The Grandparents : Part 1

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 5 of 24)

"From my grandfather I learned good morals and the government of temper. From my great-grandfather to know that on education one should spend liberally. From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but from evil thoughts; and, further, simplicity in way of living. To the gods I am indebted for having good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends." - Marcus Aurelius.

"Honorable age is not that which standeth in length of years, nor that is measured by number of years; but wisdom is the grey hair unto men and an unspotted life is old age. The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world; and the righteous live forevermore." - The Wisdom of Solomon.

"Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the springs of life.

"Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. We grow old only by deserting our ideals. In every heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from other men and women, and from the Infinite, so long is every one young." - Samuel Ulman.

"Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made."

- Browning.

Relative Increase of the Aged in Modern Life. - The outstanding fact concerning the aged is that they increase proportionately to population as civilization increases. Easier conditions of living make for longer life. Public sanitation, private hygiene, good heating arrangements in each house, good water and plenty of it, sidewalks and porches for easy airing, medical science and the art of nursing made more widely available even for the poor, more physical comforts of every sort, more widely distributed, all tend toward the preservation of life after middle age is reached. They also tend to keep alive many babies who would have died in harder conditions and prolong the life of many invalids who would have succumbed to hardships in early youth. Indeed, Doctor Holmes declared that "the best insurance of a long life was to acquire an incurable disease when young;" while the average of robust health in all modern communities is certainly lowered by the modern methods of preservation of the delicate and the aged.

Savage Treatment of the Old. - In the annals of savage life we find many gruesome tales of intentional disposal of the aged. The use of the old grandmother as a target for the training of young boys in the art of slaying one's enemy is an extreme example. The pathetic couple left behind when the tribe migrated, often with a small supply of food saved for them by some pitiful member of the family from the scanty hoard that must suffice until the next harvest or the next hunting, the neglect and the actual abuse that often made the last days quickly ended, all show that when life is too hard there is no room for the old.

The Relation of Ancestor-worship to Respect for Aged Men. - Two things, at least, helped to give the aged a better place in the social esteem and in the provision for necessities as primitive life developed toward civilization. One was ancestor-worship, which made the father and the grandfather a link, indispensable and therefore honored, in the chain of blood relationship which carried on the generations. This type of religious belief and practice did not, however, work to ease the lot of old women. If the young wife did not have a child, especially a son, she could be repudiated often, and lose her standing in the family relation and hence be subjected to hardships that made her early old and often ended her life while still in middle age. If she had a son and rose to be a grandmother she might attain a most honorable position, having her son's wife to be her servant and her son's son's wife to be her slave. Even with the best intentions, the patriarchal father could not attend to all the details of government within his usually extensive household, and no man has yet lived who could manage unassisted a group of women, such as legal polygamy and concubinage brings under one roof, each one determined to get from him the best possible conditions for her own life and that of her children.

The Position of Chief-mother in Ancient Family. - These facts often made the position of the chief-mother in a family one of such importance that they became her insurance against want and ill-treatment. The position of the chief-mother in the collective family is now one of the vital problems of Eastern nations trying to adjust the family system to modern ideas. The father's power is so much a delegated responsibility and the relationship between the lesser wives and the younger wives so much closer to the chief-mother than to the chief-father that the grandmother's position may be that of a tyrant. A series of questions which a group of Chinese students in an American university has drawn up include such as the following: "Where a young girl is brought into the home to be reared as the future bride of the boy in the family, is there any limit to the authority of the mother-in-law?" The mother-in-law in such cases being usually the older or chief-mother, she is really the grandmother-in-law.

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.