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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.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

Tags: Fatherhood

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.