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Page 43
The Modern Family
The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual
impulse which has created the institution we call the family. Few of us,
at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our
neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery. Even
the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little
direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us. None of those who
read these pages would starve if they never did any more work. If they
tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they
persisted, they would be fed by force.
Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of
beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and
ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and
dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of
gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we
attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves. If one
could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would
ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.
In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a
career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life
in the building up of the family institution. To-day, however, family
life as a career is everywhere called in question. Many women claim to
prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an
independent bank account to husband and children. Social service is
exalted; domestic service is debased. Why is it so much nobler to care
for other people's children in a social settlement, or in a school, than
to care for one's own in a home? Why should women mass themselves
together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as
suffragettes? We hear of women's work, of women's careers, of women's
clubs, associations and parties, of women's interests, movements,
causes. In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested
in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest
of women. Why do women prefer social to domestic service?
Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of
the life about him. The first is the complexity of our modern life; the
second is the nature of the institution of marriage.
A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves. Sexual love
is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic--in a
word, monogamic. As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human
unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a
new personality through the unifying and blending power of love. To say
that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it
respects its own personality. It can no longer act simply as a man or a
woman; it is a family and it must act as such in order to satisfy its
own demands. A man can no more act independently of the woman he loves
than the heart can act independently of the lungs. The man and woman who
compose the new unit are not only flesh of one flesh, but they are one
soul, one life; they are a complete organism. And the life of this
organism must be persistent to realize its own aims. In all the higher
forms of existence, processes move slowly. For nine months a woman
carries her baby as a part of her own body; then for three years the
father and mother carry the child in their arms; for a score of years
they must support, protect and train it before they let it go to seek
its own. Hence sexual love must be persistent as well as monogamic.
From all this it follows that each half of the human unit must find the
major part of its adult life in devotion to the one it has chosen as its
complement. This is no hardship; it is divine opportunity, if love binds
the lives in harmonious unity. If love is lacking, then there is no new
organism; and such a case falls outside this discussion.
Under the simpler forms of civilization that have prevailed in the past,
it was comparatively easy to find the complement for any particular man
or woman. With physical sympathy and desire, little more was needed than
common race and the same general social position. With simple
personalities even the marriage of convenience was apt to prove happy.
But, to-day, not only have men become infinitely more complex and
self-conscious than formerly, but women have ceased to be a general
class; and, in becoming individuals, they have developed wide ranges of
individual needs. Instead of fitting at the two or three points of
physical desire, race and social position, a man or woman, to live
strongly and well in this close union of body and soul, must fit each
other at many points. To the older sympathies must be added a common
attitude toward religion, education, artistic tastes, social ambitions,
industrial aptitudes, and a score of other living sympathies, if the
days are to pass in happiness, and each is to maintain his fair share of
the life of the new unit. Physical desire still remains the paramount
thing, but these other sympathies tend to strengthen it, or their
absence may weaken and ultimately destroy it. It is comparatively easy
for a person to find a complement to two or three of his, or her,
qualities; it is very difficult for a person to find fulfilment for a
score of his personal needs in another personality.
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