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Other documents randomly have
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Elsie Clews Parsons, “are dependent on the living for the
performance of their funeral rites and sacrificial observances,
marriage itself as well as marriage according to prescribed
conditions, child-begetting and bearing, become religious duties.
Marriage ceremonial not infrequently takes on a religious character.
Infanticide, abortion, celibacy other than celibacy of a sacerdotal
character, and adultery, become sins. The punishment of the
adulteress is particularly severe, although in some cases her value
as property may guarantee her against punishment by death.”[11]
Thus there may be, and in most civilized societies there is, a fourfold
interference in marriage: interference by the family, by the
community, by the State, and by the Church. An old Russian song
had it that marriages were contracted

By the will of God,

By decree of the Czar,
By order of the Master,
By decision of the community,

—with not a word about the two persons immediately concerned.

Nor is this strange, for marriage is not generally conceived of among
either primitive or highly civilized peoples as a personal relationship.
It is an economic arrangement, an alliance between families, a
means for getting children. To allow so unruly a passion as love to
figure in the selection of a mate, is an irregularity which may under
certain circumstances be tolerated, but one which is nevertheless
likely to be regarded with extreme disapproval. As individualism
makes progress against group-tyranny, the preliminaries and the
actual contracting of marriage become less the affair of God, the
State, the family and the community, and more the affair of the two
people chiefly interested; but once contracted, the marriage can
hardly be said, even in the most civilized community, to be free of
considerable regulation by these four influences. The time which
Spencer foresaw, when “the union by affection will be held of primary
moment and the union by law as of secondary moment,” has by no
means arrived. If the married couple be Roman Catholics, for
example, they may not free themselves from an unhappy marriage
without paying the penalty of excommunication; and if they live in a
State dominated by the Catholic Church, they may be legally
estopped from freeing themselves at all. Nor may they, save by
continence, limit the number of their offspring without risking the
same penalty. If they are Episcopalians or Lutherans they may
divorce only on the ground of adultery, and the guilty party is
forbidden to remarry. In communities where the influence of other
Protestant sects predominates, and where, therefore, divorce and
remarriage are not formally forbidden by the Church, the pressure of
public opinion may yet operate to prevent them. The State not only
prescribes the form that marriage shall take, but it may also either
prohibit divorce—as in South Carolina, for example—or forbid it save
in accordance with such regulations as it sees fit to make; and these
regulations are not only of a kind that make divorce prohibitive to the
poor, but they are often so humiliating as to constitute an effective
barrier to the dissolution of unhappy unions. The State of New York
offers an excellent illustration. Adultery is the only ground upon
which divorce is allowed, and even then it may be refused if the
action is taken by mutual consent. The couple who wish to be
divorced must therefore, if there be no legal cause, go through the
demoralizing business of making a case, which means that one or
the other must provide at least the appearance of “misconduct”; and
even then they are in danger of being found in collusion. But
suppose one party to be giving legal ground; then the other party, in
order to get proof, is obliged to resort to the lowest kind of
espionage. Such disreputable methods, however much they be in
keeping with the nature and practices of the State, are hardly
becoming to civilized society, and civilized persons are indisposed
towards them. Their general effect is therefore to discourage
application for divorce in New York and encourage it elsewhere.
It is significant of the unspiritual estimate generally put upon
marriage, that incompatibility is rarely allowed as a legal ground of
divorce. Violation of the sexual monopoly that marriage implies; pre-
nuptial unchastity on the part of the woman; impotence; cruelty;
desertion; failure of support; insanity; all of these or some of them
are the grounds generally recognized where divorce is allowed at all.
This is to say that society demands a specific grievance of one party
against the other, a grievance having physical or economic
consequences, as a prerequisite to freedom from the marriage-bond.
The fact that marriage may be a failure spiritually is seldom taken
into account. Yet there is no difficulty about which less can be done.
Infidelity may be forgiven and in time forgotten; the deserter may
return; the delinquent may be persuaded to support his family; the
insane person may recover; even impotence may be cured. But if
two people are out of spiritual correspondence, if they are not at
ease in one another’s society, there is nothing to be done about it.
“Anything,” says Turgenev, “may be smoothed over, memories of
even the most tragic domestic incidents gradually lose their strength
and bitterness; but if once a sense of being ill at ease installs itself
between two closely united persons, it can never be dislodged.”
Modern society is slowly, very slowly, coming into the wisdom which
prompted this observation. The gradual liberalization of the divorce-
laws which our moralists regard as a symptom of modern disrespect
for the sacredness of marriage, is in fact a symptom of a directly
opposite tendency—the tendency to place marriage on a higher
spiritual plane than it has hitherto occupied.
The State assumes the right either to allow artificial limitation of
offspring or to make it a crime; and it exercises this assumption
according to its need for citizens[12] or the complexion of its religious
establishment. It also fixes the relative status and rights of the two
parties. In several American States, for instance, a married woman is
incompetent to make contracts or to fix her legal residence. The
Virginia law recognizes the primary right of the father to the custody
of the child, yet it makes the mother criminally liable for the support
of children. On the other hand, the husband is everywhere required
by law to support his wife. Such laws, of course, like most laws, are
felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them. The State
does not interfere in many cases where married couples subvert its
regulations—for example, the law which entitles the husband to his
wife’s services in the home and permits him to control her right to
work outside the home, does not become binding save in cases
where the husband sees fit to invoke it. As a rule the State forbids
fornication and adultery.[13] In case of separation and divorce, if the
parties disagree concerning financial arrangements or the custody of
children, it exercises the right to arbitrate these matters.
The sanctions of interference by the family, save in the contracting of
marriage by minors, are at present those of custom, affection, and
(in so far as it exists and may be made effective) economic power.
When two persons have decided to marry, for instance, it remains
quite generally customary for the man to go through the formality of
asking the woman’s nearest male relation for her hand. This is of
course a survival from the period when a woman’s male guardian
had actual power to prevent her marrying without his consent. The
influence of affection is too obvious to require illustration; it is the
subtlest and most powerful sanction of family interference. Economic
power is perhaps most commonly used to prevent or compel the
contracting of marriage. It may make itself felt, where parents or
other relatives are well-to-do, in threats of disinheritance if
prospective heirs undertake to make marriages which are
displeasing to them. A striking instance of the use of this power is
the will of the late Jay Gould, which required each of his children to
obtain consent of the others before marrying. It is not uncommon for
legators to stipulate that legatees shall or shall not marry before a
certain age under penalty of losing their inheritance.
These influences do not always, of course, take the same direction.
At present, for example, artificial limitation of offspring receives
irregular but effective community-sanction in face of opposition by
Church and State. Or again, public opinion almost universally
condemns the idea that a father may, by his will, remove his children
from the custody of their mother, although the State, as in Maryland
and Delaware, may sanction such an act. But, however much they
may check one another, these influences are all constantly operating
to restrict and regulate marriage away from its original intention as a
purely personal relationship, and to keep it in the groove of economic
and social institutionalism. The reasons for this are to be found in the
vestigiary fear of sex, love of power, love of the habitual, religious
superstition, and above all in the notion that the major interests of
the group are essentially opposed to those of the individual and are
more important than his. A combination of two of these motives has
recently come under my own observation in the case of a young
woman whose parents can not forgive her for having divorced a man
whom she did not love and married a man whom she did. They were
accustomed to their first son-in-law, and resent the necessity of
adjusting themselves to the idea of having a new one. Moreover,
they feel that their daughter should have spared them the “disgrace”
of a divorce. The fact that she was unhappy in her first marriage and
is happy in her second seems to have little weight with them. They
did their best to prevent her second marriage and are at present
exerting every effort to make it unsuccessful. It is needless to
emphasize the fact that this order of interference can not be
expected to disappear while the notion persists that the actions of
one adult member of a family or group can possibly reflect credit or
discredit upon all the other members.

II
If one be an apologist for the present economic and social order,
there is little fault to be found with this endless and manifold
regulation of the most intimate concern of the individual, save that it
is not as effective as it once was. Society, we are being constantly
reminded, is founded in the family. No one, I think, will quarrel with
this statement, particularly at this stage of the world’s rule by the
exploiting State. Marriage is, to quote Dr. E. C. Parsons, “an
incomparable protection of society—as society has been
constituted”; and this for a reason which Dr. Parsons did not
mention. Nor has the reason been stated by anyone else, so far as I
am aware, although the fact is emphasized often enough. It is
emphasized, however, largely in the spirit of a contemporary French
writer who declares that “an institution upon which society[14] is
based should not be represented to society as an instrument of
torture, a barbarous apparatus. We know, on the contrary that this
institution is good, and that it would be impossible to conceive of a
better one upon which to base our customs.” Well, but suppose it is
an instrument of torture, or at least that we have come to find it
highly unsatisfactory; must we, in spite of the fact, resolve to think it
good because society is based upon it? Ought we not, rather, to
examine the order of society that institutionalized marriage helps to
perpetuate, in order to determine whether it is worth preserving at
the cost of preserving also an institution which has become “an
instrument of torture”?
The reason why marriage is “an incomparable protection to society”
lies in the fact that the continuance of the power of the exploiting
State depends upon the relative helplessness of its exploited
subjects; and nothing renders the subject more helpless against the
dominance of the State than marriage. For monopoly, under the
protection of the State, has rendered the support of a family
extremely difficult, by closing free access of labour to natural
resources and thus enabling the constant maintenance of a labour-
surplus. Where there is little or no land not legally occupied, access
to the soil is impossible save on terms that render it, if not downright
prohibitive, at least unprofitable. The breadwinner who has neither
land nor capital is thus forced to take his chance in a labour-market
overcrowded by applicants for work who are in exactly his position:
they are shut out from opportunity to work for themselves, and
obliged to accept such employment as they can get at a wage
determined not by their capacity to produce, but by the number of
their competitors. Not only is the wage-earner thus obliged to content
himself with a small share of what his labour produces; he is forced
to pay out of that share further tribute to monopoly in most of the
things he buys. For shelter, for the products of the soil and mines, he
pays tribute to the monopolist of land and natural resources; for
industrial products, in most countries, he pays to the monopoly
created by high tariffs. Or he may have to pay to both, as in the case
of the purchaser of steel products.
Such disadvantages tend not only to keep wages near the
subsistence-level, but to keep opinions orthodox—or if not orthodox,
unexpressed. For the wage-earner gets his living on sufferance:
while he continues to please his employer he may earn a living,
however inadequate, for himself and family; but if he show signs of
discontent with the established order, by which his employer benefits
or thinks he benefits, he is likely to find himself supplanted by some
other worker whose need makes him more willing to conform, in
appearance at least. There are even conditions under which his
mere unorthodoxy may bring him to jail, in thirty-four States of this
enlightened Republic. There are exceptional cases, of course, where
his skill or special training makes him a virtual monopolist in his line
and thus renders him indispensable, like a certain well-known
professor who continues to hold his position in spite of his avowed
economic unorthodoxy simply because there is no one else who can
fill it. But it may be perceived at once that the average wage-earner
with a family to support will be under much greater pressure to
dissemble than will the worker who has no family; for where the
single worker risks privation for himself alone, the married worker
takes this risk for his family as well. Nor does economic pressure
operate only towards the appearance of conformity; it operates
towards actual conformity, for the person who has children to rear
and educate will be strongly impelled towards conservatism by his
situation. If he can get along at all under the present order, the mere
vis inertiae will incline him to fear for the sake of his family the
economic dislocation attendant upon any revolutionary change, and
to choose rather to keep the ills he has.[15] Moreover, the unnatural
situation popularly called the “labour-problem,” brought about
through exclusion from the land, tends to create the psychology of
the wage-slave: it tends to make people regard the opportunity to
earn one’s living not as a natural right, but as something that one
receives as a boon from one’s employer, and hence to accept the
idea that an employer may be justified in dictating to his employees
in matters of conduct and opinion.
Thus the economic conditions brought about by the State operate to
make marriage the State’s strongest bulwark; and those who believe
that the preservation of the State, or of a particular form of it, is a
sacred duty—their number among its victims is legion—are quite
logical in taking alarm at the increasing unwillingness of men and
women to marry, or if they do marry, to have children. They are
logical not only because marriage and children make for endurance
of established abuses, but because, as I have already remarked, it is
important for the State to have as many subjects as possible, to
keep up a labour-surplus at home and to fight for the interests of its
privileged class abroad; that is, so long as industry is able to meet
the exactions of monopoly and still pay interest and wages. Where
monopoly has reduced interest and wages to the vanishing-point, the
State can no longer be said to be a going concern; its breakdown is
then only a matter of time. This point has been reached in England,
and hence the condition of which I have spoken: a numerous
population is no longer desirable, for as unemployed they are a
burden on the State and a menace to its existence. But as long as
the State is a going concern, the Spartan rule is that best suited to its
interests: obligatory marriage, and unlimited reproduction.
In modern civilization, however, in spite of the enormous power of
the State, it would be extremely difficult if not impossible to enforce
this rule. The State, with all its power, can not force its subjects to
obey any law which they do not really want to obey—or perhaps I
should say, which they want not to obey; and the growth of
individualism has created a general distaste for any effort on the part
of government to meddle directly in the affairs of citizens. Attempts
to do so are likely to bring humiliation on the Government through its
inability to enforce them, and to generate in the population a salutary
disrespect for law; as the attempt to enforce the fourteenth and
eighteenth Amendments has done in this country. With the decline of
the patriarchal system, the contracting of marriage if not the status of
marriage, is coming to be regarded as the exclusive concern of the
individual. Many who would not for a moment tolerate compulsory
marriage will tolerate a humiliating regulation of marriage; they will
allow the State to make of marriage a life-long bondage, but they
reserve the right to refuse to enter into bondage. The State may
penalize celibacy by levying a special tax on unmarried persons; but
it can no longer force people to abandon it.
Indeed, one may say without overmuch exaggeration that at present
the preservation of marriage as an institution is almost solely due to
its tenacity as an instinctive habit. For while marriage is the strongest
bulwark of the State, the economic order for the sake of which the
State exists tends nevertheless to discourage marriage because it
progressively concentrates wealth in a few hands, and thus deprives
the great mass of people of adequate means to rear and educate
families. This condition is largely responsible for the fact that
celibacy, illegitimacy and prostitution are on the increase in every
civilized country; and that the average age at which marriage takes
place tends steadily to become higher, as it takes longer to get into
an economic position which makes possible the support of a family.
In this connexion, Katharine Anthony’s statement that factory-girls
and heiresses are the country’s youngest brides is significant.
Neither the heiress nor the factory-girl has anything to gain by
waiting: the heiress already has economic security and the factory-
girl never will have it, for she and her husband—if she marries in her
own class—will always be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in
the labour-market. It should also be remarked that among the great
middle class the standard of education for both sexes, but more
particularly for women, is higher than among the very rich and the
very poor; and this tends to advance the average age for marriage.
It tends as well to make children a heavy burden on the parents.
Among primitive peoples, where difficulty in supporting a family is
virtually unknown, where adjustment to the environment offers no
complexities and childhood is therefore not so prolonged, and where,
moreover, children through their labour become an economic asset,
they are desirable.[16] But in a civilized society where the parental
sense of responsibility has developed to the point where the child is
reared for its own sake, where adaptation to the environment is a
complex and lengthy process involving expensive education and
prolonged dependence of the child upon the parents, and where the
difficulty of getting a start in life tends also to lengthen the period of
dependence; in such a society it is natural that the parental sense of
responsibility should find expression in an artificial limitation of
offspring to the number that the circumstances of the parents will
enable them to educate properly. There is a further step that this
feeling can suggest in these days of excessive economic exploitation
and ruinous wars; that is, refusal to reproduce at all: and this step an
increasing number of married people are taking, to the great distress
of self-appointed guardians of our customs and morals.
Failure to perceive the decisive importance of the connexion
between the economic condition of the parents and the proper
equipment of children for making their way in life often leads to
absurd contradictions; as for example in that staunch friend of
childhood, the late Ellen Key. No one is more insistent than this
writer upon the importance of rearing the child for its own good; yet
she gravely declares that “from the point of view of the nation,
always from that of the children, and most frequently from that of the
parents, the normal condition must be, that the number of children
shall not fall short of three or four.” Miss Key’s primary failure is one
that must be judged with great severity because it is both
fundamental and typical—it pervades and vitiates the whole body of
feminist literature. It is a failure in intellectual seriousness. Miss Key
is fully aware of a persistent economic dislocation bearing on her
thesis—“At present there is a shortage of labour for those willing to
work, of food for the hungry, of educational advantages for those
thirsting for knowledge, of nursing for the sick, of care for the
children. The circumstances of the majority are now such as to
produce, directly or indirectly, crime, drunkenness, insanity,
consumption, or sexual diseases in large sections of the population.”
Again, “The struggle for daily bread, the cares of livelihood ... are
now the stamp of public as well as private life.... Married people have
no time to cultivate their feelings for one another.... Through the
cares of livelihood parents have no time to live with their children, to
study them in order to be able really to educate them.”[17] One must
suspect a peculiar incapacity for logic in the writer who recognizes
such conditions and still recommends three or four children as being
the minimum number that people should have who wish to do their
duty by their country, their children and themselves. Miss Key has
been content to shirk inquiry into the fundamental cause of these
conditions, and hence the means she recommends for their cure are
silly and feeble. An international universal organization which is to
regulate all competition and all co-operation; trade-unionism, the
abolition of inheritances; the exercise of “collective motherliness” in
public affairs; these are some of the means she offers for the
regeneration of society. Probably never since the remark attributed
to Marie Antoinette that if the starving populace could not get bread
they should eat cake, has ineptitude gone further. If Miss Key’s call
to duty were brought to the attention of the well-to-do married couple
of the city of New York whose means are sufficient to permit them to
occupy an apartment of, let us say, two or three or four rooms, often
without kitchen, they might agree with her in principle; but they would
probably not attempt to bring up three or four children in such
straitened surroundings and to educate them over a long span of
years, for a very doubtful future. If this example seem special and
far-fetched, I would remind my readers that over fifty per cent of
people in this country are urban dwellers, and that the vast majority
of them are worse off for dwelling space, not better, than the
hypothetical couple I have cited.
It is, of course, among those who are worse off that children are
most numerous. Ignorance and religious scruples—for the Church is
strongest among the ignorant because of their ignorance—combine
to produce large families among the class that can least afford them.
For civilization, although it denies these people most things, grants
them too great a fecundity. Among primitive peoples fecundity is
decreased by various causes, such as excessively hard work,
childbearing at a too early age, and prolonged lactation during which
continence is often the rule. The average number of children borne
by a savage does not often exceed five or six, whereas the civilized
woman may bear eighteen or twenty, and it is not at all exceptional
for the woman of our slums to bear ten or twelve. Among west-side
women of New York whom Katherine Anthony questioned
concerning frequency of pregnancies, one reported fifteen in
nineteen years, another ten in twelve years, and another six in nine
years. Obviously, then, when eugenists and moralists deplore what
they term the modern tendency to race-suicide, they refer to the
educated classes. The moralist argues from prepossession and may
be dismissed from consideration; but the eugenist has scientific
pretensions which are not without a certain degree of validity and
can therefore not be lightly passed over. So long as he argues for
improvement in the quality of the race through the substitution of
intelligence for blind instinct in propagation, he is on solid ground: no
one unprepossessed by the sentimentalism which regards legitimate
children, however untoward be the circumstances of their birth and
breeding, as a direct visitation from God, can deny that voluntary and
intelligent attention to the quality of offspring offers better prospects
for civilization than hit-or-miss quantity-production. The eugenist
deplores the fact that at present this exercise of intelligence is
confined to the comparatively small class of the educated and well-
to-do, and that therefore the birth-rate among that class is all too
small to offset the unchecked propagation of the ignorant and unfit.
This is unfortunately true; and it suggests the obvious question: Why
is there in every modern State so large a class of ignorant and unfit
persons as to constitute a menace to the vitality of that State? If it is
solely because the unfit are allowed to propagate unchecked, then
those eugenists who advocate the sterilization of paupers and
imbeciles and the encouragement of propagation among the
intelligent classes by an elaborate system of State subsidy, may be
listened to with respect if not with perfect faith in the practicability of
their proposals. But how about that large mass of the physically and
mentally normal who live at the subsistence-level, and whose
progeny, if economic pressure tighten a little, are likely to be forced
down into the class of underfed beings, dulled and brutalized by
poverty, from whose ranks our paupers, imbeciles and criminals are
largely recruited? To ignore the existence of this perennial source of
unfitness is levity. To recognize it, and to assume that it results from
over-propagation is to assume at the same time that the earth’s
population is too numerous for comfortable subsistence on the
amount of cultivable land in existence. If this disproportion be real,
the only hope lies in persuading this class to limit its offspring
voluntarily to the number that the earth’s surface will comfortably
support. If it be only an apparent disproportion due to an artificial
shortage of land created by monopoly, then the eugenist’s program
amounts simply to a recommendation that the population be
somehow restricted to the number that can get subsistence on the
terms of the monopolist. Henry George has conclusively disproved
the validity of the Malthusian theory which underlies the assumption
of over-population, while Oppenheimer’s figures show that if land
were freely available for use, the earth’s present population might
easily be supported on one-third of its arable surface.[18] Here,
really, is the most convincing answer to the standard arguments for
birth-control; yet so far as I know, the opponents of birth-control have
never done much with it, whether out of ignorance or because of the
profound economic readjustments that it implies. The eugenist, too,
generally displays a constitutional aversion to attacking the problem
of unfitness at the right end—which is, to inquire, first of all, why it
exists. Hence the ineptitude of his proposals for social betterment:
they would involve much unwieldy governmental machinery and
considerably more intelligence than any State has ever displayed in
dealing with social questions; and they would attack only the results
of our social ills, leaving the causes freely operative.[19]
While those causes continue to operate, the support of a family, save
in the comparatively small class of wealthy people, will be more or
less of a burden. At present, this burden bears most heavily upon the
middle-class man and the lower-class woman. Meretricious
standards of respectability, among them the idea that a married
woman must not work outside her home even when she is childless,
tend to make marriage from the outset a burden on the man of the
middle class. For it must be remembered that since the so-called
feminine occupations have been taken out of the home, a man no
longer gains an economic asset in taking unto himself a wife. Rather,
he assumes a liability. This is especially true among the middle
classes, where social standing has come to be gauged to some
extent by the degree in which wives are economically unproductive.
It is a commonplace in this country that women form the leisure
class; and this leisure class of women, like leisured classes
everywhere, has its leisure at the expense of other people, who in
this case are the husbands. Moreover, it is among the middle
classes that the standards of education are highest and the rearing
of children therefore most expensive; and this burden is usually
borne by the husband alone. Hence the emergence of the type of
harassed pater familias at whom our comic artists poke much
sympathetic fun, who meets his family now and then on Sundays,
foots their bills, and is rewarded for his unremitting toil in their behalf
by being regarded much in the light of a cash-register.
This sort of thing, of course, is not the invariable rule. There are
many middle-class women who give their families untiring service,
and an increasing number who, either from choice or necessity,
engage in gainful occupations outside their homes. Of this country’s
eight and one half million women breadwinners, two million are
married; and it may be assumed that a fair percentage of these are
of the middle class. The great majority, however, are of the labouring
class; and upon these, economic injustice weighs most heavily. It is
these women who bear most children; and it is they who, when their
husbands are unable or unwilling to meet the growing expenses of
the family, assume the double burden of “woman’s work” in the home
and whatever they can get to do outside that will enable them to earn
a few dollars a week, in order to “keep the family together.” Miss
Katharine Anthony, in her book, “Mothers Who Must Earn,” gives a
striking picture of the unskilled married women workers of west-side
New York, victims of a crowded labour-market, who take the hardest
jobs at the lowest pay, in order that they may give some few poor
advantages to the children they have brought into the world
unwillingly, knowing that they could not afford them. “The same
mother,” says Miss Anthony, “who resents the coming of children and
resigns them so apathetically to death, will toil fourteen hours a day
and seven days a week to keep up a home for the young lives in her
charge.”
Such testimony, and testimony of a similar kind from governmental
investigators, somehow makes the general run of social criticism
appear frivolous and superficial. The married wage-earner, worn with
excessive childbearing, who still finds strength to work long hours in
laundry or factory during the day and do her housework at night,
hardly fits into the picture of selfish, emancipated women, wilfully
deserting their proper sphere of domesticity either to seek pleasure
or to maintain their economic independence. Indeed, the idea of
economic independence is quite at variance with her notions of
respectability. “Not to work,” says Miss Anthony, “is a mark of the
middle-class married woman, and the ambitious west-side family
covets that mark. Hence comes the attempt to conceal the mother’s
employment, if she has one, which is one of the little snobberies of
the poor.” The sole object of these women’s toil is to preserve the
home, chief prop of a social order which bears upon it with crushing
weight; and their adherence to a social philosophy which regards the
preservation of the home as peculiarly the business of women is
evident in the fact that they contribute the whole of their meagre
earnings to its upkeep, whereas their husbands are likely to
contribute only as much of their own earnings as they see fit.
It goes without saying that the conditions I have cited have a
profound effect on the psychology of parents, and therefore on the
lives of children. The rearing of children, if justice is to be done them,
is one of the most exacting tasks that can be undertaken. The
adjustment that is required to fit parents to the personalities of their
children and children to those of their parents and of one another, is
in itself a most delicate and difficult process, and one upon which the
nature of the child’s adjustment to the larger world greatly depends.
Such a process naturally involves friction, and therefore, if it is to be
successful, calls for no little tact and patience in the parents; and
cramped quarters, sordid poverty, and exhausting labour are hardly
conducive to the possession of either of these qualities. Children of
the middle class, it is remarked often enough, hardly know their
harassed, overworked fathers; but children of the labouring class are
likely to know neither of their parents, or to know them only as fretful,
quarrelsome people, brutalized by overwork. “The strain of bringing
up a family on the average workingman’s wage,” says Miss Anthony,
“reduced as this is likely to be by unemployment, sickness, or drink,
constitutes, indeed, the dark age of the tenement mother’s life. It is
not strange that the good will existing between husband and wife
often gives way beneath it. ‘I tell my husband,’ said Mrs. Gurney, ‘it’s
not right for us to be quarreling all the time before the children. But it
seems like we can’t help it. He’s so worried all the time and I’m so
tired. If we were easy in our minds we wouldn’t do it.’”
Nor do the children of these people have anything much better to
look forward to than such a lot as that of their parents, for poverty
drives them too into the labour-market as soon as they are old
enough to earn, to the profound distress of reformers who refuse to
face the basic question of child-labour, namely: whether it is better
for human beings, even if they be children, to work for their living or
to starve. This applies not only to the children of our industrial
labouring classes, but to those of the agricultural labourer and the
tenant-farmer, who pay the same penalty for the exploitation of their
parents. There is no little irony in the fact that our growing
consciousness of the right of children to be well born and well reared
proceeds hand in hand with an economic injustice which renders it
impossible to secure that right for all children.
If responsibility for the upbringing of children is to continue to be
vested in the family, then the rights of children will be secured only
when parents are able to make a living for their families with so little
difficulty that they may give their best thought and energy to the
child’s development and the problem of helping it to adjust itself to
the complexities of the modern environment. Such a condition is not
utopian, but quite possible of attainment, as I shall show later. But for
the present, and for some time to come, marriage and parenthood
will continue to make men and women virtual slaves of the economic
order which they help to perpetuate. Small wonder that the women of
whom Miss Anthony writes are thoroughly disillusioned concerning
“marriage life,” and would avoid it if they “had it to do over.” Marriage
as an institution has little to offer these people save toil and
suffering; it is, as I have remarked, its tenacity as an instinctive habit
that makes them its victims. And if it were not for the responsibilities
that marriage entails, responsibilities which make people fearful of
the economic uncertainty involved in revolutionary change, the
economic order that makes marriage “an instrument of torture” and
thwarts the development of children, would not last overnight.
Both as a personal relationship and as an institution, marriage is at
present undergoing a profound modification resulting from the
changing industrial and social position of women. The elevation of
woman from the position of a chattel to that of a free citizen must
inevitably affect the institution in which her subordinate position has
been most strongly emphasized—which has been, indeed, the chief
instrument of her subordination. The woman who is demanding her
rightful place in the world as man’s equal, can no longer be expected
to accept without question an institution under whose rules she is
obliged to remain the victim of injustice. There is every reason
therefore, assuming that the process of emancipation shall not be
interrupted, to expect a continuous alteration in the laws and
customs bearing on marriage, until some adjustment shall be
reached which allows scope for the individuality of both parties,
instead of one only. The psychological conflict involved in the
adaptation of marriage to woman’s changing position and the
changing mentality that results from it, is not to be underrated. At
present the process of adjustment is needlessly complicated and this
attendant conflict immensely exaggerated, by an economic injustice
which bears most heavily on married people. Individualism is
developing in modern society to such an extent that marriage based
on anything but affection seems degrading; but economic injustice is
progressing simultaneously with such strides that marriage based on
nothing but affection is likely to end in disaster; for affection and the
harassment of poverty are hardly compatible. If this complication
were removed, as it could be, we should probably find that the
adjustment of marriage to shifting ideals and conditions would come
about in a natural and advantageous manner, as adjustments usually
do when vexing and hampering conditions are removed. The
question will settle itself in any case. Just how, no one, of course,
can tell; but however revolutionary the adaptation to new conditions
may be, it will not seem revolutionary to the people of the future
because “the minds of men will be fitted to it.” This is an all-important
fact, and one that is too little respected; for the desire to enforce our
own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as
the desire to enforce them upon contemporaries. It is a desire which
finds a large measure of fulfilment—where is the society which does
not struggle along under a dead weight of tradition and law inherited
from its grandfathers? All political and religious systems have their
root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind,
and its intense fear of autonomy. Because of this conservatism,
people never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by
intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which
they live. There were, and are, such injustices in the laws and
customs of the Christian world governing marriage and the relations
of the sexes; hence the changes which have already begun, and
may conceivably proceed until they shall prove as far-reaching as
those by which marriage in the past was transformed from an
instinctive habit into an institution subject to regulation by everyone
except the two people most intimately concerned.

FOOTNOTES:
[10] Westermarck defines it as “a more or less durable connexion
between male and female lasting beyond the mere act of
propagation till after the birth of the offspring.”
[11] E. C. Parsons: “The Family.”
[12] It is interesting in this connexion to note that in post-war
England, where the thousands of unemployed workers constitute a
heavy drain on the public purse and a baffling political problem, it
has been made lawful to sell devices for birth-control. One now sees
these devices conspicuously displayed in druggists’ windows.
[13] In Maryland fornication is not a crime, although it may entitle a
husband to divorce if he did not know of it at the time of the
marriage. Adultery is punishable by a fine of ten dollars.
[14] It is important to call attention to the loose use of the word
“Society” in this quotation, as practically synonomous with the State.
In their final definition, the two terms are antithetical. There is
general agreement among scholars, according to Professor Beard,
that in the genesis of the State, exploitation was primary, and
organization for other purposes, e.g., what we know as “law and
order,” was incidental and secondary. The term Society, then, really
implies the disappearance of the State, and is commonly so used by
scholars. Even now, too, tribes which have never formed a State and
are without government of any kind, maintain society, i.e., a quite
highly organized mode of communal life. Thomas Jefferson
remarked this phenomenon among the American Indian hunting
tribes, and so did the historian Parkman.
[15] This motive is especially powerful in the United States, because
monopoly in this country even now permits people to do relatively
well. Moreover, there is still a strong current of optimism attributable
to the failure of Americans to see that the old days of almost
unlimited opportunity ended with the closing of the frontier. If the
American family finds itself in straitened circumstances, its members
are likely to attribute the fact to “hard times,” and to expect an
improvement before long, since the country has recovered from a
panic about every twenty years for the past century. They do not
understand that the measure of recovery they hope for is now
impossible. How many Americans, I wonder, have stopped to ask
themselves why this country has suffered from uninterrupted
economic “depression,” with the exception of the war-period, ever
since the panic of 1907? What they regard as depression is really
the normal result of complete land-monopoly and high tariffs. Prices
have continued to rise since the war; which is to say that real wages
have fallen.
[16] According to Herriot, children form the wealth of savage tribes.
[17] The first passage I have quoted is from “Love and Marriage”; the
other two I have taken from Miss Key’s “The Younger Generation,”
simply because I found the ideas they contain somewhat more
clearly and definitely expressed in that book than in the other.
[18] Franz Oppenheimer, Theorie der Reinen und Politischen
Œkonomie. Berlin, 1912.
[19] For a striking and characteristic example of this ineptitude, I
refer my readers to Dr. Havelock Ellis’s little book, “Eugenics Made
Plain.”
 CHAPTER IV
WOMAN AND MARRIAGE

I
Perhaps the most pronounced conventional distinction between the
sexes is made in their relation to marriage. For man, marriage is
regarded as a state; for woman, as a vocation. For man, it is a
means of ordering his life and perpetuating his name, for woman it is
considered a proper and fitting aim of existence. This conventional
view is yielding before the changing attitude of women toward
themselves; but it will be long before it ceases to colour the
instinctive attitude of the great majority of people toward women. It is
because of the usual assumption that marriage is woman’s special
province, that I have discussed its general aspect somewhat at
length before considering its relation to women in particular. This
assumption, I may remark, has been justified expressly or by
implication by all those advocates of freedom for women who have
assured the world that woman’s “mission” of wifehood and
motherhood would be better fulfilled rather than worse through an
extension of her rights. If we imagine the signers of the Declaration
of Independence, in place of proclaiming the natural right of all men
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, arguing with King George
that a little more freedom would make them better husbands and
fathers, we shall imagine a pretty exact parallel for this kind of
argument on behalf of the emancipation of women.
The belief that marriage and parenthood are the especial concern of
women is rooted in the idea that the individual exists for the sake of
the species. Biologically, this is of course true; but it is equally true of
male and female. Among primitive peoples, where individuation has
not progressed as far as among more highly civilized peoples, this
idea still prevails in regard to both sexes. Among these peoples the