The Father : Part 3

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 6 of 22)

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.

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.