, if the rate of increase continues, by the middle of this century a fourth of all American marriages will end in the divorce court and before the end of the century a half! The sociologist does not expect the movement to go so far but, it must be admitted, he bases his judgment on his faith in society's instinct of self-preservation rather than on anything the figures show.

Spread of It is natural that cities, always the first to quit the rut of tradiTraits of Character tion, generally show more divorce than the country. The fact that two-thirds of the divorces have been granted at the instance of the wife suggests that the tendency reflects woman's new sense of dignity and her new opportunity for self-support. Ninetyfour per cent. of the divorces are granted for such serious causes as adultery, desertion, cruelty, imprisonment for crime, drunkenness and neglect to provide. That adultery or desertion—either of which testifies that a real bond no longer exists - figures in three-fifths of the cases indicates that the prevalence of divorce is not due to the laxity of our laws as some insist, but to the decay of the virtues upon which the family rests, namely, self-sacrifice, forbearance and loyalty. These traits of the adaptive or self

subordinating type of character are yielding ground to the traits of self-interestedness, self-assertiveness and love of self-direction.

ENCOURAGING TENDENCIES

СНАР.
XLIX

Extraor

Popular

ity of Mat

rimony

Let it not be supposed that a casualty rate of a ninth is the only m feature of the contemporary family. In view of the increase of city life, industrialism and woman's ease of self-support, the persistent vogue of matrimony is wonderful. More of the Americans are married than of any European people west of Hungary. Of our whites of native parentage only one woman in twelve and one man in eleven reaches middle age without having taken a spouse. In 1890 out of a thousand American men, 417 were single; in 1910, only 387. In 1890 out of a thousand American women 318 were single; in 1910, only 297. Moreover, marriage Earlier now occurs earlier. The censuses since 1890, when we began to inquire into conjugal condition, reveal more people wedded before they are twenty years old, and before they are twenty-five years old.

This genial trend is due in part to the comparative ease of earning a living here, and to the small proportion of servants who, as is well known, have little opportunity to achieve a family life of their own. It owes something also to the lightening of the burden of work and of child-bearing to be shouldered by the wife. Among the native-born the worn-out mother of a dozen children is almost unknown. Although the outlook of the self-supporting spinster has brightened, that of the well-mated wife has brightened even more. The popularity of marriage reflects, furthermore, the attractiveness of a type of wedlock which constrains woman less and grants her an ampler sphere of self-determination than any other type known to civilization.

Marriage

Encour

agements

to Mating

Canalized

In view of the remarkably low rate of illegitimacy among the Sex-Love whites here and the conspicuous faithfulness of American husbands and wives in comparison with peoples which pride themselves upon their low divorce rate, there is ground for believing that our society is more successful than any previous large society in confining sex intimacy to the legal channel appointed for it. Our reward for not making it excessively difficult for unhappy persons to escape from marriage is that, while one is in it, one is willing to abide by its rules.

It is noteworthy also that the outcry over headstrong children

СНАР.
XLIX

Fewer

spoiled" by laxity of domestic discipline is fainter now than it was a generation ago. Most of the confusion attending the deSpoiled" cay of patriarchalism seems to have passed and the relations between parents and children appear to be established on a new and higher basis.

Children

Is a Nobler
Family

In view of these encouraging symptoms it is not unreasonable Emerging? to hope that what we are witnessing is not the disintegration of the family institution, but the transition from the old type of family, in which real incompatibility was masked by the husband's authority and the wife's submissiveness, to a nobler and more democratic type.

The Family Should be a Socializer

The Socializing Family

Need Not be Large

MONOGAMY NECESSARY TO SOCIETY

In proportion as this approaches accomplishment the tide of divorce ought to turn, for the precarious home is bad for spouses as well as for children. To most persons love offers more happiness when the union is pervaded by a sense of finality than when it is the sport of caprice and change. In any case there is no place like a stable home for the building of social character in children. The family is, as it were, a half-way house between the ego and society. It has charge of the earlier part of the process of socialization. In it the child should slough off its naïve instinctive egoism and take its first steps in the path of love, service and self-sacrifice. In the words of Ellwood,1 "Loyalty and unselfish devotion to the larger human groups, psychology shows, cannot be effectively developed without first developing loyalty to those smaller groups which call forth the instinctive affections of the child. The attachments developed in the family make possible and actually strengthen the attachments to larger groups. Hence, where family sentiments are strong, there one usually finds strong patriotism and strong social sympathies in general."

To discharge this beneficent office it is not necessary that the family be large. With parents of the right kind and with enough children of the right age accessible in the neighborhood nursery, kindergarten, or playground, the three-child family may socialize its members quite as thoroughly as the family with a dozen.

It is true that in a caste order the House or Family Line is a rival of society and monopolizes the love and loyalty which ought 1" The Social Problem," p. 199.