The Family and its Members Part 3

The apartment house has set the fashion of simplification and reduction of necessary personal service in the home. The apartment house, with its continuous hot water, its ready heat and its relief from care of sidewalks, halls and stairs, and with its hour-service at command is obviously becoming a favorite place to live in. Especially do women like it. The multiple house, however, does not seem the best place for children after the earliest months of infancy, and in many such houses they are openly "not wanted." The multiple house has also many disadvantages from the social side in the lack of home a.s.sociations which support family affection. They are also for the most part in localities where people are brought together without plan or friendship and hence can not cultivate that neighborliness which, so far in the history of the race, has been a nursery of the community spirit.

=The Apartment House and the Family.=--The apartment house seems to be the best place for those families in which all the adult members are busy at some vocation, and in which the children are of age to profit by educational opportunities usually found only in cities. In such families the burdens of the person who is in command of the family comfort as to food and raiment and house-keeping are reduced to the lowest terms. If to the usual apartment house provisions for aids to the housemother are added, what is now offered in some places, namely, the "Auto-Service for Meals," whereby the princ.i.p.al meal, at least, the dinner, is brought to the door ready to place on the table and all cooking dishes hard to wash are returned to the centre of supply to be prepared for another service, then, indeed, can all the members take turns in rendering the small offices for family comfort still required and each go about his or her special vocation at will. This seems to be the goal of many progressive minds, although personal taste is seldom satisfied by "cooperative" cooking.

It must be remembered by all, that the sort of family pictured above has in it no children of ages requiring freedom of motion and constant attention (unless, indeed, "the boarding-school in the country" for all over four or five years is contemplated). It has in it no aged whose needs in diet and in physical comfort vary from the usual. It has in it no chronic invalids and no convalescents, no blind or lame or specially weak requiring special help. It is for the particular benefit, at least, of families of a particular type, of which the cities, with their more varied facilities, contain an unusual proportion. For the family of the ordinary type, with its many differing needs and its variety of claim upon some one person for its central direction and service, the various aids from without which have been indicated serve rather to relieve from excessive burdens than to remove altogether the special obligations of the woman-head of the family.

Moreover, the time left to the average housemother from the old housework by the new helps in that work is, in part at least, mortgaged in advance to social effort to make the new commercial aids to family service actual helps and not hindrances to family health and comfort. The food supply drawn upon must be sharply investigated lest it contain deleterious substances or be denuded of nourishing quality.

The ready-made clothing must be bought with knowledge and constant vigilance against cheating in material or in construction or in sins of fashion against health and beauty. The labor-saving devices of every sort must be put to intelligent test and require specific training for most efficient use. The family budget must be more carefully planned and more heroically maintained at prudent levels.

The public service of markets, transportation facilities and functions of "middlemen" must be understood and controlled as never before.

Above all, the pressure of uniformity must be resisted if the offered supply of the essentials of life prove inadequate to the deepest needs, or the scale of living be too ambitiously set by the housing facilities adjusted to the ideas and claims of landlords rather than to the needs of family life.

Hence we may say that the old forms of effort by which mothers fed and clothed and sheltered their children led directly to absorption of interest, energy and conscientious labor within the house. The new forms of effort by which these essentials of healthful and comfortable living are secured lead directly to all manner of cooperative social adjustments of supply to demand. The standard of demand, however, let it never be forgotten, is made and maintained within the intimate family circle itself, and the personal intelligence and ethical maturity of the housemothers, who form the major purchasing cla.s.s of every civilized community, determine that standard. For that great enterprise of high standardization the same personal devotion to the central demands of life is required in the average modern woman which made the ancient mother so great a leader in primitive culture. The new aids to the housemother's task may give her a better chance than any women ever had before to see the real social significance of the personal offices of home life. The poets have seen it all through the centuries and have pictured the myth G.o.ddesses bringing the cup and the bread and the fruit and weaving the web of ceremonial or of simple garment in household poetry. All human need for sustenance and the nurture of our physical being has made the wife the loaf-giver and the mother a nourisher of the young, and as such artists have portrayed her.

We may say "our father-land," but we always say "our mother-earth." To those who see clearly the value of the ancient family rite of the meal alone together, to which it may well be every member of the family has made a distinct contribution; to those to whom the private table still appeals and who still appreciate the taste and quality of every purchase made for each individual member of the intimate group (things taking time and thought most often of the mother), the individual home has meanings that are not lost but rather are growing in spiritual importance as the drudgery of the household is lessened.

=New Uses of Electric Power.=--To-day another great contribution to the spiritual value of the private household ministrations is offered in the new uses of electric power. Already the "servantless house" is widely advertised. Already the grave difficulties in household adjustment made by the growing unwillingness of competent girls and women to do anything in the households of strangers, and thereby giving rise to the serious "servant-girl problem" for people of limited means, are being mitigated by the new devices of this modern wizard of electricity. It seems to many of us that had this magician been discovered before the invention of steam-power-driven machinery the whole tendency of modern industry would have been turned not so absolutely, if at all, toward the factory. Such modifications of domestic manufacture and handicraft as right use of electricity could have initiated, might have prevented some of the social and economic evils of our present labor world. However that may be, it is clear that now the modern housewife has at her hand the means of easy control of her special family duties such as no ancient woman could have conceived. The movement henceforward, therefore, we must believe, is toward such lessening of household burdens by mechanical means, and such simplification of household requirements by new family ideals as will make every woman of ordinary strength and of even moderate capacity and training so sure a master of essentials in that field that she can dispense with the "help" that so often now hinders the real family life and make the home more truly the private shrine of affection and of mutual aid than it has ever been before.

=Certain Duties the Mother Cannot Delegate= if she would hand on the torch of life the brighter for her handling. Doctor Devine has well said that "the only satisfactory method of getting babies safely through the first years of life is the strictly individualistic plan of attention to each one by its own mother." The proof of this is in the death-rate of infants in foundling asylums and in other forms of communal care even where scientific knowledge has been invoked and humane feeling exercised. To keep babies alive and well is a prerequisite to all later development, and happiness seems to be a necessary foundation for such preservation of their life and health.

So far in human experience babies have declined with one accord to be happy unless some one person was constantly devoted to their welfare.

That person may be a "hired expert," it is true, but the successful nurse must have the mother-feeling. Moreover, it is now agreed that the best physical stamina is secured by mothers breast-feeding their own babies, and all manner of incentives, even to state subsidies, are being used to lead women to this personal office.

If mothers thus nurse their babies they must come close to them in affectional contact, and it is through affectional contact more than in any other way that babies seem to thrive. No one can claim that ability to care for and bring up children "comes by nature." The affectional tie does, however, give an added earnestness to the desire to learn how to minister wisely and well to the needs of the child.

That same affectional tie on the part of the mother is shown in a return of affection from the child. Such personal ministrations of the mother to the child have also a great effect in forming the whole character in later life. One may worship from a distance, and the capacity to justly estimate excellence grows with maturity. But the child knows best those who serve his needs most intimately and gives his love to that person.

=The Mother's Compensation for Personal Service.=--There is much compensation, therefore, for the woman who gives herself to her child in old-fashioned ways of personal service. She gets the charm and the allurement of the growing bud on life's tree. If she misses that she loses something of her birthright and some "subst.i.tute-mother" gets something of satisfaction from the child that she does not.

=Early Drill in Personal Habits.=--The third essential of the inherited obligation of mothers to their children is the early drill in personal habits that are required for health and decency and propriety in any given time and place. For this it is an absolute necessity that either the mother so serve herself or that she secure some subst.i.tute-mother of refinement, knowledge, affection and devotion which make her an equal in the family circle. How many nurses fulfil that demand? Many, even of those least recognized by their employers as ent.i.tled to special grat.i.tude and appreciation. The point to be noted is, however, that even if experts for "hour-service" as nursery governess could be had in sufficient numbers and even if the majority of families could financially meet the expense of those fully competent, such service would not, as a rule, meet the needs of children under three or four years. It is a constant task, not, indeed, requiring every minute of time, but requiring constant readiness to serve at need both day and night to start an infant along the required rules of daily habit. And that task does not lend itself to the conditions of group-teaching or to the schedule of shared service of visiting experts. Some one must be on the job all the time or it is not accomplished with success, although skilled personal care-takers can get fine results in gradually lessened attention by the time the baby becomes the child.

If there are several children in a family, however, the most competent mother, or subst.i.tute-mother, has the process to repeat with each newcomer, so that for every child we may reckon at least two years of very constant attention if the bodily habits of health and propriety and the first steps in social training for agreeable membership in the family are to be well taken. The public school is full of children for whom the teachers heroically try to make up for lacks in this intimate home-training. It may be that some people view with pleasure a "movie picture" in which large numbers of children go through a "toothbrush drill," but to some of us it is a sorry exhibit. When Booker Washington opened Tuskegee he required only a toothbrush as entrance fee and equipment, and the use of that implement had to be explained and almost all other agencies for personal neatness and physical care of the body to be offered and their use enforced. This was the step of a whole race toward civilization, a step which the slave condition had not made possible before for the field-hands of the South. The people coming to us from all the peasant cla.s.ses of Europe and the East have many of them lacked also the chance to be drilled in the things that belong to private and personal habit demanded by our civilization. It may be that for such the public school is the only medium for the belated acquirement of such habits; but if publicity in drill and lack of reserve and modesty be the price paid for wholesale instruction it may injure those with good breeding at command in their own homes by lowering their standards, even while it helps upward those who need the school baths and the school treatment of heads and throats and teeth and all manner of personal care. It is not easy to get what children require in these particulars in the crowded tenement. It may be impossible in the congested quarters of a great city. But the need thus pathetically shown in the children of many social strata in the United States indicates that not only should there be own mothers or subst.i.tute-mothers for every little child to start each aright along the way of life but every own mother or subst.i.tute-mother should have a decent place to live in so that all needed drill may be conducted in dignified privacy and in an atmosphere required for right results. The housing problem reaches back to the primal need to have a suitable living-place into which to put every home.

=Early Practice in Walking, Talking, Obedience, and Imitation.=--The fourth obligation which the past has laid upon the modern mother is to teach the little child to walk, to talk, to obey, and to imitate. All these are a part of the habit-drill of the very earliest years. They are bound up with the acquirement of those personal habits of health and propriety before indicated. It is not for nothing that women from the oldest time have been noted for their power of speech and habit of talking. They have had to give every little child the start toward that most indispensable key to all knowledge, the use and understanding of language. And the mother, or the woman who acts for the mother, knows what the child says before any one else can understand his fumbling at speech. Later the mother and the father and other devoted members of the family have to interpret the child's language to all others until he gets accustomed to this difficult art.

In learning to walk it is the desire to get closer to those most beloved that helps the child to balance on his feet and try the fearful voyage across the room to where father or mother waits to welcome his approach. And here in most families the mother has the practice in hand far more hours in the day than any one else in the family. Yet for talking and walking in families where there are several children the most efficient instruction of the youngest is often given by the older brothers and sisters. The first child has all to do or to try to do alone; the only child has to pioneer all through childhood and youth so far as his own family life is concerned, but the child in a family of several children learns almost by unconscious absorption from those just a step in advance of his own attempts.

Where there are children too near in age the inevitable jealousy or unhappiness of the baby too soon pushed from his throne defeats this end of easy accomplishment through imitation. Where there are too many children in the family for the father to properly support, or the mother to healthfully or happily care for, the nearness of age often means friction and not comradeship. Where in such families the older children act as "little fathers" or "little mothers" they may be defrauded of a child's right to care-free leisure or develop a tyrannous control of the younger ones far from helpful to the development of either. The coming of new members to the family, however, in right s.p.a.cing and right conditions, means that each child gets the benefit of all the teaching each other child receives and makes it far easier for all to learn the ways of life. The art of obedience which is learned in such conditions is a share in a family public opinion, outlined, indeed, by the parents, but maintained by all the younger members of the group. Not that the same elements enter into the early character-drill of each child. There are as many temperaments and as many capacities and as many differing reactions to like conditions in any family, as a general thing, as there are children to be considered. This difference, however, while it makes family discipline more difficult, makes it also usually more effective, for it insures that parents shall study reasons for rules and try at least to reach an obvious basis for them in personal and social well-being rather than in the parents' will. This leads the way to later democracy by stimulating the sense of justice and the sense of individualistic right, together with the sense of mutual tolerance and mutual aid in the very beginnings of family living together.

=Special Responsibility of the Average Mother.=--The burden of this preliminary training toward social order and social welfare rests to-day more heavily upon the mother than upon any one else, even the father. He often has pressing business down-town whenever hard questions of family discipline must be faced. He is often so overburdened with the financial support of the family that he cannot give time or attention necessary to the constant helping of children to escape from the savage to the civilized, from the selfish to the helpful, from the ignorant to the ever-learning. At any rate, just as many men "keep their religion in their wife's name," so, many fathers, although successfully appealed to as final authority in larger concerns of family order, leave the details of character-drill of all their younger children in the hands of the mother.

What teachers can do in school comes later in life than the period of which we now speak. Even the kindergarten, with its short hours and its more artificial life, only shows each day a picture of what the child may do later on in his own self-culture. The home nursery is the real place of actual experience for the average child, with the family table and the intimate a.s.sociation with father and mother and brother and sister. These make a school of preeminent importance to the later training.

=Women's Relation to More Formal Education.=--The fifth obligation which the modern mother inherits from the ages is that relating to the more formal education of all girls and of all little boys in the folk-lore, the vocational skill, and the methods of social arrangement which set moral fashions and demand personal obedience to the social order into which one is born. This obligation is so largely shared to-day that many see in it no special burden for the modern mother.

The school training once so largely within the home, or for the older boys so definitely obtained in fraternities or war-groups of men, is now a separate inst.i.tution. The customs, tribal or national, that once ruled the family-training are now solidified and definitely outlined in laws written on statute books. The illiterate parent cannot, if he would, disobey the compulsory school law. The poverty-stricken parent must either starve himself to feed his children according to the demands of the health board or he must accept public or private charity for their sustenance according to modern demands. The ignorant parent must submit to treatment of his children by public nurse or doctor of whom he may be afraid. The parent not ignorant, but differing from the majority as to what will prevent disease or cure it, must accept the public rule.

The decay of domestic industry and the growth of the factory system have given rise to so many and serious social dangers that laws are now pa.s.sed forbidding home manufacture on grounds of need to abolish sweatshop conditions, although to many such prohibition seems, and to some may be, the denial of parental moral protection to children and youth in families of the very poor. The training for self-supporting work, which came about so naturally from within the household in the handicraft stage of industry, now requires many public agencies of education. The new social "mores" accepted by the majority and supported by law and court may be directly opposed to the inherited ideal of right living of large numbers of people in any given locality, especially in the United States with our large immigrant population.

To have education so much a public concern seems to many to so minimize the mother's share in it that she is placed in the same general relation as the father to what was once her special duty.

Ideally, both parents are equally bound to decide all questions concerning the formal education of their children within the limits of personal choice made possible by the public provisions of which all parents may now take advantage. In some favored families this really occurs. Actually, however, in most families the mother has more leisure to learn of possible opportunities, to influence possible improvement, and, above all, to help to wise individual choice in the use by the family of these socially provided educational facilities than has the father. She is also now more likely to belong to a.s.sociations or clubs or cla.s.ses for adult study in which educational problems are discussed than is he, and often more intimately acquainted with children's desires or needs in education.

=Women's Relation to Educational Agencies.=--A glance at the list of national and local a.s.sociations for the study and application of educational science and art will show the vast majority of women over men (in the United States at least) who are trying to find out what real education in modern life should be and how to secure that best training for their own children and for the children of all. The educational obligation is, therefore, not taken from the average mother's duty; it has changed its form only and often is the more difficult to meet successfully because of the high specialization of the teachers and the confusion of the school direction. No one would claim that fathers, if loyal and worthy, are less anxious than mothers for the trailing of their children toward successful living. The fact, however, that most mothers stand nearest to the lives of the children make them most often the necessary purveyors of educational opportunities from the public provision to private use.

=The Social Value of Parental Affection.=--Below and within all other gifts to humanity which have come by the way of motherhood's devotion to child-life is that selective and partial affection which secures to each child one adult person at least to whom he or she is supreme in interest. Most normal women feel when they hear the cry of their own new-born that all of life is justly tributary to that one priceless creature who has come at their call out of the mystery of being to travel the difficult road of the generations of mankind. Nor is this inherited tendency toward partial affection a sign of undeveloped or selfish quality in the woman of to-day. It is a provision of nature still supremely useful in helping each tiny atom of the social whole to find and keep its own place in a world of struggle and hardship.

The fear of defeat handicaps many a purpose before it is put to the test. The sense of loneliness drives many to lower companionship when higher is hard to attain. The lack of courage and the paralysis of faith in one's self or in others makes invalid many a nature which might otherwise achieve. To prevent such waste from inner weakness and to "encourage excellence in each individual," to use Doctor Small's fine phrase, we need a childhood saturated with the sense of personal values on the plane of affection. Selfishness may indeed pollute this mainspring of personal power, and selfishness sometimes reaches its acme in motherhood's partiality for its own. The ideal of social solidarity and the claim of all upon each one must never be absent from the family influence if that influence is to be wholesome. The family, however, exists to make a small spot in which there may be a unity found nowhere else, and at the centre of the family life is still the mother.

Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and devotion for every child in the interest of every child? "The community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure for each child his rightful share in that endowment. The main business of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little social permission to do their work by proxy. Many social helps in her task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of the housemother.

=What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new relationship to the home--that of mutual headship with man in the social inst.i.tution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate.

Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring a new relationship to the school--that of learner in the highest educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area.

Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her ancient devotion to child-life.

The ma.s.s of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial order--that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary, instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in domestic handicraft.

Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity, dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancestors. Woman is acquiring a new relationship to the state--that of citizen with full responsibility instead of her old perpetual minority under man's control. Social welfare demands that she take into the body politic the same devotion to the weak and undeveloped, the same patient, wise dependence upon the spiritual elements of justice and wisdom which have made her private motherhood so successful. She must not now, on peril of a social setback, take up man's weapons of selfishness, of violence, of impatient revolution--weapons the best of men have already discarded.

Women should now be clear-sighted enough to see that the world needs from them not the same but different contributions to the upreach and onward march of the race from those elements in which man has excelled. If society-at-large is to become truly a family of those who love and serve each other, then human beings of the mother-s.e.x must take into public life and public service the best they have learned and taught in the individual home. What women most need now is to "retain all the good the past hath had" as they step forward to their full liberty and responsibility in new relationships to life.

QUESTIONS ON THE MOTHER

1. What, in general, have been the social demands upon wives and mothers, and how have these been met in the past?

2. What, if any, of these inherited social demands are now met by social agencies outside of the private family?

3. What, in general, may be defined as the line of demarkation between the private obligations resting still upon mothers for personal service to family life and agencies of public child-care and social standardization?

4. How far is a trend toward minimizing the demand for personal service of the housemother in the private family to be encouraged?

5. If a mother, in average financial condition, has the "three and one-half children" eugenists demand of each family, and does her duty by them in private family life, how much of her time and strength must go into the housemother's service and for what period of years?

6. What amount of time and strength might be left, in the case of strong and competent women, for other vocational work?

7. Is the modern "nursery school" an adequate subst.i.tute for the early home-training? (See report, "A Nursery School Experiment," published by "Bureau of Educational Experiments,"

144 West Thirteenth Street, New York City.)

FOOTNOTES:

[3] (_a_) See, for example, "Conveniences for the Farm Home," Farmers'

Bulletin No. 270, and (_b_) "The Farm Kitchen as a Workshop," Farmers'

Bulletin No. 607.

CHAPTER III

THE FATHER

"Who plants his soul in stalwart sons and daughters keeps on giving His life and vision to his fellow men; His power grows like leaven.

"His children strive to take his spirit up and keep it living; They share with all the love he gave his own, as he had shared, And lives, his love has served, all call him father."