The Broken Family : Part 2

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 14 of 19)

New Standards of Marriage Success. - When it was decided to investigate the causes for the backwardness of school children, why so many "failed to pass" and were "retarded" in the march from grade to grade in the elementary classes, the first inquiry took no note of the exactions of the grade standards. All who failed to move on at the scheduled moment for "promotion," in any school examined, were listed as "backward." Later, it occurred to the investigators, that the first thing to find out was whether or not a given grade standard was one that true pedagogy would approve, and second, whether there was a serious discrepancy in that grade standard between the different schools from which the children came for examination.

In much the same way the first inquiries as to the evil of frequent divorce seemed to take for granted that all who sought divorce were in circumstances that might have been socially and usefully continued within the marriage bond. We know better now. We know that the first question to ask about a broken family is: What was its condition before the break? Did justice, and a fair estimate of the quality of the union and its effects upon the man and the woman involved, and their children, demand that the family hold or be held together, or was there a condition that made society more interested in the ending than in the continuance of that union?

If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of society that men and women should marry who are so physically diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family; and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent their doing more harm to family life?

Whatever may be thought by many who view all divorce with horror, there is a tendency within that movement toward free divorce, toward the freeing of the currents of generative life from evil influence, from despotism, from degenerative tendencies, and from the worst forms of social wrong-doing. There is, also, of course, in that movement, a testimony which should make all earnest lovers of their kind learn how to urge socially therapeutic treatment, a testimony to human weakness, to a lack of the sense of responsibility, to a love of personal pleasure at any cost to moral obligation, and to a need for social control of the whole family relation.

The causes, in our country, for which more than 90 per cent, of the divorces are granted, are the serious ones of adultery, cruelty, imprisonment for crime, habitual drunkenness, desertion, and neglect to provide for the family. This indicates that in most cases there has been a failure on the score of basic family requirements from husbands and wives, and from fathers and mothers, before the court was called in to break the legal bond. Does this also indicate that such failure of character has increased among our people to the extent of its increased legal recognition in divorce? We can not think so. There are special reasons why all bonds of intimate association are strained in modern life, with its separate industrial, social, and educational affiliations for each individual. But that all of us are going downward, or most of us, is not a provable contention and should not be an undemonstrated inference.

Dangers of Extreme Individualism in Marriage. - The primary fact is that we have allowed individualism in marriage to go beyond limits which are socially safe, just as in the economic order and in the administration of political affairs, we have supposed that the "let-alone-policy" would work social good. No other civilization has been able to secure successful family life without some support, supervision, control, and aid to the married couple and their children, from without. We cannot return to the collective family of other days. We must learn how to make society in general work toward the ends of stability and social order in the family, as in other social institutions, and by methods that reverence and secure personal freedom and fit well into a democratic state.

Free Love Not Admissible. - Professor Ellwood says that "while material civilization is mainly a control of the food process, moral civilization involves a control of the reproductive process, that is, over the birth and rearing of children." He argues from this that social organization "precludes anything like the toleration of promiscuity or even of free love." Most students of social history will agree with this statement. We may, therefore, say that the attitude of law, of custom, and of social standards, must be that of demanding legalization of permitted sex-relationship, and the effort to make legal sex-relationship permanent where possible without sacrifice of the substance of family life to its outward form.

Must Work Toward Desired Permanency in Marriage. - This means a quite new approach to the problems of marriage and divorce. It means the inauguration of legal and educational mechanisms in the interest of making people want to stay married, rather than toward an effort to make people stay wedded when they wish to separate. In this, more, even than in any other field of social effort, we should take heed to and obey the advice of Dr. Lester Ward "to use attractive rather than compulsory methods of reform."

Needed Changes in Legal and Social Approach to Divorce. - What are the main points of change in our legal and social approach to the divorce situation, which the modern need for social control through democratic measures demands most clearly and strongly? They are, first, a longer period of delay between reception and granting of the request of a man and a woman for a license to marry. Several State legislatures are now considering statutes which require an "interval of three days" between the application for and the granting of marriage licenses. This is certainly a short enough time in which to find out if either of the parties is likely to commit bigamy if the license is granted, if both of the parties are really of adult age claimed, if either of the parties is afflicted with an infectious disease that would make marriage dangerous to the other party, if either of the parties has been a resident of a criminal or pauper institution, if either or both of the parties are competent to financial support of the twain, if there is any "just cause or impediment" against the legal union. We may find it wise to return to the old "three weeks publishing of the banns" in order to know what the state is about in granting and what two people are about in demanding a marriage license. In the second place, there are limits outside of which society should not allow legal marriage to receive its sanction. During the legal interval required there may develop knowledge of facts that make it a social crime for one or the other or both parties to be allowed to start a new family. This is matter for serious and long-continued study, and the experimentation of our different Commonwealths in determining the useful or necessary restrictions upon legal marriage is not without value. The main thing, however, is for society to recognize that there are just restrictions upon marriage and that this is proved by the actual social burden which unfit persons place upon their fellows when marrying and bringing forth after their kind. The third point, which must be emphasized more strongly than has been the case heretofore, is the need of making the state, through its courts, the ally, not the enemy, of marriage permanency. As it is now, the Divorce Court exists to secure divorces. Its very existence invites to its use. The court procedure in all cases of marital unhappiness which has become acute enough for legal freedom to be sought should be a court procedure that aims at arbitration, at "trying again," at winning harmony by just concessions from either or both the parties, a court procedure consciously and definitely set to the task of making more marriages successful even when they have developed difficulty of adjustment, rather than one allowed to act as a means of easy separation of even fickle, selfish, and childish people on grounds of superficial difference.

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.