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Page 3
It is true that, into this enduring quality, many elements enter, some
homely or merely material. A desire for support, or for a resumption of
sex relations, may play a part in a wife's decision to forgive the
wanderer. There are many other factors--use and wont; pride in being
able to show a good front to the neighbors; a feeling that it is
unnatural to be receiving support from other sources. Just the mere
desire to have his clothes hanging on the wall and the smell of his pipe
about, the hundreds of small details that go to make up the habit of
living together, have each their separate pull on the woman whose
instinct to be wife and mother to her erring man is urging her to give
in; Home is, in both their minds,
" ... the place where when you have to go there
They have to take you in....
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."[5]
A woman who had left her home town and found clerical work in a strange
city, in order not to be near her syphilitic husband from whom she had
determined to separate, said, "When you've been married to a man, you
can't get over feeling your place is with him."
However we may deplore the results in a given case, the spineless woman
who takes her husband back many times may nevertheless be giving a
demonstration of the thing we are most interested in conserving--the
durability and persistence of the family. And so the social worker who
is enabled by experience or imagination to enter into the real meaning
of family life is neither scornful nor amused when Mrs. Finnegan is
found, on the morning when her case against Finnegan is to come up in
the domestic relations court, busily washing and ironing his other shirt
in order that he may make a proper appearance and not disgrace the
family before the judge.
* * * * *
An attempt will be made in this small book to analyze some causal
factors in the problem of the deserter, to touch upon recent changes in
the attitude of social workers toward deserted families, to present
illustrations from the best discoverable practice in the treatment of
desertion, and to suggest certain possible next steps, both on the legal
and on the social side. For lack of space, it will be impossible to
consider the closely related problems of the deserting wife, the
unmarried mother, or the divorced couple. It is assumed throughout that
the reader is familiar with the general theory of modern case work; and
no more is here attempted than to give a number of suggestions which
will be found to be practical, it is hoped, when the social worker deals
with the home marred and broken by desertion, or when he seeks to
prevent this evil by such constructive measures as are now possible.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Twenty-fourth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Society for
Organizing Charity, p. 25.
[2] Goodsell, Willystine: The Family as a Social and Educational
Institution, p. 8. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1915.
[3] Byington, Margaret F.: Article on "The Normal Family," _Annals of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science_, May, 1918.
[4] Bosanquet, Helen: The Family, p. 342. London, Macmillan & Co., 1906.
[5] Frost, Robert: North of Boston, p. 20. New York, Henry Holt & Co.,
1915.
II
WHY DO MEN DESERT THEIR FAMILIES?
"Before the deserter there was a broken man," said a district secretary
who has had conspicuous success in dealing with such men. By this
characterization she meant not necessarily a physical or mental wreck,
but a man bankrupt for the time being in health, hopes, prospects, or in
all three; a man who lacked the power or the will to dominate adverse
conditions, who had allowed life to overcome him. Such an unfortunate
may not be conscious of his own share in bringing about the difficulties
in which he finds himself, but he is always aware that something has
gone seriously wrong in his life. His grasp of this fact is the one sure
ground upon which the social worker can meet him at the start.
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