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Page 45
Meantime every issue of the daily press counts as its choicest items
stories of the shameful and soul-destroying ways in which men and women
are trying to live their lives in spite of this medi�val institution. So
far-reaching is the unrest, that at each new revelation of marital
heresy, society feels constrained to rush forward and frantically
denounce the heretic in order to prove its own orthodoxy.
Our own attitude toward marriage as a sacrament to be directed by a
church, or as a pleasure to be exploited by individuals, must be
changed if the life of the family is to be re-established as the great
vocation of earnest men and women. Intelligence must be turned upon this
problem as upon all others that vitally affect our lives. What President
Eliot has called "the conspiracy of silence touching matters of sex"
must be broken, and when it is, I believe honest men will agree with
Ellen Key that "In love humanity has found the form of selection most
conducive to the ennoblement of the species."[51]
[51] ELLEN KEY, _Love and Marriage._ New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911
In this field, at least, a eugenic conscience must take the place of the
older theological conscience.[52] We must recognize the infamy of
knowingly bringing defective children into existence. We must agree that
under no conditions should people tainted with syphilis be allowed to
marry; and that those subject to imbecility or insanity should not be
allowed to live together unless they are unsexed.[53] Justice to future
generations, and protection of the state, demands at least this much.
[52] See the publications of the Eugenic Education Society, especially
files of _The Eugenics Review_, 6 York Buildings, Adelphi, London.
[53] Indiana has an admirable law on this subject, and New Jersey has
just added the same to her statutes.
Whether alcoholics, those suffering from congenital sense defects, and
near relatives, should be allowed to marry may still be an open
question; but it should be recognized that the state has the right and
the duty to inquire into these conditions and to impose restrictions.
Society must come to feel that it is at least as shameful for a broken
old noble to live with a young girl under the forms of marriage as for
two young lovers to live together outside them.
As to what the personal, social and industrial relation of man and wife
should be, we have widely different views and practices. The older view,
still embodied in the practice of most nations, and best seen in Germany
and England, is that the woman's duty is to complement the husband. He
does what he wishes, so far as he can, and the wife rounds out the
whole. It is the old ideal of later savagery, that the man should
provide and protect, and the woman should breed children, care for the
home, pray and wait.
This is really the same ideal that dominated our political life until a
hundred and fifty years ago. It was the duty of the lords to direct and
fight; the peasants should work and wait. In politics there gradually
grew up a middle class which combined with the peasants to overthrow the
older privileges; and now all classes direct, fight, wait and watch
together. Whether this democratic idea is finally to prevail, we may not
know; but it is well worth trying, and the results so far are full of
promise.
In the same way, in the family, a great middle class of wives has grown
up, largely since 1870, through education and industry, as the burgers
did in political life, and these emancipated women are insisting that
the peasant of the family, the _Hausfrau_, shall join with them and
dethrone the husband so that all shall share life's responsibilities
together as free and equal partners. In fact, in America, the revolution
has already come; and, as in the earlier stages of political
revolutions, those deposed are having a hard time to maintain even their
equal share of opportunity.
But the parallel between political and domestic life is not complete,
and if pushed too far the analogy is mischievous. The assumption of
physical, intellectual and social superiority on the side of political
lords and domestic lords was the same. It is possible, however, rightly
or wrongly, to reduce all the people to the same political level and set
them all at work doing the same things. But between men and women there
was not only the assumption of physical and mental difference, but there
was and must always be the infinite difference of sex. In domestic life,
the women cannot live without men nor the men without women. Not only
would the generations fail, but the present generation would lose its
deepest meaning, if either sex were banished or debased.
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