The Family : Part 7

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 8 of 25)

Again it must be insisted that what society-at-large now needs most is not celibates, however wise and good, working along one line, without close touch with the main experiences of birth and death and common social relationship, but rather the deepening and broadening of common human relations through the reaction of the wise and good upon all the fundamental ties that bind the race and the generations together. The loss to society of those who might have been fathers and mothers and chose to be so devoted to religious orders as to stand apart from their race-life is an admitted calamity in the view of most people who study mediæval history.

Dangers of Extreme Specialization. - Moreover, the tendency now in all departments of industry and professional service is toward a specialization which often defeats its own end and lessens rather than increases the usefulness of its own department. "We want not workers," says Emerson, "but men working." We want not specialists in the extreme sense but all-round students devoting themselves to one sphere of research or activity with a constant sense of its relation to all other spheres of thought and action. Particularly in social service we want not so much those who in early life specialize in one or another form of social pathology or social therapeutics but rather those mature and rounded in personal experience who elect some particular service with full realization of its place in the network of common human relationship. Especially is this true of all social work which deals directly with individuals.

The higher development of the family and the wider range of social service, therefore, alike, demand that a much greater proportion of the moral and intellectual élite of the race pay their debt to the generations through the family.

Industrial Exploitation of Childhood and Youth. - There is another condition of modern life which must be noted as inimical to the stability and the efficiency of the family, a condition which works from the bottom upward through the lower levels of society as others which have been noted work from the top down through the higher levels. It is the condition which leads toward the misuse of young girls in wage-earning tasks. There is a difference of opinion among the wisest in regard to the social usefulness of forms of protective labor legislation for adult women which are not shared by men. There can be none in respect to the social harm of using the vitality, the charm, the strength, the happiness of minors, especially of potential mothers, to carry on the processes of machine-dominated systems of manufacture and business. It takes so little physical strength or mental power to become a cog in these rapidly revolving wheels. It means such a waste to thus use the years of youth, meant for education and development and meant to attract toward successful family life rather than away from it.

The wrong and injustice of child-labor is equal for both sexes and no law can be too stringent or too severely enforced against it. The social waste of using youth exclusively in wage-earning pursuits can easily be proved, in the case of girls, to extend to years older than in the case of boys. The family cannot be maintained in stable condition, and certainly can not progress in social value, unless the majority of young girls are given the right attitude toward it and time to prepare for its opportunities and responsibilities. If, as is generally now believed, the legal majority and voting age for boys and girls should be the same, namely, twenty-one years, then the girls, as potential mothers, must have a distinct and specialized protection up to that legal majority from all that harms health, prevents safeguarded recreation, or turns life-currents away from the home to the factory. The death-rate of babies when mothers work in factories or shops with no provision for special rest is one testimony to the social improvidence of our present industrial use of older women. The life-long invalidism of many women, the childlessness of multitudes, the statistics of home conditions revealed by Children's Courts furnish testimony of like character. The unknown toll of loss of personal aptitude for family life leading to broken homes, or to hopeless struggles against invasions by poverty of the right of common men and women to a home, are proof positive that a change in economic conditions is demanded in the interest of family life.

Social Measures Needed to Prevent These Evils. - These social evils connected with child-labor and the neglect in the industrial world of youth and its needs are not to be mended by helps to individuals alone. More radical measures are required for the protection of society's most precious asset, the health, happiness and leisure of all its children.

"Education," says the ancient sage, "is the ladder that every child must climb in order to become all that he is meant to become; and therefore children are made unfit for other employments in order that they may have leisure to learn." To this may be added, the type of education that fits the average girl for high usefulness as a housemother is an absolute need if the average home life is to be made a centre of freedom and of happiness. Those, therefore, who are working against child-labor and against the unrestricted use of mothers of young children and of potential mothers, in wage-earning industry, are working directly, and with great power, for the preservation and stability of the family. Those also who are working through the formal education of the schools for the insertion of study and practice along lines of home-making are making a complementary and valuable contribution toward the inner unity and the outer success of the family.

The Attack upon the Family by Reactionaries. - One more and most important attack upon the family as it exists to-day must be noted in this list of elements in modern society which work against this inherited institution. It is an attack which, however mistaken, is ostensibly, and often honestly in intent, a movement for the protection and improvement of the family order. It is the effort to turn the history of that institution back upon itself and make the family again, as in the past, a legal unity with one representative, the husband and father, through whom alone the wife and children have distinct relationship to society-at-large.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.