The Family and its Members Part 11

Elizabeth Barrett Browning sang:

"Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!

Our ministering two angels look surprise On one another as they strike athwart Their wings in pa.s.sing."

but her union with Robert Browning showed that they were nearer alike than in her sad humility she had fancied. Jonas Lie, the Norwegian novelist, and his gifted wife, it is said, "knew the felicity of a perfect union," and he himself has testified, "If I have ever written anything of merit, my wife has as great a share in it as myself, and her name should appear on the t.i.tle-page as collaborator." The joint discoveries of the Curies are well known, linking husband and wife together in a great gift to humanity. In humbler circles of the gifted and the talented the married couples are becoming more numerous each decade whose work as well as whose affection binds them together.

=The Supreme Satisfactions of Successful Marriage.=--Take it all in all, although no particular marriage may be "made in heaven," the sort of union that monogamic marriage has worked out at its highest reaches is without a rival in depth of feeling, in satisfaction of a.s.sociation, in wealth of comradeship, and in social value as a foundation for family life and for initial training toward social serviceableness. No wise person can do aught to lessen its opportunity for ethical drill, or for that due mingling of attraction and duty which make all the vital a.s.sociations of human beings helps toward the higher life. No wise person will continue in the ancient error of mistaking show for substance in these weighty matters.

All who believe that the family is an inst.i.tution whose gift to the social order is not yet outgrown and whose possibilities of social value are not yet fully developed, must work to make the right marriages easier to secure, and the wrong ones less easy to be consummated, and to purge the ideals of home of selfishness and of superficiality by constant portrayal of the best in the married life.

The stage and the moving picture should more often portray the world's marriage successes rather than perpetual reproductions of the marriage failures. The novel should more often show how many people save, so as by fire, the dreams of youth in rescue of their married life from threatening ills. Such portrayal would not be against a realistic ideal of art, but a more perfect and balanced use of realism. The rise of people on "stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things"

is quite as dramatic as the succession of falls that land them in the pit of despair. The struggles that succeed are quite as capable of exciting emotional response as are those that fail.

Real life shows a larger measure of successful achievement than of bitter failure, else would life not go on. Marriage at its highest is yet to be used in any adequate measure as the theme of the artist and the stimulant of response to art.

The day will come when "Main Street" will reveal its best and not its worst; its richest, and not its poorest products, for the satisfaction of universal sentiment.

QUESTIONS ON HUSBANDS AND WIVES

1. Are there any subjects upon which husbands and wives must be in substantial agreement in order to secure a successful marriage? If so, what are some of them?

2. Are there any radical differences in belief, respecting religion, politics, education of children, ways of living, business relationship, etc., which marriage may successfully bridge, provided there is genuine and faithful affection? If so, name some of them.

3. How can "engaged" couples make sure that essentials of agreement, and non-essentials of agreement to differ, are well understood in advance?

4. Are there any new spiritual relationships of men and women in marriage made possible by the modern tendency toward the democratization of the family? If so, what are some of them?

FOOTNOTES:

[7] This bill, the so-called "Cable Act," was pa.s.sed September 22, 1922.

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHILDREN OF THE FAMILY

The human being arrives:

"Immense have been the preparations for me, Faithful and friendly the arms that have helped me; Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen; For room to me the stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences to look after what was to hold me; Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me, And forces have been steadily employed to complete and delight me; Now, on this spot I stand with my robust soul."

--WALT WHITMAN.

"The child grows up in a setting of social functions of a type higher always than that of his private accomplishment. He must grow by gradual absorption of copies, patterns and examples."--BALDWIN.

"He is happy who comes with healthy body into the world; much more he who goes with healthy spirit out of it. Nature has implanted within us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety; to bring these to maturity is the object of education. All men require education, and G.o.d has made children unfit for other employments in order that they may have leisure to learn."--COMENIUS.

"The most critical interval of human nature is that between the hour of birth and twelve years of age; this is the time when vice and error may take root without our being possessed of any instrument to destroy them; the first art of education, then, consists neither in teaching virtue nor truth but in guarding the heart from evil and the mind from error."--ROUSSEAU.

"A ladder leading to heaven is let down to every child, but he must be taught to climb it. Education should decide for every child not only what is to be made of its life, but should seek an answer to the question, what was it intended that child should become?"--PESTALOZZI.

"An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy."--OLD PROVERB.

"Come, let us live with our children!"--FROEBEL.

=Conditions to be Secured for Every Child.=--There are several conditions which must be secured for every child to insure that it may be born and reared according to high standards.

These may be listed as follows:

I. Two parents, to secure in advance a favorable social position.

II. A competent mother, to insure his first two or three years of life in health, happiness, and growing power.

III. A competent father, to stand back of the mother and help make a home adequate at least to the minimum of normal life's demands.

IV. Community surroundings that will make possible the successful achievement of parental duty.

V. Census provisions for vital and social statistics that will make it sure that every child is counted in the population of his nation, state, and community, and that he is accounted for in all social relationships.

VI. State protection against industrial exploitation, vicious influences, harmful use of leisure time, and generally unwholesome conditions.

VII. Health standards in the community, fixed by experts and maintained in essentials by public provisions.

VIII. Education standards, fixed by experts and maintained, at least in normal minimum, by community provision.

IX. Such vital relation between the family, the school, the political system, and all cultural opportunities as shall insure to each child his just share of the social inheritance to which all are heir.

=The Need for Two Parents.=--The first point noted is the need of two parents for every child. The illegitimate child is handicapped. It is a sound social movement that aims to make every "slacker" father accept his share of responsibility in the case of the unmarried mother and either marry the woman or give financial aid for the child. It does not thereby secure two actual parents for the child. The orphan child, the half-orphan child is handicapped; more so if bereft of mother than of father, but if the father dies or deserts after marriage, all experience shows that even if the mother lives and is capable and faithful, the child who lacks a father has many difficulties to overcome. The child of parents who have come to dislike each other is seriously handicapped. A forced tie between those who no longer love each other creates an atmosphere often fatal to comfort and happiness and one to which children, sensitive as they are to the feeling of their elders, react most unfavorably. The child of divorced parents is handicapped; perhaps not so often or so seriously as when held for years in an atmosphere of mutual hatred, suspicion, fault-finding, and distrust--handicapped, however, by many social embarra.s.sments, by shock to affection given, perhaps, to both parents equally, and by the often great difficulty of finding a suitable home for the child of the divorced couple. The child that is not wanted and comes into a world hostile to his birth is handicapped in proportion as the influence reaches him at the moment of conception or lessens the power of the parents to give him what he needs before or after he arrives.

There must, then, be two parents, in love, as in law, to start a child right--two parents who live until he has reached age of independent direction and support, two parents who pull together for themselves and for him, two parents who are equally recognized in law as acting for him in guardianship throughout his minority.

The recognition of some of these needs of every child has been more general and intelligent than that of others. For example, the equal guardianship of the father and mother, their mutual responsibility for financial support when financially competent, their equal control over the family life and their common pledge to the community of parental care--this has not been recognized until recently, is not now in many of the States of the Union and perhaps not perfectly in any one.

At an Annual Meeting of the Uniform Laws Commission, at Cleveland, Ohio, Mrs. Catherine Waugh McCulloch, partner with her husband in the firm of McCulloch and McCulloch, Chicago, Illinois, and representing the League of Women Voters, secured an almost unanimous recommendation for uniform laws giving equal guardianship to fathers and to mothers.

As Mrs. McCulloch is the successful mother of four children, besides being Master in Chancery of the Supreme Court of Illinois in Cook County, and has long represented the legal interests of women in the largest organizations of progressive women in the United States, she could, and did, speak with special authority in urging the right of mothers to protect their children on equal terms with fathers, by a "Uniform Joint Guardianship Law."

Some facts have given color to the claim of the extreme feminist that if you can only get the right sort of mother the father is more or less a negligible quant.i.ty. The history of the family, however, proves, if it proves anything, that to actively engage two adults in the business of rearing children is an immense a.s.set to those children.

The two parents insisted upon as foremost necessity for child-care may, however, be of a poor sort, perhaps only furnished with good-will toward their task. Even so, whatever the lacks may be, however small the capacity, feeble the will and poor the purse, however society-at-large has to make up for deficiencies in the parents, it is at least one step toward a successful life to have two recognized parents who mean to do the right thing by their offspring and never fail in love toward each other and toward the children whom they call their own.

=Every Child Should Have a Competent Mother.=--The second demand of child-life is for a competent mother--competent in health, that the baby may get really born alive, competent in nursing and household skill, or in power to secure that skill from others, in order that the baby may be sure of that first long start of two or three years toward physical, mental, and moral sanity and strength. It is in those first years that the child gains power to begin his own conquest of the world at an advantageous point. That many women are not competent physically for even the first test of childbirth we know from many sources of inquiry. The facts brought out in legislative hearings by those urging support for the so-called "Maternity Bill" amply prove this. Taking the figures for New York State alone, in the year 1920 we find a total of thirteen mothers out of every thousand dying in childbirth, with an estimate from physicians that with proper care two-thirds of these women could have been saved. A competent mother, then, physically speaking, means not only one measurably strong but one sufficiently cared for to prevent overstrain before the birth-hour. Again, in New York State alone, we find that eighty-six babies out of every thousand die before they reach the end of their first year. This may be from ignorance on the mother's part, or it may be from her physical weakness unequal to the care of the new baby. It may be there are already too many children near that baby's age who also make heavy demands upon time and energy. It may be that discouragements from unhappy family conditions or worry over economic disabilities sap the mother's vitality. It may be that taints of blood doom the child and the mother. Whatever the cause, it is reason for deep concern that a great state, like New York, for example, has a rate of infant mortality nearly twice as high as that of New Zealand and ranking eleventh in the twenty-three states of the registration area in which the death of babies is set down with care. When we add to this loss the death of at least 25,000 women each year in childbirth, most of whom could have been saved under right conditions, we are still more concerned. Of the 250,000 babies lost last year we are safe in estimating at least one-half whose lives could have been spared with even a minimum care. The effort now making all along the line of social advance to give every child a decent start in life is obviously necessary and wise.

If the mother is proved wholly incompetent in mind or character we have acquired a social right to take her child from her and place it where it can receive better nurture and training. We are beginning to recognize the corollary duty of social aid to all women of good character, motherly feeling, and any fair degree of intelligence in their function of motherhood. There are those hopelessly incompetent who should never be allowed to have children. There are far more with power to bear and rear children successfully whom adverse circ.u.mstances submerge to incompetency. These, we are now learning, must be helped in some way, for society's sake even more than for their own, if they are willing to undertake parental service to the race.

The pa.s.sage of the so-called Sheppard-Towner Bill is one answer in the United States to the right of the child and its mother to life and health. There are those who deplore the tendency to seek for such aid to individuals through the Federal Government. The Governor of New York State, for example, although a man of progressive ideas and liberal point of view, opposed "starting aid to mothers and babies from the Washington end," declaring that work for the "welfare of citizens of any cla.s.s should start at the locality to be benefited."