Читать книгу The Family and its Members - Anna Garlin Spencer - Страница 16

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"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."

From the Tribute, To My Father, by Hornell Hart.

"To dwell in the wide house of the world; to stand in true attitude therein; in success to share one's principles with the people; in failure to live them out alone; to be incorruptible by riches or honor; unchangeable by poverty; unmoved by perils or power—these I call the qualities of a great man."—Mencius.

"For the man who is such as no longer to delay being among the number of the best is like a priest and minister of the gods, using the deity that is planted within him, that which makes a man uncontaminated by any pleasure, unharmed by any pain, untouched by any insult, feeling no wrong, a fighter in the noblest fight, who cannot be overpowered by passion, one dyed deep with justice, understanding that only what belongs to himself is matter for his activity, yet remembering also that every human being is his kinsman, and that to care for all men is according to mans nature."—Marcus Aurelius.

"'Tis not in battles that from youth we train

The governor who must be wise and good.

Wisdom doth live with children round her knees;

Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk

Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk

Of the mind's business; this is the stalk

True power doth grow on."

—Wordsworth.

Historic Background of Fatherhood.—The father seems to have had a precarious attachment to the family in earlier forms of life. As Le Tourneau well says, "The animal family is especially maternal; although father birds often share parental duties, many mammals are less developed in duration and strength of affection." Fathers, mothers, and their offspring are not closely grouped in lower life. The relation of the sexes, even when the human was reached, seems not to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of parenthood. "Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John Lubbock. The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation, made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men to learn that babies take two parents to give them birth.

When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very exciting.

The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function and how he linked it with the god-idea. The "religious dedication of women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with sex in its relation to religion. This idea of the sacrifice of sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed to be better served by monks and nuns than by fathers and mothers.

In the family relation the experience of fathers, after they knew themselves to be such, has been widely varied and not along any single line of development. To quote Le Tourneau again, "There has been no strict relation between intellectual development and the form of sexual union. Even among monkeys, as in men, we find both polygamy and monogamy; and bees and other forms of lower life show a high degree of social organization and division of labor without the institution of the family at all." The relation of the sexes has always been a deep concern of human society even in most primitive forms of social order, but after men knew the connection between the gratification of sex-instinct and the procreative function, they began to reason about and to make more definite the customs that outlined permitted marriage. The varieties of social expression in these ancient customs is witness alike to economic pressure, the effect of climate and immigration, political struggle and the institutions of war and of private property.

Purchase and Capture of Wives.—Purchase and capture began early to run a race in the supply of wives. Purchase, which kept the twain together in nearness to one or the other side of the family line, was usually best for women; especially when, as often happened, it gave her the protection of her own blood relations. Capture, on the other hand, made woman not only the possession of her husband in a peculiar sense as separating her from all who might, through the working of natural affection, act as her helpers in time of need, but made it possible for the slavery of the wife to the husband to take on more cruel forms. Although, it must be said, even capture gave a few women of superlative charm a chance to take precedence of common wives gained in the usual manner.

Two influences, one from the custom to allow marriages only within a certain blood bond, and one to allow marriages only outside that family relationship, have worked in the first instance to preserve certain racial traits from extinction, and in the second place to mix the common elements of human nature to the enrichment of the common stock. This balancing regard for the known and allurement of the novel has also worked to give manifold forms of family association, since those customs were superseded.

It would seem that not only were "trial marriages" for individuals an ancient, not at all a modern device, to see how the twain could get along together, but varying trial forms of marriage for racial, tribal, and national groups have made all manner of experiments to see what on the whole would serve best the social need in the family relationship.

That process of wide experimentation at last settled into the ideal and practice of one father-head, at least, even if still allowing more than one wife and mother within its bond. That father-head seems to have found his place only on condition of grant from society of complete authority over wife and children.

The Patriarchal Family.—The patriarchal family, which Sir Henry Maine described so well, but which he mistakenly supposed to be the first great type of familial association, placed firmly at the centres of social order the power and responsibility of the man. Doubtless that power and responsibility drew their chief sanction from the idea of man as the real source of being. After man learned that he was as much a parent in being father as woman was a parent in being mother, nothing seemed to have contented him but spiritual supremacy in parenthood. The classic picture and interpretation of this phase of family development is contained in the great drama of the Greeks, the trilogy of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Electra, Orestes, and the Erinnyes. Here we see how the mother-side of life, once so powerful as representative of tribal unity, was set aside and overborne by the father-side, as Apollo proudly claims all generative power for man and relegates the mother to the position of an underling nurse. It will be remembered, however, that Athena, although, as Apollo said, "having a father only," makes the mothers still invaluable as guardians of the family altar and as those who can bless or blight both the fruitage of the earth and of the marriage bed.

The Greeks, by virtue of their superior self-consciousness when passing through radical social changes, and by virtue also of their power of literary portrayal of experience, have set down for us, for all time, the way by which man attained his unlimited power over woman and over the family order.

We need not accept in full measure Dr. Lester Ward's picturesque story of the manner in which women were made subject to men, i.e., that female sex-selection so overdid the business of rewarding with favor the strength, the fighting quality, and the cunning which grew to mental power in the male, that when human men and women were reached, woman found a master ready-made by her subhuman sisters. We may, however, find a most suggestive indication of the real reasons for that masculine supremacy in Doctor Ward's testimony to the way in which the female sex, when it had the power of special selection of the kind of mates it wanted, set a fashion in masculine attainment which did work later against her own command of the sex-relation. Women did not become subject to men because of physical weakness. The savage woman does continuous work heavier and more strength-demanding than that assigned to the savage man. It was not even that the primitive woman had always to carry the child as she worked, and had therefore a double burden, although that greatly helped men in gaining supremacy. It was rather that the larger leisure of primitive man and his consequent development of thought and imagination enabled him to secure religion and statecraft as allies to his physical claims. The intellectual side of the male development was doubtless greatly aided by female selection, and when man was reached he already knew how to outwit other men and most women in the race for power.

The Three Chief Sources of Influence.—It has been well said that the "three great sources of influence in barbarous as in civilized countries are religion, military power, and money." All these influences became masculine monopolies ages ago.

The ancient woman was sometimes a priestess and often a healer in her simple fashion and in all ages has acted as nurse in illness and care-taker of the aged and the feeble when these have received care. She has been mistress of the ceremonials of birth and death and marriage when these have been parts of the family ritual, and courtship has been largely in her charge. All the customs that relate to intimate household experiences have been shared by women as ritual and rule of life.

Men, however, took over the simple elements of religious feeling and social requirement in which women bore so great a part and made of them religious cults and theologies, and they then became a masculine monopoly. Men also took over the simple healing of gifted women and made it first the prerogative of the "medicine man" and at last of the medical profession, from which women were barred until very lately. The social customs which women once had power to enforce in so many ways became the "law," made and executed solely by men. Art, science, literature, grew to great proportions as man acquired the opportunity and the skill to concentrate his intelligence upon specialties of effort; and from all the walks of educational preparation and of professional achievement women were debarred. Hence, in the family order, in which the first and obvious place of women had been relatively high, man took the position of mastery by right of religious priesthood, by right of legal supremacy, and by right of monopoly of the money power.

Back of all this lay the assumption of the superior relation of the father to the spiritual life of the child.

Man gained his larger leisure first by the use of women as slaves when individual women became the property of individual men, and later by conquest over other men through which process he secured more slaves, and finally by the military systems that in various forms gave some men a chance to work at what they liked and from which they could gain advantage in the growing complexity of increasing social organization.

Man's larger leisure, which gave him money power or its equivalent in earlier forms of exchange, could not have been secured by him had not woman been socially and by religious sanction set to the constant task of the family service and the more peaceful occupations of primitive agriculture.

Ancient Military Training of Youth.—Doubtless man's military prestige and power gave him the greatest advantage over woman and was the source, more than anything else, of her subjection in the family order. This came about not only because military success gave the women of conquered tribes into the absolute power of the conquerors, and broke for such the social bond of remaining mother-right, but because of the special training of boys and young men which the military systems of all ages have initiated. "The ancient fraternities," and the manner of education which separated those who would be "braves" from the family life in early youth, the strong bond of a common purpose made appealing to youthful imagination by mystic ceremonials and burnt into the consciousness by painful "initiations," all combined to teach men how to work together for common ends and in a way unknown to the training and opportunity of women.[4] This it was which gave a consistency and a power to man's collective life which woman could not gain in the past, and exclusion from which enabled man to become her legal and economic master even within the home.

The economic power which man acquired through specialization of labor, made possible for him by social excuse from exhausting personal service within the family; the political power, made possible for him by military achievement, from which women for the most part were strictly barred by the "Trade Unionism" of war preparation; the intellectual power, made a sex-monopoly in education and professional use and opportunity; and the religious sanction of priesthood and theology, which fastened all these to law and government, secured the complete subjection of mothers to fathers and gave woman in the family the status of her infant children.

Ancestor-worship.—This triple influence of money, military power, and religion, gave the definite basis for ancestor-worship, which has been so widespread and so influential in the setting of social customs. Ancestor-worship, with its separate family ceremonials, for which the wife must learn her husband's family ritual, led to child-marriage, and that in turn to the slavery of the wife not only to the husband but to the older women of his family. Child-marriage led also to many tragedies of racial decay before it was seen to be inimical to strength and power of achievement. When child-marriage was not a part of marriage customs, however, and a suitable age was demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the father secure. He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the children yet to be. The Greek poem before referred to shows in the pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid for peace of the dead and the service of the living yet to be born, shows vividly how religion made firm and binding the father's place in the family.

So deeply did this religious sanction of ancestor-worship affect the social "mores" that, as is shown so clearly in Spartan history, no man could shirk his duty of marriage and of parenthood without social opprobrium. The well-known anecdote related by Plutarch of the youth who, educated rigorously to show respect to the aged fathers, is praised for flouting a grey-haired bachelor and refusing to rise and give him a seat in the open square because, as the youth scornfully says, "No children of yours will ever make sacrifice for his ancestors," pictures vividly the sense of responsibility to the family life once almost universal.

This feeling, bred by ancestor-worship, has persisted long after the church in its various forms has superseded the ancient family worship. We find it as late as in Colonial times in Protestant New England, where the bachelor was fined and subjected to humiliating community supervision and the spinster, almost unknown above twenty years of age, if persisting in her single life was treated as an exception to be held in social tutelage.

The Double Standard of Morals.—The triple bond of money, military power, and economic supremacy, which made men masters in the family life, made them also able to free themselves from exclusive devotion to one wife, whether under the law of polygamy or professed monogamy; as it has been possible for men to divorce their wives for slight causes, while wives often received the death penalty for even supposed infidelity. It has also instituted and maintained for ages a double standard of morals by which the same act mutually shared by men and women has been for men a slight peccadillo and for women a deadly sin. Chastity has been made almost the sole virtue of women, invasion of which even by resisted force has destroyed her "honor," and voluntary rejection of which has made her a creature of social ostracism. Man, on the other hand, has been forgiven all manner of slips from the straight and narrow way of marital fidelity, provided he could achieve something of importance in the world of thought or action.

This double standard of morals has reacted upon the family not only in preventing women from establishing social conditions suitable for their own best development and that of their children but has thrown over the home the dark shadow of commercialized prostitution with its cloud of evil thought, physical degeneracy and defrauded childhood.

Basic Needs for Equality of Human Rights.—When women as mothers have no power of guardianship of their own children; when they as persons have no power of self-defense against cruelty and outrage of their own fathers or husbands; when as members of society they have no contract-power but must suffer all manner of injustice unless highly fortunate in their male representative; when as citizens of a so-called democratic state they have no voice in either law or its enforcement, then they are indeed a subject class. Any subject class dependent upon privilege or special favor for all the order and circumstance of life is clearly not a fit part of modern democratic society. It is, therefore, of tremendous social importance to the family, as truly as to all other inherited institutions, that women are now rapidly emerging from that subject condition of perpetual minority under the law to the individual responsibility and self-protective power of the legal adult. This passage "from status to contract" was too long delayed (the position of women after the affirmation of liberty and equality for men in modern forms of government being so illogical as to cause much disturbance in the body politic), but it has, after all, been rapid in its final steps. To-day the ideal of equal rights between the sexes and in relationship of men and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of the enlightened. What is before us is the slow and in some respects difficult task of working out that ideal in social adjustments. While at work on this task it behooves us to go over the past experience more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal family gave to society and through society to wife and children as well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife and children.

Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.—It seems not too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from particular men. In such period and condition the sex-relationship itself had not attained its present spiritual quality. There was apparently required the sense of ownership on the part of one man to safeguard those women most generally desired from exploitation by all men. Some legal order in the oppression of women by society had to precede, apparently, the abolition of oppression of women itself; just as to-day the effort is to "humanize war" before we can become wise and strong enough to abolish it. No social device that the imagination can conceive could be so well fitted to protect motherhood, in an age before justice could give power of self-protection, as was that of the patriarchal family. The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the political aspect of the building up of great families from which the state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social order and the chief heir of social privilege. It seems apparent, therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all, and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of Heaven.

"Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition of equality of personal rights within that order. The great lady of the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery, realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in appropriate social conditions.

To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject condition in the past. We have to remember, however, that social history seems to indicate that no system of human association has grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its dominant features. The protection of wife and child, which rested for so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages of the world.

The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to persist after the need for them has ceased. This hindrance has been shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by ethical and humane considerations. A form of family relationship entrenched in institutions of age-long prestige and supported by the triple influence of money, military power, and religion, lived on after its work in securing social order had been accomplished and long after its usefulness was entirely ended. After the father-headship ceased to express the highest ideals of either sex-relationship or parental devotion, its retention produced social evils and personal wrongs which made a conscious and determined movement for "Woman's Rights" necessary, and still makes necessary close and definite attention to the equalizing of opportunities.

The Social Value of the Patriarchal Family.—It is well, however, to consider not only the negative but the affirmative side of the social inheritance of the patriarchal family, in which has grown up and developed the ideal of monogamic marriage. What did the father gain, intellectually and ethically, from that patriarchal order, and what did he give, not only in protection of wife and children but toward their moral development in social life?

The effect of unlimited power over another is generally worse for the one who wields than for the one who is subjected to that power, and the faults of men have their deepest origin in the family order that gave all its members into his complete control. Man's faults of dogmatism, of selfish domination, of sacrifice of personal life to further desired political or economic ends, have roots in the patriarchal family. Man's careless misuse of his own moral ideals for purposes of ambition was certainly fostered by this sense of ownership of women and children with legal power to use them for pleasure or profit.

Something else, however, came to man in and through the patriarchal system. Society, that gave him liberty to rule the family, rigidly required of him that such rule should be in the social interest, as that interest was then understood.

It was obviously for the interest of society that women should be chaste, in order not only that a man might know his own children but that the family line and inheritance should be preserved from insecurity. A man's infidelity to the marriage vow might seem to do no perceptible harm if practised outside the family circle, but woe to him if he trespassed upon the family ownership of another man.

There might be more than one wife acknowledged as secondary in status or a mere concubine slave to help in domestic duties while giving pleasure to the head of the family, but there was early a social demand for one chief wife whose offspring should inherit the family power. Although even in this fixed demand there were loopholes of "legal fiction of adoption" by which some favorite child not of the actual line of inheritance might be given the place of honor and control. Again, if the father under the patriarchal system was the recognized economic master he was also legally held to the financial support of wife and child. In the collective family life his obligation extended far through the line of kinship and of alliance by marriage, and to-day in many Oriental countries the father may be bound to poverty as the responsible support of a large company of dependent pensioners. It must also be remembered that if the ancient father, as head of the family, held the permission of society to discipline wife and child even to severity of corporal punishment he was also charged with the task of insuring their obedience to whatever social laws were in force and was himself legally liable to punishment if he did not keep his family law-abiding. That moral responsibility for the behavior of his family, early outlined in detail, was increasingly eased by the growth of personal relationship of women and youth to society. That was shown in the laws that defined the extent of punishment allowed the father-head. Although he might be secure in his legal right and duty to bestow on wife or apprentice "moderate castigation," an old Welsh law limited him to "three blows only with a broomstick on any part of the person except the head;" and another ancient law allowed the use only of "a stick no longer than the husband's arm and no thicker than his middle finger" in the case of the wife; while Blackstone's well-remembered restriction was to "a stick no bigger than his thumb."

The moral responsibility of the father for his children, carrying with it as it did the liability of prison or even death for the misbehavior of sons, was governed by various statutes which show in the Middle Ages a growth toward freeing children from parental control and placing upon them when "of age" a definite and personal legal bond and penalty.

For example, we read that the Anglo-Saxon law held many children at the age of ten responsible for some acts which were forbidden, but that most youth were legally minors until the age of fifteen. Until the early period of the eighteenth century it was still possible for a parent to legally sell his children, "a girl up to fourteen, a boy under seven." And after that period a wayward or troublesome son or daughter, or any of the offspring, when the parents could be proved financially incapable of their care, could be sent to convent or monastery.

The ability to bear arms seems to have been the criterion for legal coming of age. The Romans, with their heavy weapons, held the son in tutelage until the age of fifteen. The Germans, with their use of light darts, gave their sons power of self-control at the age of twelve. In the heyday of feudalism "a knight's son became of age when he could swing his father's sword" and "a yeoman's son when he could swing his father's battle-axe," and by that process the fathers were released from liability to punishment for their sons' misdemeanors.

On the other hand, after the tenth century, no child under ten could be punished for his father's crimes unless it could be shown that he was a party to them, and the custom of carrying family autonomy so far as to wipe out innocent and guilty alike, when a treason or crime of any sort angered the powers in command, was practically ended.

When the beginnings of the modern industrial order appeared and burghers shared with knights and yeomen the social responsibility, "a burgher's son acquired freedom and legal responsibility when he could count and measure broadcloth." The wife gained a growing and perilous freedom from laws which increased her direct relationship to the state. She attained the power of being punished even by the death penalty for broken laws far earlier than she attained the slightest influence in the passage or enforcement of those laws. It was generally thought, however, until very recently, that if a wife "did not behave" it was the husband's fault and right that he should suffer the consequences.

The Responsibility of the Ancient Father Commensurate With His Power.—Again, it must be remembered that if the ancient father was by virtue of his military training and activities separated from the domestic interests which he so often and with full social permission sacrificed to war and preparation for war, he was at the same time under perpetual conscription by the community of which he was a part to serve as protector of his own family and the families of those of the same social group. The social pressure upon the father-head of the family was therefore severe and unremitting, since he was in so many ways responsible for, as truly as master of, his household. It was no light task to be a worthy head of a patriarchal family in all the ages when growing law was superseding custom and advancing civilization was increasing the complexity of social life. This task when well achieved gave to man a serious sense of his duty as well as a firm conviction of his power.

We see the fruits of that ethical training in family responsibility in many of man's noblest traits; preëminently in his recognition of the duty of protection of the weak and young, and in his devotion to his own, against the world if need be.

The vast outreach of man's intelligence toward the organization of the state, of the industrial order, of the church, of the formal educative process, of the means of transportation, of the systems of finance, of the development and application of scientific knowledge, and even of the arts and of literature, all reveal the effect of his early schooling in the representative responsibility of fatherhood to society.

We speak to-day of the "father of modern invention" in this or that particular. We have not ceased to praise the "good provider" or to esteem him highly who has a well-ordered home.

Moral Qualities in Women Developed by Masculine Selection.—Moreover, we are all now recognizing the fact that we owe to the ownership of woman by man a secondary sex-selection of inestimable value. It may be an extreme statement to say, with at least one sociologist, that the ages of woman's subjection to man was not too great a price to pay for the gift to the race of feminine beauty and charm. We can assert, however, that some moral values which men insisted upon in the women they chose for wives gave the race what at one time it needed most and still needs: namely, the habit of service to others, and the power of adaptability to changing and often difficult conditions.

Man's genius for organization institutionalizes every aspect of thought and activity he takes under his control. The institution, organized at first for the benefit of personal life and the life-process, tends invariably toward a fixity of method and hardness of substance that finally sacrifices life-growth to its iron pressure until a new form of institution makes its way through struggle and suffering.

The relation of women to men and of women to family life demanded of most women easy and rapid adjustment to the requirements of others and led to their mediation between every institution and the personal life. The household mastership of men, and the fact that they could choose for favor the sort of women most agreeable to them as masters, placed at the centre of the family, and therefore at the centre of the life-process itself, the type of womanhood that lent itself most easily to social adjustment. And it placed that type at the centre of the social order when the "cake of custom" most needed to be broken to allow of a more democratic association. The type of womanhood which masculine selection, working through long ages, has made the essentially "womanly" type, is one in which physical beauty, charm of manner, general rather than special ability, affectionate and competent response to family, easy adaptability to whatever social system her marriage might give entrance, and unswerving loyalty to the ethical traditions and religious sanctions of her day and generation, combine to attract the love of man and the devotion of children.

Some of these elements of character are especially needed to-day in order to make democracy work, and to secure against dangers incident to decay of autocratic control, and hence may later prove of great social use in the modern state.

The idealization of womanhood by man, which seems never to have made him uneasy in claiming control of her person or estate, has embodied itself in the artist's pictures of Truth and Justice, and Knowledge and Charity, in feminine forms. These bear witness to the fact that even when men were most insistent upon father-rights they were moulded by intimate companionship with women in the home to some appreciation of the value of feminine personality.

While, therefore, the moral discipline which came to the mother in the old order of the family, led her to understand the value of personality, and the need of ever-increasing effort to make the individual lives within the family circle comfortable, happy and good, the moral discipline of the patriarchal father led toward an increasing conquest of nature, of other men, and of all the social forces, in the interest of his own family group. This led at last to his impersonation of many ideals in the "eternal womanly that leads us on."

The Higher Ideal of Fatherhood.—Throughout this many-sided discipline of marriage and parenthood there has been growing an ideal of fatherhood so noble and so tender that it has easily become the central thought in many religions.

The "Heaven-father" is an old picture. The Father in Heaven persists in the effort to bring the Supreme near to the human heart. A law of obedience unquestioned, a rule of conduct making an actual Way of Life, a power unlimited and yet a loving-kindness that marks the sparrow's fall and has regard for the prodigal as for the upright son—surely there must have been uncounted fathers of goodness and wisdom passing praise to have made the name the easiest one by which to call the Divine!

Meanwhile, the average life has been working, often unconsciously, toward a condition in which the patriarchal father is out of drawing with his own industry, his own political system, and his own theology. To-day we give the wives and potential wives contract-power, private ownership of property, opportunity for economic independence, vocational training, entrance to all higher educational institutions, adult responsibility under the law, and the franchise on equal terms with men.

In the light of these accomplished facts vain is the effort of such writers as Devoe, in his Studies in Family Life, to show that "the Christian family" still makes women "subject" and holds "all goods in common" in the husband's name.

Incomplete Adjustment and Equality of Rights in the Family.—There is, however, great confusion of mind as to the extent of change in the father-office which the new independence of wives and mothers should effect. Take, for example, the matter of the financial responsibility of the husband and father. If a married woman has independent property, shall she not be liable as well as her husband for the support of the children? If so, what becomes of the suits at law against "Family Deserters" heretofore applied alone to husbands and fathers? A study of this class of offenders under the law, published in 1904, shows that in New York alone something over $100,000 was collected in one year in "alimony from men, two-thirds of whom were deserting husbands." In these cases the duty of providing financially for wife and child pursued the husbands and fathers after they had run away from home. In the 591 cases of "Family Deserters" especially studied two-thirds were men and one-third women, showing not only that the law deals more severely with men than with women, even when women are held to be responsible for any sort of family support, but that desertion is for the most part a masculine offense. If it can be shown that fathers are or should be relieved from the age-long financial responsibilities of family support, will the showing in "Family Desertion" be different?

There seems to be a consensus of opinion that in present conditions that family is likely to be in the best economic condition, in which the chief, if not the entire, income is supplied by the husband and father, leaving the wife and mother to be specially responsible for the translation of that income in terms of family comfort. That is admirably indicated in Mrs. Hinman Abel's book, Successful Family Life on the Moderate Income. Does that condition still carry with it the sole economic responsibility of the husband and father for the wife as well as for the children? Or shall the phrase now beginning to be used in laws passed against family desertion apply to the wife only when it is proved she is "in necessitous circumstances" without her husband's provision? For the children the newer laws say "him" or "her" when providing penalties for "any person," either father or mother, "who wilfully neglects or refuses to provide for the support and maintenance of minor children."

The claim, then, of the wife seems to be increasingly one of either invalid "conditions," or "necessitous circumstances," or "lack of other means of support," when defaulting husbands are brought to court; and the claim of children upon parents is increasingly extended from father to mother whenever there are means at hand from either to supply the children's needs.

In respect to the "choice of domicile," always the right of the husband and father, there is little change in law; but the strong movement to secure to women independent nationality, in place of automatic following of the nationality of their husbands, will, if carried out, make the supreme choice (that of the country to which one shall pledge allegiance) a legal right of women as of men. That in itself would make some confusion in cases where international marriages give separate national interest.

In respect to man's responsibility for national defense in the interest of home and native land, he is alone conscripted to-day, as of old, for fighting service on the battle-field, but all manner of social demands, almost as imperative as a governmental draft, now call women to special service in war time. In peace, the taxes know no sex, and the rules of the business game are not amenable to chivalry.

In the matter of professional and vocational training and opportunity, men and women are largely on an equal footing, in the United States, at least. And apparently for the first time in human history a man and a woman, both eminent in their line of work, may seriously ask which of the two earns the larger salary, and hence it may be which of the two can do more toward family support.

The full consequences of women's moral acts now fall wholly upon her in the case of disobedience to law. There is still, it is true, in some parts of the civilized world respect for "an unwritten law" that excuses a man for killing a rival in his wife's affections, but for the most part she stands on her own feet and he on his when there is question of crime or misdemeanor.

The Marriage Question To-day the "Husband-problem."—The whole situation is changing in so many ways as relates to the mutual obligation of men and women in family life that Havelock Ellis is right when he says "the marriage question to-day is much less the wife-problem than the husband-problem." That is to say, the single headship of the family is invaded and yet the methods of adjustment of two heads are not yet clear in either law or custom. As the Bishop of Hereford said at the meeting of his brother Bishops, in which the resolution to omit the word "obey" from the marriage service of the Church of England was withdrawn (on the ground that if presented it would be successfully opposed), "It is obvious to every one that it would not be convenient to have two heads to a family."[5] There are already two heads in every up-to-date family in the United States! The real difficulty now is to see how best to adjust mutual responsibilities toward each other and toward the children involved, and to write a consistent and uniform set of statutes into the law. That law respecting marriage and the family, partly inherited without change from the patriarchal order, partly altered in particulars in obedience to some popular demand based on cramping conditions made by the law whenever it was enforced, after it was already outgrown, needs careful revision. Ignored so often by the moral and intellectual élite, inconsistently set aside by new measures passed without regard to what is already established as precedent, all laws respecting marriage, the family, and the parental relation which have come down from the past, need thorough overhauling and the best wisdom should be exercised in full revision and codification.

The husband and father, meanwhile, many times holds firmly to his old-time fine chivalry and adds justice without spoiling his relationship to the family. The wife keeps her inherited aptitude for loving care of husband and children, and adds a new independence of thought and action without danger of confusion of ideal or function.

Can Women Have All the New Freedom and Also All the Old Privileges?—Some women, however, are trying the absurd and dangerous experiment of seeing how much they can take from men in the old lines of "support" and how little they can give in the old lines of service; how much they can gain in the new freedom and how little they can pay for it in individual work. These are the women who are willing that the family property shall be in their name for the purpose of cheating creditors, and at the same time acknowledge no obligation to support the children from a common family fund. These are the women who demand their liberty to achieve and deny their duty to help. These are the women who take "alimony" from a man with whom they will not live and have married for their own convenience. They are the women who have independent incomes from inheritance or from vocational success and yet excuse themselves from any responsibility toward even invalid husbands, and never see the parental bond as now binding both fathers and mothers alike.

Many men are struggling in some confusion of mind as to the outcome of this new tendency to equalize rights and opportunities, and to the credit of most of them, be it spoken, they want to do the right thing.

It is now for women to preserve the father, the best of him, and for men to still call for the mother, the noblest of her, in the new adjustments that wait for full realization of the new democracy in the family.

Here, again, we need not wait for perfect consistency in law, or full understanding of social tendencies and their outcome, to find our way in life. Love shows the way—love between intellectual and moral equals, who, in trying to adjust their own lives to a higher law in which "self-reverencing each and reverencing each," settle all problems on the higher levels of thought and feeling.

New Social Advantages for Fathers.—Meanwhile, again, the father-office stands out in actual living function as never before. The fathers that now show what fatherhood was meant to be—they are legion. Holding the wife and mother in her place of sacred honor, they are to their children the Supreme Court of appeal in grave questions of discipline, the highest functionary of the family in the distribution of honors and rewards, the best comrade in fun, the most delightful companion in games, the strongest challenger in effort, and the symbol of knowledge and power of the community life.

With the new partnership of men and women in the family the father has a chance to be a companion and friend as never before. He has an opportunity to show his children that side which the ancient father often failed to develop, the side of friendship and understanding. To the boy a clear picture of what he would be, to the girl a declaration of the kind of man she would marry, the modern father of the highest type makes possible a modern mother who shall show her son what womanhood may become in freedom, and who can lead her daughter to be, like herself, the flower of all the best of the past.