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Page 51
If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even
intellectual life may shift to a higher level than was before possible.
With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized.
The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant
life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and
interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or
pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over
the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived
it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.
No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day
find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites
Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the
path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and
understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden
and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world
of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the
intellectual life as growing up with one's children.
On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all
the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods,
vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection,
undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and
libraries--everything that touches the social well-being--touches him
vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away.
The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted
his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people
who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through
friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life
is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills
it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the
old and the young.
Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of
extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders
among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of women in
the future. While the women are young, ambition and the charm of freedom
bear them gaily along. Generally better educated than the men of their
own class, habituated to a personal expenditure which would correspond
with a large family expenditure, their intelligence prevents their
falling desperately in love with the men whom they might marry. But in
the thirties they have visions of the future which are deeply
disturbing; and in the forties they face the tragedy of a lonely old
age. Some men and women there must always be whose lives lack the
fulfilment of family life because of ill health or the accidents of
personal relations. But most women, if they are willing to pay the same
price for a significant family life that they so gladly pay for
professional success, will find the way open to live all of life. Why is
it that women count it an honor to work and starve for an art, but
dishonor to undergo privations for their children? All that is here said
of women may be said of men, but the man's period of family life is
longer than woman's, and the tragedy of lonely old age with him seems
less overwhelming.
The old plea that we must have an army of celibate women because in
civilized countries there is a preponderance of females does not hold at
present in the United States. The census of 1910 shows an excess of
2,691,678 males in this country. Nor is this entirely due to
immigration. More boys than girls are always born in civilized lands;
and of native white people born of native parents in the United States
there were, in 1910, 25,229,294 males and 24,259,147 females, a
difference obviously due to natural causes. New England alone in America
has a preponderance of females; and the excess there, as also in England
and Germany, is needed all along the frontiers of civilization. With the
industrial and social freeing of women now going on, we may reasonably
hope that the communities of old maids left behind, through the
emigration of young men, will be broken up.
Of course, it will be pointed out that many men and women who do marry
fail to realize the ideal presented in these pages. Every form of living
is dangerous and not every one can hope to be a successful husband and
father or wife and mother. Even devotion to religion furnishes many
inmates for insane asylums; athletic contests leave a line of cripples
behind them; and railroad disasters fill thousands of graves annually.
The institution of marriage has had no such intelligence applied to its
improvement during the past years as has been given to perfecting
railroads; and since founding a family is a more difficult undertaking
than making a journey, one need not be astonished at the number of
fatalities. Even if the institution of marriage were as intelligently
and carefully brought up to date as railroad systems are, it would still
remain dangerous to live either in or out of marriage.
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