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Page 17
The family logically consented to give her up at her marriage, when she
was enlarging the family tie by founding another family. It was easy to
understand that they permitted and even promoted her going to college,
travelling in Europe, or any other means of self-improvement, because
these merely meant the development and cultivation of one of its own
members. When, however, she responded to her impulse to fulfil the
social or democratic claim, she violated every tradition.
The mind of each one of us reaches back to our first struggles as we
emerged from self-willed childhood into a recognition of family
obligations. We have all gradually learned to respond to them, and yet
most of us have had at least fleeting glimpses of what it might be to
disregard them and the elemental claim they make upon us. We have
yielded at times to the temptation of ignoring them for selfish aims, of
considering the individual and not the family convenience, and we
remember with shame the self-pity which inevitably followed. But just as
we have learned to adjust the personal and family claims, and to find an
orderly development impossible without recognition of both, so perhaps
we are called upon now to make a second adjustment between the family
and the social claim, in which neither shall lose and both be ennobled.
The attempt to bring about a healing compromise in which the two shall
be adjusted in proper relation is not an easy one. It is difficult to
distinguish between the outward act of him who in following one
legitimate claim has been led into the temporary violation of another,
and the outward act of him who deliberately renounces a just claim and
throws aside all obligation for the sake of his own selfish and
individual development. The man, for instance, who deserts his family
that he may cultivate an artistic sensibility, or acquire what he
considers more fulness of life for himself, must always arouse our
contempt. Breaking the marriage tie as Ibsen's "Nora" did, to obtain a
larger self-development, or holding to it as George Eliot's "Romola"
did, because of the larger claim of the state and society, must always
remain two distinct paths. The collision of interests, each of which has
a real moral basis and a right to its own place in life, is bound to be
more or less tragic. It is the struggle between two claims, the
destruction of either of which would bring ruin to the ethical life.
Curiously enough, it is almost exactly this contradiction which is the
tragedy set forth by the Greek dramatist, who asserted that the gods who
watch over the sanctity of the family bond must yield to the higher
claims of the gods of the state. The failure to recognize the social
claim as legitimate causes the trouble; the suspicion constantly remains
that woman's public efforts are merely selfish and captious, and are not
directed to the general good. This suspicion will never be dissipated
until parents, as well as daughters, feel the democratic impulse and
recognize the social claim.
Our democracy is making inroads upon the family, the oldest of human
institutions, and a claim is being advanced which in a certain sense is
larger than the family claim. The claim of the state in time of war has
long been recognized, so that in its name the family has given up sons
and husbands and even the fathers of little children. If we can once see
the claims of society in any such light, if its misery and need can be
made clear and urged as an explicit claim, as the state urges its claims
in the time of danger, then for the first time the daughter who desires
to minister to that need will be recognized as acting conscientiously.
This recognition may easily come first through the emotions, and may be
admitted as a response to pity and mercy long before it is formulated
and perceived by the intellect.
The family as well as the state we are all called upon to maintain as
the highest institutions which the race has evolved for its safeguard
and protection. But merely to preserve these institutions is not enough.
There come periods of reconstruction, during which the task is laid upon
a passing generation, to enlarge the function and carry forward the
ideal of a long-established institution. There is no doubt that many
women, consciously and unconsciously, are struggling with this task. The
family, like every other element of human life, is susceptible of
progress, and from epoch to epoch its tendencies and aspirations are
enlarged, although its duties can never be abrogated and its obligations
can never be cancelled. It is impossible to bring about the higher
development by any self-assertion or breaking away of the individual
will. The new growth in the plant swelling against the sheath, which at
the same time imprisons and protects it, must still be the truest type
of progress. The family in its entirety must be carried out into the
larger life. Its various members together must recognize and acknowledge
the validity of the social obligation. When this does not occur we have
a most flagrant example of the ill-adjustment and misery arising when an
ethical code is applied too rigorously and too conscientiously to
conditions which are no longer the same as when the code was instituted,
and for which it was never designed. We have all seen parental control
and the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort which
belong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quite
outside the family life. Probably the distinctively family tragedy of
which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this
authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection and
misunderstanding. We see parents and children acting from conscientious
motives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a misery
which can scarcely be hidden.
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