Friends : Part 2

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 8 of 20)

Some Advantages in Choices of Marriage by the Elders. - The old arranged choice for marriage, in the first place, secured, and still secures in countries not yet changed in this particular, a similar financial position. Often greed of family prestige made the money end the chief one and sacrificed everything else to the bringing together of two great fortunes. Yet the fact that family choices usually united those of similar financial standing and power of gratification of taste did lead toward an easy adjustment of the young couple to life together. One of the chief causes of unhappiness in marriages wholly from personal choice and in response to an impulse of passionate attachment is that the taste and "style" of living of the two has been so different that it is hard, after the first glamour wears away, to settle down to agreeable compromises. As a rule, "the beggar maid and King Cophetua" can get on better than the young woman heiress and the ex-chauffeur in such compromises; for it is always easier to extend one's income than to contract it, and women can still owe all to the loved one with better grace than men can bear the position of one "marrying above his lot." The tendency of the older custom, however, to limit all marriage choices on the basis of money to be contributed to the common fund was, and is when now in force, as destructive to real happiness in marriage as any ill-considered leaping across social barriers could well be. It is well, therefore, that it is outgrown.

The second condition believed essential to success in marriage from the point of view of family stability, when the marriage choice of the loved one was made by the elders, is far more important than that of financial equality. It is the congeniality of the two families to be united by the marriage. The custom of betrothing their children as a means of carrying on the close friendship of a lifetime beyond its natural limit into the generations yet to be, is an old and not a wholly bad one. It insures for the young couple a genuine love from both sides the family line. To be sure, that love may be an oppressive and undesired gift which one or the other of the young people ardently wishes to ignore or to be freed from, but it contains also some elements of a good start for those same young people in a mutually devoted double parentage. When, however, as in Eastern countries, it leads to betrothal in infancy or very early childhood and sets the girl who is to be the wife in the family of her betrothed when she is too young to know her own real nature or to have a mind to make up about what she would wish for herself, it may be and generally is an evil thing.

In the questions concerning the family set forth by the Chinese inquiry, to which allusion has already been made, the first set of problems relates to "Early Engagements," and it is asked, "Is the practice of parents in arranging for the engagement of a girl while still a mere child productive of happiness in the future home?" And, again, "Can a woman refuse to marry a man whom her family decides she should marry, after the formal engagement has taken place?" To our Western ideas the answer is so plain to both these questions that one may be impatient at their repetition here. Yet it is certainly true that many people freely engage themselves to their later unhappiness and there have been many family virtues bred on even the outgrown fashion of family choice. Where unhappiness has been prevented in the results of family choice doubtless the friendship of the two family heads has had much to do with such mitigation of bad effects of extreme parental control in marriage.

Social protection of the young has in a measure superseded the ancient family arrangement, but where it has not, a young person may be found to-day in as bad a position through personal choice as that of the girl set in a home without her own consent to be the future wife of a man she has not seen. The difference is, however, a vital one.

In the case of the Chinese girl the status is fixed. In the case of a girl of the Western world, even of most unfortunate circumstance or weakness of character, there is a possibility of escape from even the worst conditions into a new relationship to life and to marriage. We have suicides in the Western world, and some of them of young girls who, free to choose their mates, loved not wisely but too well; but the toll of suicides of wives in China is one that testifies that polygamy and the power of fathers over their daughters in marriage and even in their sale for immoral uses, and the legal right to hold girls in domestic slavery, are evils not made tolerable even by the high-minded who try to perpetuate the friendship as well as the power of leading families by intermarriage.

An early Massachusetts law declared that "No female orphan could be given in marriage during her minority except with the approbation of a majority of the selectmen of the town." This was proof that in this country from the first, the social power was used not to make girls accept husbands that might be chosen for them but to protect girls from exploitation of designing persons, and if they had not a family protection they were held secure in that of the officers of the community. The law of 1719, in New York, that no person under twenty-one should be married without the written consent of parent or guardian was a step in the direction of social control. This law aimed not to make marriage choices for any young person but to safeguard such choice from possible harm.

The ancient family choice in marriage tried in the third place to give every one an equal chance to be married. The families concerned, when the age thought to be marriageable had been reached, sought to give the young persons a place in the family order. The idea of bachelors and maids of mature years was not only repugnant, it was an indictment of the vigilance and good offices of the elders. When a certain Doctor Brickell practised medicine in North Carolina in about 1731, he declared that "She that continues unmarried until twenty is reckoned a stale maid, which is a very indifferent character in this country;" and in New England the unmarried man, as elsewhere, was subjected to special tax and social odium.

The family arrangement for marriage of the young did one thing, at least, in a time when women and girls enjoyed little protection or financial security outside of marriage - it set at work forces to provide husbands for many girls who would not be the first choice in a free competition for masculine favor.

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.