The Family and the School : Part 4

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 18 of 22)

This conviction led on one side to the introduction of courses of study in universities, colleges, normal, high, and even some elementary schools, which had bearing upon management of sanitation, food supply, housing, street control, recreation, economic reform, social engineering in politics, and kindred agencies for social betterment. It led on the other side to the attempt to make the office of the philanthropist a vocation, for which definite training and standardized compensation must be provided. So rapidly have these two elements of applied social science invaded the vocational field that to-day, outside of general and special teaching, they draw the majority of women seeking professional careers into work directly leading to social and personal betterment. A few women became lawyers, doctors, ministers, and now aspire to political leadership; but for the most part women are true to their sex-heritage now that they have a chance to choose and fit for their work. The nurture of child-life, the moral safeguarding of youth, the care of the aged, the weak, the wayward, and the undeveloped - these, which have been their special tasks since society began to be rational and humane, are still their main business in the more complex situations of modern life.

Departments of Household Economics in Colleges. - When the departments of household economics were added to college courses they were hailed on one side as a needed attempt to "make the higher education fit women for wifehood and motherhood;" and on the other side they were opposed as a base concession to conservative views of woman's position, and as leading toward a lowering of standards in women's higher education. They were, and are, neither of these. The college courses in subjects related to the scientific improvement of human beings and their environment are courses leading toward new vocational specialties, which the newly outlined science of race-culture demands. Women who excel in these specialties do so as paid functionaries and are oftener unmarried than married. Nor are these studies limited to feminine students, although far more women than men choose them.

The interrelation of the present social order by which a milk or a water supply has to do with "big business" and with law, and "a garbage can is a metal utensil entirely surrounded by politics," requires some knowledge of these things on the part of men; especially if they are to be "heckled" in political campaigns by women voters. There are, to be sure, now outlined school training "departments of homemaking" intended to help individual women in their work in private homes, but such departments are generally of the nature of "extension courses." Regular college courses, especially those of four years and leading to a special degree, in household economics, as in other groups of studies, lead directly toward a vocational career, standardized and salaried, related to general social organization, and subject to the "factory" tendencies of the modern industrial order. Students in such courses, generally speaking, graduate either to teach household arts in schools and extension work, or to take positions as expert dietitians, managers of hospitals and other public institutions, directors of laundries and restaurants, as trained nurses, assistants or directors in chemical laboratories, architects, interior decorators, landscape gardeners, and what not.

All these specialties are essential to social progress, and all are linked to family life in general, but none of them is particularly related to any one family group of one father, one mother, and their children. They, therefore, while tending to make family life in general far more successful than of old, fit no woman surely for wifehood and motherhood; and they cannot do so unless omniscient social wisdom can tell in advance what girls will marry and have children and social control becomes despotic enough to oblige such girls to take these courses in preference to any others; or unless society returns to its old drastic compulsion for all to marry and bear active part in the race-life as parents.

Society Now Based upon Man's Economic Leadership. - Any study of the needs of the family in relation to the school, especially in relation to the tax-supported, free, and compulsory educational system, must take account of two outstanding facts: namely, first, that the whole arrangement of society as we have inherited its condition is based upon the economic leadership of the husband and father in the home partnership. This continues to be the rule even in social strata where the sense of justice gives both parties a common purse and where finest quality of affection and of comradeship makes it a negligible matter which one makes the larger contribution to the united treasury.

Women Socially Drafted for Motherhood. - The second fact which must have its recognition in any study of education in relation to the family, is that no married woman is exempt from all demands of motherhood unless some "selective draft," more delicate in its evaluation than any we have yet evolved, shall indicate her right to exemption, and that if marriage is to continue on anything like its present basis commonplace women cannot have all its advantages without paying some adequate price.

Father-office and Mother-office Still Differ. - We are now in the midst of a social order in which the father-office and the mother-office do differ essentially in their requirements in the vast majority of families. The father-office leads directly toward specialization and achievement in some one calling. To be a good father is, in ordinary family conditions, not so much to give constant personal attention to his children as to do something well which the world wants done and will pay for and by which he may maintain and improve the economic and social standing of his family. To "give hostages to fortune in wife and child" may, indeed often does, hamper a man's idealistic relation to his vocation and oblige him to work for money when he wants to work for fame or for higher usefulness, but it serves almost always to keep him steady to his job. For the average mother this is not the case.

Where there is a family of children more than large enough to make good the parent's share in life's ongoing stream, or where physical, mental, or moral peculiarities demand special attention to one child or more, or where aged, delicate, or incompetent members of the family circle call for special consideration, or where the environment does not provide, or the income cannot pay for elaborate aids to domestic comfort from without, the average conscientious housemother must give the best of strength and the most of time in the service of the private family for many years of life. That is to say, getting a group of children up to adult independence and saving the community most of the intimate duties of care of the aged and of the weak, while it calls upon the man-head of the family for greater activity in his special line, calls upon the woman-head of the family for a general and personal service as a primary duty.

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.