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Page 44
In earlier times, too, the individual reached such maturity as he or she
was to attain much earlier than now, when education has become a
life-long process. Once united, there was comparatively little danger
that passing years would develop latent tastes that might prove
dissimilar. To-day, complete union at twenty may mean many oppositions
at forty, if each half of the unit goes on developing its powers. And we
must add to this individual complexity and slower development of the
present-day men and women the intense self-consciousness of modern times
which makes it impossible for us to forget our conditions and go on
living in a world once significant and true but now empty or false.
A second cause for the unrest of the present is doubtless to be found in
the inflexibility of the institution of the family, under which lovers
are allowed to live together and bring into existence the children of
their love. The family, as we have it, was shaped under the stress of
medi�val disorder. In such a time men are willing to pay any price for
peace and quiet. And so the barbarian invaders, living among the broken
fragments of Greek and Roman civilization, gradually shaped feudalism,
culminating in absolute monarchy, which gave them political security.
They shaped the Holy Roman Catholic Church that they might worship in
peace. They shaped the guilds that they might work quietly, and enjoy
the fruits of their labors. The family, with its civil and
ecclesiastical sanctions, was formed to protect the personal lives of
men and women who wished to live together and rear children.
But with peace, life grew stronger and more intense; and the bonds which
the people had shaped, and which had given them security, reached their
limits of growth, became painful, and threatened to prevent all further
development. The rising cities bought their freedom from feudal lords;
even the serfs won better conditions; and the rising national units beat
down the older political institutions with their swords. Finally the
movements that gather around the French Revolution opened the way for us
into the democratic freedom and security which we enjoy to-day. The
guilds were broken up and a measure of freedom was secured, though the
industrial institution which shall give us freedom and security in our
work is yet to be formed. The Protestant Revolution led us by devious
ways into religious freedom where men can worship as they will.
Of all these older institutions, shaped under iron necessity, the only
one that remains practically unchanged is the family. Dealing with the
most powerful of all our human hungers, as it does, we have not dared to
make it fit our modern life. Not only is this true, but the forces of
the older state and church which survived, fastened themselves upon this
institution and strengthened its resisting power. The church
increasingly made marriage into a holy sacrament, so that it not only
protected lovers, but became a subtle, inviolable and indissoluble
mystery. The state sanctioned the family, and made it an instrument for
regulating political and property rights. Formal society proclaimed the
family and made it the standard for respectability.
Two centuries hence, our family, with its sacramental significances, its
lack of a eugenic conscience, its financial subordination of women, its
frequent lack of love and sympathy, its primogeniture, and its
determining power over social opportunity, will be as incomprehensible
to students of institutional forms as the Holy Roman Empire is to us
to-day. Who will then understand how church and state could have
licensed and consummated marriages between young and inexperienced
people, marriages which were to be binding on their thought, feeling and
action for life without requiring some time, however brief, between the
application for a license and the final binding of vows? Who will be
able to understand how church and state could have sanctioned marriage
between a broken-down old noble and a young and inexperienced girl of
seventeen? How will the future student explain the fact that in New
Jersey state and church combined to sanction and bless the marriage of
an imbecile woman and of her offspring until they had produced 148
feeble-minded children to curse the state.[50]
[50] See _The Kalikak Family_, by HERBERT H. GODDARD, New York:
Macmillan Company, 1912.
Who will then understand why a man and woman who had not only ceased to
love each other but had come to feel a deep repugnance for each other
should have been compelled to share bed and board, even when there were
no children, until even murder seemed preferable to such slavery of soul
and body? How can this student understand woman's economic dependence,
her uncertain income, her insecure rights in property for which she
toiled side by side with her husband? Who will then believe that in the
year 1911 an English citizen could go before a court and secure an order
for legalized rape, under the name of restitution of marital rights?
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