The Grandparents : Part 8

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 12 of 24)

The initiation and maintenance and increase of schools of training for social work is one of the great educational and social achievements of the past quarter-century, but the age-limit for entrance in many such schools is a huge mistake. The very essence of true social service to individuals is experience in life. The girl or boy who has had none or little may make a good technician in many departments and may make a fine showing in work that is not personal, and may collect material or knowledge about groups of persons who need help. But the man or woman who is able to be of great value as a "social doctor" is not only born to such service but also is one who has not begun a specialty of social technic too young to have learned something of the difficulty of living. Young students? Yes. But many more who have come later in life to a sense of their social responsibility and to a desire to learn how best to serve society with all that they have gained in rich experience. The psychology of social training must envisage a wider range of years to be most effective.

Prepare Vocationally for Old-age Needs. - The third demand, that every man and woman in early youth or in later youth shall be trained in some light and agreeable occupation that can be pursued, perhaps to economic return, in the days when strenuous labor can no longer be carried on, is one that has as yet received little attention but which should be a matter of deep concern. The fact that so many old women of little physical strength and who require much personal care can yet be useful and therefore actually wanted as helpers in many families is indicative of the fundamental fact in industrial life that a general training for general usefulness, such as the housewife has had through the ages, has some advantages still.

Before Mrs. Perkins Gilman gets all women into some specialty, alongside of the already highly specialized men workers, let us see to it that men get a chance for a more general training! The restless idleness of the man whose specialty of manual labor or definite type of business interest is now beyond his strength or opportunity is a sad thing to see. We have had to develop a special charity to furnish a work-interest to aged men in public institutions. They were so miserable and pathetic without that occupation. Women fare better in this, as in many other elements of labor, for they can do so many things, usually have to do so many things, most of them, in the family, that some one sort of work, at least, is left to them for special old age. "Mother's pies" or grandmother's cakes or needlework or knack at dusting or baby-tending or what not keeps her young and makes her actually a helper even when old. Grandfather's loss of his job, of his specialty of effort, of his hold on the great industrial machine, leaves him too often hopelessly at sea for the passing of time still left to him.

Well-to-do women in the United States, moreover, have acquired through the large leisure inherited wealth or their husband's means have supplied, a social business that has not only delayed old age but nearly obliterated its ancient signs and tokens. The Clubs, the Leagues, the Alliances, the charitable agencies, the institutions of care for the defective, the friendless, the infirm, the dependent children, the countless societies and coöperative social organizations for social serviceableness, in which women are leaders and chief workers, bear witness that "grandmother" has found a place for her energies after the children have grown and set up households of their own.

If such a grandmother is a member of the daughter's family she is not half so objectionable to daughter's husband as when mother-in-law had a permanent place at the fireside, perhaps in the exact spot where he wanted to put his easy chair, and had to be "taken out" if she ever ventured into the great world. She now has her own interests, often so many and vital that her day is more completely filled than when she was younger. She has her own set of friends and her own use for the energy and power of direction that often in the old days made her a troublesome member of the family. If only she has a chance at her own little cooking, and her own individual sitting room, and has her own income, if ever so small, she may fit well into even a city apartment and no other member of the family be the worse. The thing required for old men and women alike is some work suited to slower motion and lessened strength and greater need for quiet and independent thought. This is a need which more women than men have met to-day, we repeat, but it is one that must be understood and effectively satisfied for men and women alike.

Edward Everett Hale said every man needed "both a vocation and an avocation" - something by which he earned his living and something by which he maintained his interest in activity. It is the avocation that must be planned for. The vocation is often thrust upon one by necessity or chance association. If every aged person had something to do that made each day short and each night a welcome rest much of the friction between the older and the younger members of families would be avoided and life would piece the generations together more perfectly.

The Attitude of Mind Toward Old Age. - Life calls upon us all to prepare while yet young for the lessened power of old age. The removal from the commanding place to the honorable but more difficult position of the ex-leader and the chief-emeritus is a step that requires care.

The attitude of mind that can keep in harmonious touch with the oncoming generation and yet not lose the value of its own day of contribution to the social inheritance is an art to be acquired only by effort and the exercise of moral and mental power. There was, perhaps, never in the history of our civilization so great a gap between the ideals and social practices of the grandparents and those of the third generation. The parents even are feeling themselves too far from the children; the grandparents often realize a vast distance between themselves and the rising generation. The distance is not always the measure of progress. It is not seldom the effect of rapid changes in mechanical appliances, in material agencies and economic conditions, in literary taste and in ideals of culture; an effect which has unsettled youth in the inherited ways and not yet settled them in well-considered new rules of living. The experience that might aid in easing the process of readjustment is not always at hand and not always used when it is attainable. The experience of age is too often shown in dogmatic rules. The inexperience of youth is too often the accompaniment of a childish conviction that everything that has been is wrong and everything that promises to be is best.

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.