To some extent the evil of lax administration of the divorce laws is exaggerated by popular opinion. In the main the courts are careful and conscientious in the trial of suits. According to the report of Commissioner Wright, in seventy counties scattered over twelve states but 67.8 per cent. of the petitions for divorce were granted. From this fact it is inferred that "judges exercise a reasonable care before issuing a decree." For the counties investigated "it is certain that in about 30 per cent. of the cases of petition a decree has been denied. The number of cases involved is sufficiently large and the localities sufficiently different to lead one to the conclusion that the same state of affairs exists throughout the country, and that our courts, instead of being careless in the matter of granting decrees, weigh well the causes alleged, and do not grant decrees unless the allegations of the libellants are fairly sustained."[743]Still, under the laws as they exist there is plenty of opportunity forabuse, even when the court is cautious. The service of notice on the absent defendant through the mails or through publication in the newspapers, allowed in many states, and the fact that only in a few instances is there any provision requiring the prosecuting attorney to resist an undefended libel, afford occasions for fraud.[744]Some of the usual statutory causes of divorce, under the refinement of judicial interpretation, seem virtually to invite divorce.[745]This is to some extent true of "nonsupport," "wilful absence," "desertion," and "gross neglect of duty;" while "cruelty" has become almost an "omnibus clause." Under plea of "constructive cruelty" or "mental anguish" the grievances admitted as valid grounds for dissolution of wedlock are often trivial or even absurd, although it is likely that they are sometimes put forward as a shield or substitute for graver wrongs which the plaintiff is reluctant to disclose.[746]The general introduction of the decreenisi, giving opportunity for reflection, might prove a wholesome correction of the almost necessarily liberal policy of the courts in such cases. Divorce suits are sometimes too hastily disposed of by the judges because of the pressure of other litigation. The creation of a limited number of special divorce courts in each of the states might prove a remedy, if care were taken not to so increase the cost of actions as virtually to discriminate against the poor.
The appearance of the government report in 1889 revealed for the first time something like the real facts regarding divorce in the United States. In the entire country during the period of twenty years (1867-86) covered by the report, 328,716 petitions for full or partial divorce were granted. From 9,937 decrees in 1867, the number rose to 11,586 in 1871, 14,800 in 1876, 20,762 in 1881, and to 25,535 in 1886, showing an increase in twenty years of 157 per cent., while there was a gain in population of but 60 per cent. during the same period. Comparing the last year with the first, only four states in the Union—Delaware, Connecticut, Maine, and Vermont—show a decrease in the divorce rate; while, more fairly, comparing the fourth quinquennium with the first, only the three states last named show such a "decrease in their divorce movement."[747]Of the whole number of divorces during the twenty years, 112,540 were granted to the husband and 216,176 to the wife. Among the principal causes, at each stage of the wedded life, only for adultery were more decrees granted on the husband's petition than on the wife's.[748]"As regards the ratio of divorces to marriages, six states report marriages fully enough for a trustworthy comparison. Of these, Connecticut has for the entire period a divorce to 11.32 marriages and for the worst year, 1875, one to 8.81; Rhode Island gives one to 11.11 for the period and one to 9.36 in 1884, closely approaching that for the preceding years; Vermont one to 16.96 for the period and at its worst, in 1871, one to 13; Massachusetts gives one to 31.28 for the period, its worst being one to 22.54 in 1878; Ohio averages one to 20.65, with an almost unvarying progress downward to one to 15.16in 1886;" and in the District of Columbia the rate for the period is 31.28, while at the best it is 74.65 in 1868 and at the worst 20.82 in 1877. "In some other states where marriages are less fully reported, the ratios are as follows: Illinois one to 14.76 for the period, while Cook county gives one to 13.6; Michigan one to 12.92; Minnesota one to 30.05; New Hampshire one to 9.74 (its lowest, one to 7.6 in 1880, being evidently due to very imperfect returns of marriages); New Jersey shows one to 49.39; Kansas one to 17.42; Wisconsin one to 21.07; and Delaware one to 36.99. These last, it should be noted, are some of them for shorter periods than twenty years."[749]This method of comparing the number of divorces granted with the number of marriages celebrated is not very satisfactory. "It is vicious in this, that the marriages celebrated each year cannot be compared scientifically with the divorces drawn from the whole volume of marriages celebrated in the past thirty or forty years, many of which even took place in foreign countries."[750]The commissioner has therefore adopted another method of comparison, not entirely free from error, based on the estimated number of existing married couples. From this it appears that in 1870, for the entire country, there were 664 married couples to one divorce granted, while in 1880 the number of such couples to one decree had fallen to 481.[751]Estimated another way, on the basis of the eleventh census, in 1867 there were 173 divorces to 100,000 couples and 250 in 1886.[752]
The divorce rate in the United States is higher than in any other country for which statistics are collected and published, with the single exception of Japan,[753]being lowestin the southeastern and highest in the western and southwestern states.[754]As in Europe the divorce rate is higher and the marriage rate lower in the cities than in the country.[755]Again, while the marriage rate per capita of population is steadily descending, the divorce rate is on the average rising, although the "North Atlantic group of states, from Maine to Pennsylvania inclusive, shows no increase" in the twenty years, the growth of divorce just keeping pace "with the population."[756]For some of the western states the more recent statistics are sufficiently startling. "Divorces in Ohio increased from 2,270 in 1889 to 3,217 in 1899, and the ratio to marriages has become 1 to 10.9. There were 2,418 divorces in Michigan in the year 1900, or 1 to 9.6 marriages. Here about two-thirds of the applications are granted. In some states three-fourths of the suits are successful. In Michigan the statistics show that nearly all the divorces are granted to residents of the state. Indiana shows a remarkable change for the worse. Almost a generation ago Indiana was notoriously bad. Then the laws were improved and her divorce rate was no worse than that of some states in the east; but for some unexplained reason divorces of late have increased rapidly. In 1899 there were granted no less than 4,031 divorces, and 4,699 in the year 1900. In the lastyear the ratio of divorces to marriages of the same year became 1 to 5.7 for the entire state," and 1 to 3.8 in the county of Marion containing Indianapolis.[757]In Europe likewise the marriage rate is decreasing and the divorce rate increasing, each in some countries with even greater rapidity than on the average in the United States. Moreover, the growth of divorce in recent years is a remarkable phenomenon in Catholic as well as Protestant lands. Thus in the entire German Empire divorces rose from 5,342 in 1882 to 6,677 in 1891, the population during the same decade rising from 45,719,000 to 49,767,000. In Holland there were together 271 divorces and separations in 1883 and 474 in 1892, the population at the same time advancing from 4,225,065 to 4,669,576. During the same ten years divorces in Sweden rose from 218 to 316, the population being 4,603,595 at the beginning and 4,806,865 at the end of the period. In this decade, the population making but slight advance, the aggregate number of divorces and separations in Switzerland decreased from 1,013 to 953. In France for each 1,000 marriages celebrated 14 divorces were decreed in 1885 and 24 in 1891, the population showing a very small increase. For the decennium beginning in 1884 and closing in 1893 the number of divorces decreed in Belgium mounted from 221 to 497, while the population grew from 5,784,958 to 6,262,272. During the same period in Greece the number rose from 88 to 103. In Bavaria—like Greece or Belgium a Catholic state—there is also a rapid growth ofdivorce, the number of decrees advancing from 218 in 1882 to 308 in 1891, thus giving a rate of one divorce for 24,490 of the population at the commencement as compared with 18,279 at the close of the decade.[758]"In England divorces rose from 127 in 1860 to 390 in 1887, an increase much more rapid than that of population or of marriages. Judicial separations rose between the same years from 11 to 50. In Scotland divorces which in 1867 numbered 32 had, in 1886, grown to 96, a still more rapid rise, as it covers only twenty instead of twenty-seven years. It is worth noting that in England it is usually the husband who petitions for a divorce, and almost always the wife who seeks a judicial separation."[759]
It has long been observed that in Europe the marriage rate falls in hard times and rises again on the return of prosperity. "According to all experience," declares Mill, "a great increase invariably takes place in the number of marriages in seasons of cheap food and full employment."[760]The middle and upper classes, says Fawcett, "do not often marry unless they have reasonable prospect of being able to bring up a family in a state of social comfort.... But the laborers, who form the majority of the population, are but slightly influenced by such cautious foresight. Even a trifling temporary improvement in their material prosperityacts as a powerful impulse to induce them to marry; for it is a demonstrated statistical fact that the number of marriages invariably increases with the decline in the price of bread."[761]Farr and Bodio reach the same conclusion.[762]Ogle on the other hand, while agreeing entirely with these writers as to the favoring influence of prosperity and the depressing effect of hard times on the number of marriages, finds in England, so far as the price of bread alone is concerned, that the reverse is true, more marriages there taking place among the laboring class when bread is dear. In this case, he urges, the higher cost of bread may itself be an incident of increased industrial activity, depending in part on the rise of freight charges on imported wheat. So he concludes that "the marriage rate rises and falls with the amount of industrial employment, which in its turn is determined by the briskness of trade, as measured by the values of exports, which also rise and fall concomitantly, and produce by their effect upon freights a simultaneous rise or fall in the price of wheat."[763]The researches of Oettingen, Bertillon, and especially those of Cauderlier, have also disclosed a general variation in the marriage rate corresponding with the rise or fall in the price of the necessaries of life.[764]War in particular has a powerful influence in lowering the marriage rate, while on the restoration of peace the loss may be largely or entirely recovered. "In 1864 Denmark was at war withPrussia, and its marriage rate fell from 15.0 to 11.13" for each 1,000 inhabitants, "the lowest point it has ever yet reached, but in the next year, the war being over, rose to 17.8, and was higher than it has ever been again. In 1866 Austria was at war with Prussia, and, while the Prussian rate fell from 18.2 to 15.6, the Austrian rate fell from 15.5 to 13.0, but on the cessation of hostilities rose in 1867 to 19.3, a higher level than in any earlier year."[765]According to Willcox,[766]the same rule appears to hold good in the United States. In Massachusetts for the period 1850-90 the marriage rate was low in the years of industrial depression and during the Civil War. Furthermore, the same writer has for the first time demonstrated that the average divorce rate for the whole country is affected in the same way, sinking in hard times and rising again on the restoration of business. Represented graphically, the curve for the Massachusetts marriages and the curve for United States divorces (1867-86), with slight exceptions, "uniformly ascend and descend together and reach their maxima and minima in the same years. Depressions in trade have had a tendency to decrease divorces as well as marriages;" whereas in England, while the marriage rate falls the divorce rate rises in hard times. But in that country divorce is notoriously very expensive and hence mainly a luxury for the rich. So it is concluded that "this difference between the effect of hard times in England and in the United States, together with the very rapid increase of divorce among the southern negroes, and the fact that only about one wife in six of those obtaining divorces receives any alimony, are among the indications that divorce has become very frequent and perhaps most frequent among our lower middle classes, and hasreached for weal or woe a lower stratum than perhaps anywhere in Europe."[767]
Whether the number of divorces is directly influenced by legislation is a question which has given rise to decided difference of opinion. Bertillon, writing in 1883 in favor of the new divorce law of France then under consideration, took the position that statutes extending the number of causes of divorce or relaxing the procedure in divorce suits have little influence "upon the increase in the number of decrees."[768]Yet, for obvious reasons, he predicted that the first, though not the lasting, result of a change in the law allowing absolute divorce instead of mere separation would be the opposite of this conclusion. Such, in fact, was the case. In 1883 there were 3,010 separations; while, after the new code took effect, 4,478 divorces and separations were granted in 1884, 6,245 in 1885, and 6,211 in the following year.[769]Only a part of this can be accounted for by the change in law, for there had been a rapid increase during the preceding fifty years.[770]For the United States this point has been examined by Professor Willcox, and his results go to show that the difference in the divorce rate existing among the states cannot very largely be accounted for by the difference in the number of grounds of petition sanctioned by the respective statutes. Thus in 1880 New York admitted one cause, NewJersey two causes, and Pennsylvania four; yet on the average in that year for each 100,000 married couples New York was granting 81 divorces, New Jersey 68, and Pennsylvania 111.[771]"This means that more divorces for adultery are granted in New York, relatively to population, than for adultery and desertion in New Jersey, and almost as many as for adultery, desertion, cruelty, and imprisonment in Pennsylvania. Assume the number of married couples in the three states in 1875 to be a mean between the estimates for 1870 and 1880, and compare with this mean the total number of divorces for adultery in the three states for the twenty years. Pennsylvania had annually 16 such divorces to 100,000 couples, New Jersey had 26, and New York 78. Judging from the court records, one would say that adultery was about three times as frequent in New York as in New Jersey, and about five times as frequent as in Pennsylvania. No such inference is warranted. The true conclusion is that limiting the causes increases the number of divorces in those which remain, but without materially affecting the total number. A certain proportion of the married couples in the three states desired divorce, and was willing to offer the evidence required in order to obtain the decree. The number of causes, then, seems to have affected the grounds urged for divorce, but in no large degree the total number."[772]It is possible that this conclusion is somewhat too emphatic. The problem is very complex, and it is hard to make allowance for all its conditions. For example, it should not be forgotten that New Jersey has but one tribunal, the court of chancery, authorized to grant divorce, whereas New York has many; and if states sanctioning a wider range of causes were selected for comparison, the result might be changed, though scarcely to any wide extent.
Commissioner Wright has attempted to discover the general influence of legislation by examining every change in the laws during twenty years in connection with the divorce statistics. Often a sudden increase, and occasionally a slight decrease, in the rate is observed without any alteration in the statutes. In fourteen instances, however, he believes it "quite apparent that the lines of statistics are curved in accordance with laws enacted just previous to the curves."[773]The changes effected by these laws are of many kinds, including the addition and repeal of causes and various alterations in the procedure, some of them complex. But under careful scrutiny in some instances the statistics reveal no certain causal relation between the change in the divorce rate and the antecedent change in the statute. Indeed, in the light of Professor Willcox's detailed criticism of the figures, four of Mr. Wright's test cases must be rejected, so far as evidence afforded by the statistics is concerned;[774]four or five others show considerable influence of legislation; while in the rest that influence is slight, temporary, or questionable.[775]Contrary to the popular opinion, restrictions upon the remarriage of divorced persons wouldnot affect in a large degree the divorce rate, although only foreign statistics are available to test the point. These show that within the first two or three years after dissolution of marriage divorced men are not much more inclined to remarry than are widowers, while during the same period a considerably greater number of divorced women than widows renew the nuptial ties.[776]With an increasing rate, which does not advance uniformly, it is perhaps impossible to measure exactly the effects of lax or restrictive legislation. The divorce movement is dependent upon social forces which lie far beyond the reach of the statute-maker. Yet it seems almost certain that there is a margin, very important though narrow, within which he may wisely exert a restraining influence. Good laws may, at any rate, check hasty impulse and force individuals to take proper time for reflection. They may also by securing publicity prevent manifold injustice in the granting of decrees.
After all, in this fact do we not catch a glimpse of the proper sphere of divorce legislation? Divorce is a remedy and not the disease. It is not a virtue in a divorce law, as appears to be often assumed, to restrict the application of the remedy at all hazards, regardless of the sufferings of the social body. If it were always the essential purpose of agood law to diminish directly the number ofbona fidedivorces, the more rational course would be to imitate South Carolina and prohibit divorce entirely. Divorce is not immoral. It is quite probable, on the contrary, that drastic, like negligent, legislation is sometimes immoral. It is not necessarily a merit, and it may be a grave social wrong, to reduce the legal causes for a decree to the one "scriptural" ground. The most enlightened judgment of the age heartily approves of the policy of some states in extending the causes so as to include intoxication from the habitual use of strong drinks or narcotics as being equally destructive of connubial happiness and family well-being. Indeed, considering the needs of each particular society, the promotion of happiness is the only safe criterion to guide the lawmaker in either widening or narrowing the door of escape from the marriage bond. The divorce movement is a portentous and almost universal incident of modern civilization. Doubtless it signifies underlying social evils vast and perilous. Yet to the student of history it is perfectly clear that this is but a part of the mighty movement for social liberation which has been gaining in volume and strength ever since the Reformation. According to the sixteenth-century reformer, divorce is the "medicine" for the disease of marriage. It is so today in a sense more real than Smith or Bullinger ever dreamed of; for the principal fountain of divorce is bad matrimonial laws and bad marriages. Certain it is that one rises from a detailed study of American legislation with the conviction that, faulty as are our divorce laws, our marriage laws are far worse; while our apathy, our carelessness and levity, regarding the safeguards of the matrimonial institution are well-nigh incredible. Indeed, there has been a great deal of misdirected and hasty criticism of American divorce legislation. Even thoughtful scholars sometimes indulge in the traditional arraignment. The laws of the American statesproduced since 1789, declares Bryce, present "the largest and the strangest, and perhaps the saddest, body of legislative experiments in the sphere of family law which free self-governing communities have ever tried."[777]Such sweeping assertions are in many ways misleading and fail to advance the solution of the divorce problem. There is, of course, in the aggregate a "large" body of statutes; for each of the fifty-three commonwealths, on this subject as on all others, has a separate code; but the harm resulting either from the bulk or the perplexity of the laws, while needing a remedy, is not so serious as is commonly assumed. More and more in their essential features the divorce laws of the states are duplicating each other; and there is already ground for hope that in reasonable time they may attain to practical uniformity. Furthermore, it may well be questioned whether the complexity or the conflict in the American codes is so pronounced as in the numerous systems of divorce law maintained in the states of the German Empire until the enactment of the imperial code of 1900. In some cases in German lands the law was obscure and well-nigh past finding out. Prussia alone had three different systems; and Bavaria was in the same plight.[778]If American legislation is on the average more liberal in extending the enumerated grounds of divorce, it would surely be rash to assume that it is the "sadder" on that account. The question is: Has American social liberalism, in this regard as in so many other respects, increased the sum of human happiness? Besides, "laxity" in this connection is not exclusively a feature of American legislation. It may be reasonably doubted whether any "omnibus clause" in the country gives wider discretion to the court than the fourth of the five causes sanctioned by the new uniform law of Germany,allowing divorce when "either spouse has been guilty of grave violation of the obligations based on the marriage or of so deeply disturbing the marital relation through dishonorable or immoral behavior that the continuance of the marriage cannot be expected from the other."[779]Even broader provisions formerly existed in the codes of some of the separate German states, and may still be found elsewhere in Europe.
The achievement of a wisely conceived and carefully drafted uniform law for the entire country, would be of great advantage, although it might not directly cause a very great decrease in the average divorce rate, and certainly would not produce the same rate for the individual states.[780]How may such a uniform law be secured? The method of procuring the enactment of a federal law under a constitutional amendment—once much in favor[781]—has for the present been almostabandoned by active workers. Instead, it is preferred, through the state commissions on uniform legislation, to urge the adoption of a model statute by the separate commonwealths. These commissions, now thirty-five in number, have prepared a bill for a law governing divorce procedure; and its temperate and practical provisions ought to gain its general adoption.[782]All this is well; but it is still more needful to strive for a common marriage law. In the end it may be found necessary, under a constitutional amendment, to appeal to the federal power. What service could a national legislature render more beneficent than the creation of a code embracing every division of the intricate law of marriage and divorce? Aside from its educational value as a moral force, such a code in material ways would prove a powerful guaranty of social order and stability.
In the meantime it is essential to fix the attention upon causes rather than effects. For the wise reformer, who would elevate and protect the family, the center of the problem is marriage and not divorce.
It is needful in the outset, as already suggested, frankly to accept marriage and the family as social institutions whose problems must be studied in connection with the actual conditions of modern social life. It is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very different conditions. The guiding light will come, not from authority, but from a rational understandingof the existing facts. Small progress can be expected while leaning upon tradition. The appeal to theological criteria is, no doubt, matter of conscience on the part of many earnest men. Nevertheless the vast literature which seeks to solve social questions through the juggling with ancient texts seems in reality to be largely a monument of wasted energy. Much of it is sterile, or but serves to retard progress or to befog the issue. Witness the perennial discussion of the "scriptural" grounds of divorce, or of the Levitical sanction or condemnation of marriage with a deceased wife's sister! Witness the vapid homilies and treatises on the wedded life! There is, in truth, urgent need that the moral leaders of men should preach actual instead of conventional social righteousness. It is high time that the family and its related institutions should be as freely and openly and unsparingly subjected to scientific examination as are the facts of modern political or industrial life.
From the infancy of the human race, we have already seen, the monogamic family has been theprevailingtype. There have been, it is true, many variations, many aberrations, from this type under diverse conditions, religious, economic, or social. Under changing influences the interrelations of the members of the group—of husband and wife, of parent and child—and their relations individually and collectively to the state, have varied from age to age or from people to people. There have been wife-capture, wife-purchase and thepatria potestas. But in essential character—at first for biological, later for ethical or spiritual reasons—the general tendency has always been toward a higher, more clearly differentiated type of the single pairing family. Moreover, setting aside all question of special priestly sanctions, the healthiest social sentiment has more and more demanded that the "pairing" should be lasting. Whether of Jew or gentile, the highest ideal of marriagehas become that of a lifelong partnership. Are these tendencies to remain unbroken? Is the stream of evolution to proceed, gaining in purity and strength? Are marriage and the family doomed; or are they capable of adaptation, of reform and development, so as to satisfy the higher material and ethical requirements of the advancing generations? Seemingly they are now menaced by serious dangers. Some of them have their origin in the new conditions of a society which is undergoing a swift transition, a mighty transformation, industrially, intellectually, and spiritually; while others, perhaps the more imminent, are incident to the institutions themselves as they have been shaped or warped by bad laws and false sentiments. Apparently, if there is to be salvation, it must come through the vitalizing, regenerative power of a more efficient moral, physical, and social training of the young. The home and the family must enter into the educational curriculum. Before an adequate sociological program can be devised the facts must be squarely faced and honestly studied. In the sphere of domestic institutions, even more imperatively than in that of politics or economics, there is need of light and publicity.
The family, it is alleged, is in danger of disintegration through the tendency to individualism which in many ways is so striking a characteristic of the age.[783]Within the family itself there are, indeed, signs that a rapid transition from status to contract is taking place in a way which Mainescarcely contemplated; for he appears to have imagined that precisely in this sphere the process was already virtually complete. The bonds of paternal authority are becoming looser and looser. In America in particular young men and even young women earlier than elsewhere tend to cut their parental moorings and to embark in independent business careers. So also more and more clearly the wife is showing a determination to escape entirely frommanu viri—still sustained by the relics of mediæval law and sentiment—and to become in reality as well as in name an equal partner under the nuptial contract. The state also has intervened to abridge the parental authority. Minor children are no longer looked upon as the absolute property of the father. For the purpose of education, society removes them for a considerable part of the period of nonage from home and immediate parental control; and, on the other hand, it forbids their employment in mines, factories, or other injurious vocations during their tender years. Under child-saving laws they may even be removed from home, when they are cruelly treated or exposed to vicious influences, and placed under the protection of the state. Thus, little by little, to use the phrase of a thoughtful writer, the original "coercive" powers of the family under the patriarchalrégimehave been "extracted" and appropriated by society. In the education of the young the family retains the lesser part. "The state has here interfered in the private ordering of the household by taking the child from its parents for one-third of its waking hours, and has introduced order and system into the training of children, together with the assertion of rights on their part. The family becomes therefore less a coercive institution, where the children serve their parents, and more a spiritual and psychic association of parent and child based on persuasion. A more searching interference on the part of the state, together with a new set of governmental organizationsfor its enforcement, is found in the boards of children's guardians, the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, orphans' asylums, state public schools, with their investigating and placing-out agents, empowered under supervision of the courts to take children away from parents and to place them in new homes. A large part of the unlimited coercion of thepatria potestasis here extracted from the family and annexed to the peculiar coercive institution where it is guided by notions of children's rights, and all families are thereby toned up to a stronger emphasis on persuasion as the justification of their continuance."[784]Here we catch a glimpse of the direction of future evolution in the family. At the same time it appears that the disintegration of paternal and marital coercive power is not a serious menace to the family. It has cleared the way for a higher and nobler spiritual domestic life. The real danger is that the family and the home will surrender an undue share of their duty and privilege to participate in the culture and training of the young. This function for the good of society may be vastly developed, though mainly on new lines bearing directly on the nature of marriage and the family. Of this function some further mention will presently be made.
More threatening to the solidarity of the family is believed to be the individualistic tendencies arising in existing urban and economic life.[785]With the rise of corporate and associated industry comes a weakening of the intimacy of home ties. Through the division of labor the "family hearth-stone" is fast becoming a mere temporary meeting-placeof individual wage-earners. The congestion of population in cities is forcing into being new and lower modes of life. The tenement and the "sweating system" are destructive of the home. Neither the lodging-house, the "flat," nor the "apartment" affords an ideal environment for domestic joys. In the vast hives of Paris, London, or New York even families of the relatively well-to-do have small opportunity to flourish—for self-culture and self-enjoyment. To the children of the slum the street is a perilous nursery. For them squalor, disease, and sordid vice have supplanted the traditional blessings of the family sanctuary. The cramped, artificial, and transient associations of the boarding-house are a wretched substitute for the privacy of the separate household.[786]For very many men club life has stronger allurements than the connubial partnership. Prostitution advances with alarming speed. For the poor, sometimes for the rich, the great city has many interests and many places more attractive than the home circle. The love of selfish indulgence and the spirit of commercial greed, not less than grinding penury, restrain men and women from wedlock. Yet the urban environment has also the opposite effect. In the crowded, heterogeneous, and shifting population of the great towns marriages are often lightly made and as lightly dissolved. Indeed, the remarkable mobility of the American people, the habit of frequent migration, under the powerful incentives of industrial enterprise, gold-hunting, or other adventure, and under favor of the marvelously developed means of swift transportation, will account in no small degree for the laxity of matrimonial and family ties in the UnitedStates. May not one gather courage even from this untoward circumstance? Assuredly the present thus clearly appears to be an age of transition to a more stable condition of social life. Furthermore, the perils to the family of the kind under review need not be fatal. They are inherent mainly in economic institutions which may be scientifically studied and intelligently brought into harmony with the requirements of the social order. Already in great municipal centers, through improved facilities for rapid transit, the evils resulting from dense population are being somewhat ameliorated. Of a truth, every penny's reduction in street-railway fares means for the family of small means a better chance for pure air, sound health, and a separate home in the suburbs. The dispersion of the city over a broader area at once cheapens and raises the standard of living. Every hour's reduction in the period of daily toil potentially gives more leisure for building, adorning, and enjoying the home.
To the socialist the monogamic family in its present form is decidedly a failure. "To those who would substitute common ownership for industrial liberty, the institution of the family presents one of the most persistent obstacles. Domestic unity is inconsistent with the absolute social unity vested in the state."[787]The larger social body must be composed of individual members, free and equal; and it will not tolerate within itself a smaller body with special group-interests of its own, much less with any vestige of coercive authority over its constituent parts. There must be noimperium in imperio. Writers like Engels[788]seek consolation and support in Bachofen's theory of a universal stage of mother-right before the monogamic family with the institution of private property had brought domestic slavery intothe world. They "hold that the monogamic family is a relic of decaying civilization. All ideas on which it rests, the subordination and dependence of women, the ownership of children, the belief in the sacredness of marriage as a divine institution, above all respect for the individual ownership of property and the rights of inheritance as permanent elements in our social organization—have been undermined. The foundations are sapped and the superstructure is ready to topple in."[789]
Woman in particular has been the devoted victim of the greed of individual possession upon which the monogamic family rests. "Far back in history," according to Edward Carpenter, "at a time when in the early societies the thought of inequality had hardly arisen, it would appear that the female, in her own way—as sole authenticator of birth and parentage, as guardian of the household, as inventress of agriculture and the peaceful arts, as priestess and prophetess or sharer in the councils of the tribe—was as powerful as man in his, and sometimes even more so. But from thence down to today what centuries of repression, of slavehood, of dumbness, of obscurity have been her lot!"[790]
Under socialism, declare Morris and Bax, marriage and the family will be affected "firstly in economics and secondly in ethics. The present marriage system is based on the general supposition of economic dependence of the woman on the man, and the consequent necessity of his making provision for her." In the new social order this degrading condition must disappear. "Property in children would cease to exist, and every infant that came into the world would be born into full citizenship, and would enjoy all its advantages, whatever the conduct of its parents might be. Thus a newdevelopment of the family would take place, on the basis, not of a predominant life-long business arrangement, to be formally and nominally held to, irrespective of circumstances, but on mutual inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will of either party." Thus a higher morality would be sanctioned. There would be no "vestige of reprobation for dissolving one tie and forming another."[791]
A similar demand for liberty is made by Laurence Gronlund. Economically "the coming commonwealth" will place woman "on an equal footing with man." But she will be "equal," not "alike;" for in the new society the sexes will no longer be free industrial competitors, but each will have its special vocation. Physiological differences will not be ignored. "Woman will become a functionary, she will have suitable employment given her, and be rewarded according to results, just the same as men." Like men she will have suffrage, not as a right or a privilege, but as a trust. "The new order will necessarily, by the mere working of its economic principles, considerably modify" the marriage relation; and "is that relation such an ideal one now, that it would be a sacrilege to touch it? Is marriage not now, at bottom, an establishment for the support of woman? Is not maintenance the price which the husband pays for the appendage to himself? And because the supply generally exceeds the demand—that is, the effective demand—has woman not often to accept the offer of the first man who seems able to perform this pecuniary obligation?" If it be objected that this is taking "rather a commercial view" of the "holy" relation, is not, "as a matter of fact, marriage regarded by altogether too many as a commercial institution? Do not, in fact, the total of young women form a matrimonial market, regulated by demand and supply?" "Now the Co-operative Commonwealth will dissipate this horror," enablingevery healthy adult man and woman to find a mate. Thus, contrary to false charges, socialists are not trying to destroy the family: "they want to enable every man and woman to form a happy family!" Modern democracy revolts against the patriarchal constitution of the family, upon whose model all feudal and ancient societies were organized. In the "very nature of things family-supremacy will be absolutely incompatible with an interdependent, a solidaric, commonwealth; for in such a state the first object of education must be to establish in the minds of the children an indissoluble association between their individual happiness and the good of all."[792]
The manifold social evils which take their rise directly or indirectly in marriage as it is—be the actual causes what they may—have always justly aroused the unsparing criticism of socialistic writers. Thus to Robert Owen—whose pure life was unreservedly and courageously devoted to the social good, as he understood it—marriage was a member of his "trinity of causes of crime and immorality among mankind."[793]With almost the fanatical zeal of an apostle of a new religion, he railed at the "single" family.[794]He proclaimed the glad tidings of the swift approach of the new moral order. Then "the imaginative laws of the marriages of the priesthood must be among the first to be abolished, by reason of their extended injurious influence upon human nature, poisoning all the sources of the most valuable qualities which Nature has given to infant man. These marriages have dried up the fountain of truth in human nature; theyperpetually insinuate that man can love and hate at his pleasure, and that to be virtuous he must live according to the dictates of the laws and ceremonies devised by the priesthood, that he must hate according to the same dictation, and that if he does not thus love and hate, he is vicious, and he will be eternally punished in another world," while on earth he will suffer from the human laws and by the public opinion which priests have inspired.[795]Under the new moral order all this will be changed. Marriages will be more lasting than now. "Every individual will be trained and educated, to have all his powers cultivated in the most superior manner known; cultivated too under a new combination of external objects, purposely formed, to bring into constant exercise the best and most lovely qualities only of human nature." Wealth for all will be "produced in superfluity." Therefore all will be "equal in their education and condition," and without any distinction except as to age. "There will be then no motive or inducement for any parties to unite, except from pure affection arising from the most unreserved knowledge of each other's character.... There will be no artificial obstacles in the way of permanent happy unions of the sexes; for ... the affections will receive every aid which can be devised to induce them to be permanent;" and the wedded pair "will be placed as far as possible in the condition of lovers during their lives." In "some partial instances," however, happiness might not even thus be secured. In such event, "without any severance of friendship between the parties, a separation may be made, the least injurious to them and the most beneficial to the interests of society."[796]In fine, Robert Owen's book, although often vague in expression and violent in tone, contains in its statements,and still more in its suggestions, practically the whole program of later socialistic writings on the subject of marriage and the family, except the argument based on historical evolution.[797]
Robert Dale Owen followed in his father's footsteps. He finds even the Haytian institution of "placement"—an informal union made and dissolved at the pleasure of the contracting persons—far superior in its morality and its stability to the sacramental marriage which exists by its side.[798]
August Bebel, in his able book onWoman and Socialism, draws a powerful indictment of matrimonial relations under the existing order. To this source, in his view, may be traced the prevalence of sexual crimes and the most dangerous tendencies now threatening the integrity of society. Infanticide, abortion, and prostitution; the decline in the birth and marriage rates; the increase in the number of divorces; the subjection of woman—all these, he says, are due mainly to the influence of the present "coercive marriage." This is so because that "marriage is an institution bound up in the closest way with the existing social order and with it must stand or fall." Coercive marriage is the creature of economic conditions, the "normal marriage" of the present bourgeois society; and with that society it is already in process of disruption. "Since all these unnatural conditions, being especially harmful to woman, are grounded in the nature of thebourgeois society and are growing with its duration, that society is proving itself incapable of remedying the evil and of emancipating woman. Another social order is therefore needful for this purpose." In the new state, economically and socially, woman will be entirely independent. She will no longer be the subject of authority and of exploitation; but, free and equal by man's side she will become "mistress of her own destiny."[799]
Whatever may be thought of the remedy suggested by socialistic writers, whether or not our only hope lies in the co-operative commonwealth, it is certain that they have rendered an important public service. They have earnestly studied and set forth the actual facts. With unsparing hand they have laid bare the flaws in our domestic institutions as they really exist. They have clearly proved that the problems of marriage and the family can be solved only by grasping their relations to the economic system. They have shown that progress lies along the line of the complete emancipation of woman and the absolute equality of the sexes in marriage. In accomplishing all this they have in effect done much to arouse in the popular mind a loftier ideal of wedded life.
The liberation of woman in every one of its aspects profoundly involves the destiny of the family. It signifies in all the larger activities of life the relative individualization of one-half of human kind. This means, of course, a weakening of the solidarity of the family group, so far as its cohesion is dependent on the remnants of mediæval marital authority. Will the ultimate dissolution of the family thus become the price of equality and freedom? Or rather, is it not almost certain that in the more salubrious air of freedomand equality there is being evolved a higher type of the family, knit together by ties—sexual, moral, and spiritual—far more tenacious than those fostered by the régime of subjection? How remarkable, in England as well as in America, is the revolution already accomplished! Few facts in social history are more instructive than the change which has taken place in the tone of the literature dealing with woman and her relations to marriage and the family. In the eighteenth century and until far down into the nineteenth it is for the most part utterly frivolous or sentimental. Vapid satire abounds. Erotic or facetious verse at the expense of the "fair sex" or "wedded love" finds ready popular response. Even in what is meant for earnest discussion woman is treated as a helpless being, to be petted, cajoled, or corrected, not too harshly, by her superior lord; or else she is edified with endless lectures on the sacred duty of guarding her virtue—a fact which throws a lurid and unintentional light on the moral standards of the age. Imagine anEssay on Old Maids,[800]tediously spun out in three volumes; or a book like Eliza Haywood'sFemale Spectator,[801]which,although in four volumes, had already reached its seventh edition in 1771.
Nevertheless, the beginning of an efficient agitation for woman's rights was then made. As early as 1696 appeared Mary Astell's vigorousDefense of the Female Sex, further developing views which she had expressed two years earlier.[802]The next year Defoe, advocating an "academy for women," made a strong plea for the equal education of the sexes.[803]A singularly clear and incisive exposure of theHardships of the English Laws in relation to Wiveswas published in 1735. The writer, apparently a woman, while protesting that her adversaries for want of arguments resort to "points of wit, smart jests, and all-confounding laughter," presents many striking proofs from judicial annals and elsewhere to show that in England the "estate of wives is more disadvantageous than slavery itself;" that they "may be made prisoners for life at the discretion of their domestick governors;" and that they "have no property, neither in their own persons, children, or fortunes."[804]In 1739 an anonymous writer, signing herself "Sophia," produced a forcefulVindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem with the Men, in which, appealing to "rectified reason," she urged that difference in sex relates to the "propagation of human nature," whereas in "soul there is no sex," and diversity must therefore come from education and environment.[805]Mary Wollstonecraft's better known and much more elaborateVindication of the Rights of Woman,[806]published in 1792, was therefore not without helpful predecessors. But it is immensely superior to them in its literary power and its intellectual grasp. The fearless, direct, and unaffected way in which the subject is handled, especially the questions of sex and education, discloses the dawn of a new era of discussion. More clearly than ever before the liberation of woman appears as a sociological problem of the greatest moment to mankind. True, much space is devoted to combating objections which may now seem trivial; but to the average mind of Mary Wollstonecraft's day they were by no means trivial, and they had to be cleared away before the full light could come in.
The foundations were thus laid upon which, chiefly during the last half-century,[807]a vast literary superstructure—controversial,historical, and scientific—has been erected; a many-sided literature worthily embodying the thought of a great transitional stage in social progress. The opponents of woman's liberation have been forced to choose new weapons. Satire and mockery are no longer in vogue. Both sides are very much in earnest. The tone of present discussion is nothing if not serious. Moreover, while the battle for sexual equality in the family and in the state is very far from being yet fought out, the ultimate victory seems already assured.
It would, indeed, be very strange if some incidental harm should not result from the veritable revolution in the condition of American women which little more than a generation has produced. This is the inevitable penalty which social progress has always to pay. Yet in the present case the transitional loss to the family or to the larger social body is exceedingly slight compared even with the immediate gain. This is especially true of woman's new intellectual life with all its manifold activities. It matters not whether she is showing herself mentally man's equal. If any justification of her new rôle were needed it might suffice to affirm that she has precisely the same right as man to free and unhampered self-development in whatever direction and in whatever manner she herself shall find most conducive to her happiness. But it is amply justified by its social results. It cannot be seriously doubted that woman's admission to equal privilege of higher education is enabling her better to share with man in doing the world's work. Besides, in spite of the vain imaginings of misogynisticphilosophers,[808]the problem of special sexual function in its relation to mental capacity is being settled in woman's favor. "Science," declares Lourbet, in completing his valuable survey, "is incapable of demonstrating the 'irremediable' mental inferiority of woman.... The pretended antagonism between mental power and sexual power, which does not withstand rigorous analysis, appears definitively to be destroyed by experience, by the tangible facts which incessantly strike the eye."[809]Herbert Spencer reaches the conclusion that "were liberties to be adjusted to abilities, the adjustment, even could we make it, would have to be made irrespective of sex."[810]
It is singular what acute anxiety is felt by adherents of the old régime[811]lest woman's new intellectual life should prove disastrous to her physical constitution, unmindful of the fact that even now for the majority of married women the burdens of the orthodox "natural sphere" are far moreharmful. The tables are decidedly turned by a radical writer who with truth declares that "evidence is rapidly accumulating which makes it almost impossible to deny that the feminine constitution has been disastrously injured during the long ages of patriarchal rule, and that this beloved 'sphere' of woman, where she was thought so safe and happy, has, in fact, been a very seed-bed of disease and misery and wrong;" that "through these ages of overstrain of every kind—physical, emotional, nervous—one set of faculties being in perpetual activity while the others lay dormant, woman has fallen into a state that is more or less ailing and diseased; that upon her shoulders has been laid the penalty of the injustice and selfishness of men."[812]Even if the participation of woman in the mental activities and the public vocations which men have hitherto monopolized should prove harmful to her, has she not a right to discover the fact by experience? "I consider it presumptuous," said John Stuart Mill in the outset of the organized emancipation movement, "in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised, and no one can safely pronounce that if woman's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves."[813]
It is vain for "scientific optimism" to seek in "nature" a justification for woman's sexual subjection. "Independently... of its false facts and false premises, this pretended scientific defense of the undue inequality of the sexes in man is fundamentally unsound in resting upon a thoroughly false assumption, which is only the more pernicious because widely prevalent. It assumes that whatever exists in nature must be the best possible state.... The only practical use to which we put science is toimprove upon nature, to control all classes of forces, social forces included, to the end of bettering the conditions under which we inhabit the earth. This is true civilization, and all of it."[814]
The fear that the education of woman, in connection with her growing economic independence, will prove harmful to society through her refusal of matrimony or maternity appears equally groundless. According to Dike, "the demand for her enfranchisement, either as a right or on the ground of expediency, grows out of this way of treating her as an individual whose relations to society are less a matter of condition and more of personal choice. And this principle is carried into a sphere entirely her own. A partial loss of capacity for maternity has, it is said, already befallen American women; and the voluntary refusal of its responsibilities is the lament of the physician and the moralist."[815]It is true that the birth-rate is falling.[816]So far as this depends upon male sensuality, a prevalent cause of sterility; upon selfish love of ease and luxury—of which men even more than women are guilty; or upon the disastrous influence of thepresent extremes of wealth and poverty—of which women as well as men are the victims—it is a serious evil which may well cause us anxiety; but so far as it is the result of the desire for fewer but better-born children—for which, let us hope, the advancing culture of woman may in part be responsible—it is in fact a positive social good.[817]It is true also that, while fewer and fewer marriages in proportion to the population are taking place, men as well as women are marrying later and later in life.[818]Here again, for the reasons just mentioned, the results are both good and bad. Certain it is that early marriages and excessive child-bearing have been the twin causes of much injury to the human race. "To the superficial observer," declares a writer very conservative as to the effects of woman's emancipation, "it may appear that every marriage must enrich the state, and that early marriages must lessen the amount of sexual immorality, but inquiry will prove conclusively how fallacious are those views. Early marriages certainly tend to the production of large families, but then a family, to be a source of wealth to the state, must at least be self-supporting, which is exactly what the feeble, degenerate children of the great mass of our early marriages are not. They are brought forth ill-developed and unhealthy; their immature, improvident parents are unable to either feed or educate them as they ought to be fed and educated; hence, instead of being a source of wealth to the state, they prove a serious drain upon her resources. A large percentage of these miserable children succumb during infancy, but a great number drag out a pitiful existence,only to become inmates of our workhouses and infirmaries, our asylums and prisons, and, after being supported at the public expense for a longer or shorter period, to die prematurely, leaving the state poorer than they found it and no better. It is indeed a small percentage of the children of the immature that ever become robust useful, self-supporting citizens."[819]
It is not marriage or maternity which educated women are shunning; but they are declining to view marriage as their sole vocation or to become merely child-bearing animals. Let us not worry about the destiny of college women.[820]It is simply wrong wedlock which they are avoiding. They have, suggests Muirhead, a careful regard for the "kind" of marriage. They are determined to have only "the genuine article." They "look in marriage not only for the old fashioned 'union of hearts,' but for the union of heart and head in some serious interest which will survive the mere attractions of sex and form a solid bond of union even in the absence of others which, like the birth of children, depend on fortune." So "far from being hostile" to the family, "they are only preparing the way for a purer and more beneficent form of family life." The "maternal instinct is happily not confined to the uneducated."[821]The rise of amore refined sentiment of love has become at once a check and an incentive to marriage.[822]Long ago Mrs. John Stuart Mill explained how essential are knowledge and equality to render woman the real companion of man in the struggle for existence; how the subjection and ignorance of the wife degrade not only her own character, but that of the husband as well. "There is hardly any situation more unfavorable to the maintenance of elevation of character, or force of intellect, than to live in the society, and seek by preference the sympathy, of inferiors in mental endowments."[823]
If woman's even partnership with man in the nurture of the family and in facing the exigencies of external life depends mainly on equal education, never was such education more urgently required than at the present hour. Social and industrial problems are constantly demanding higher and higher mental training for their solution. The same is true of the problem of the family. It is very largely a question of reform and development in home education. Clearly, then, husband and wife have great need of intelligent sympathy and counsel in the discharge of their joint, yet partially differentiated, tasks. Hence, it should be the highfunction of public education to promote this healthy companionship in social duty. Furthermore, American experience appears to show that it can best do so by training young men and women together. Indeed, in this regard the sociological value of coeducation is very important. Theoretically it seems reasonable to assume that those who are to work together in later life may gain some advantage by spending the years of study side by side. The practical result of coeducation in the western states, where it has been given the freest opportunity, appears to demonstrate that such is actually the case. The majority of those who have had extended experience, after making all due allowance for special difficulties to be surmounted, are emphatic in their opinion that mentally and morally both sexes are the gainers by it, as compared with training in separate institutions.[824]It is true that eventually marriages very often result from such associations. That is precisely the gist of the matter. Are not the conditions entirely favorable to the fostering of happy unions? Under what better auspices can attachments be formed than when young men and women are learning to gauge each other's character through the varied social and intellectual rivalries of the years of scholastic life?
Educational equality, however, is but one aspect of the movement for woman's liberation. There are other factors of the ideal partnership of the sexes in the uplifting of society. Intellectual emancipation is proceeding, and necessarily must proceed, hand in hand with political and economic emancipation. The three movements are in largemeasure blended and interdependent. The participation of woman in the new vocations—industrial, artistic, professional, or administrative—implies a great advance in mental training. It means a distinct unfoldment of faculties and character. "No sociological change equal in importance to this clearly marked improvement of an entire sex has ever taken place in one century."[825]It is a revolution in which one-half of the human race is becoming an equal factor with the other in intellectual and economic production. At last woman is gaining a share in the social consciousness; she is entering into the social organization as a new and regenerative force. Doubtless, in the process of readjusting new functions and conditions to the old some temporary harm may ensue. Yet happily the alarm is subsiding lest by her entrance on the new vocations woman should permanently wreck her physical constitution, refuse to marry, or cause industrial disaster through over-competition.[826]With fargreater justice a century ago it was complained that the "intrusion of men-traders" into woman's work was driving her to destitution and thus fostering the "social evil."[827]The callings into which women are charged with "intruding" were, many of them, women's callings before they were men's.