Ethics · John Dewey
THE FAMILY
In certain classes of society there is one economic feature which is probably responsible for many petty annoyances and in some cases for real degradation of spirit. When the family was an industrial unit, when exchange was largely in barter, it was natural to think of the woman as a joint agent in production. When the production moved to factories and the wage or the wealth was paid to the man and could be kept in his pocket or his check-book, it became easy for him to think of himself as "supporting" the family, to permit himself to be "asked" for money for household expenses or even for the wife's personal expenses, and to consider money used in these ways as "gifts" to his wife or children. Women have more or less resistingly acquiesced in this humiliating conception, which is fatal to a real moral relation as well as to happiness. It is as absurd a conception as it would be to consider the receiving teller in a bank as supporting the bank, or the manager of a factory as supporting all the workmen. The end of the family is not economic profit, but mutual aid, and the continuance and progress of the race. A division of labor does not give superiority and inferiority. When one considers which party incurs the greater risks, and which works with greater singleness and sincerity for the family, it must pass as one of the extraordinary superstitions that the theory of economic dependence should have gained vogue.
(1) The "domestic theory," or as Mrs. Bosanquet styles it, the "pseudo-domestic" theory, is held sincerely by many earnest friends of the family in both sexes. They feel strongly the fundamental necessity of family life. They believe further that they are not seeking to subordinate woman to the necessities of the race, but rather to give her a unique position of dignity and affection. In outside occupations she must usually be at a disadvantage in competition with men, because of her physical constitution which Nature has specialized for a different function. In the family she "reigns supreme." With most women life is not satisfied, experience is not full, complete consciousness of sex and individuality is not attained, until they have dared to enter upon the full family relations. Let these be preserved not merely for the race, but especially for woman's own sake. Further, it is urged, when woman enters competitive occupations outside the home, she lowers the scale of wages. This makes it harder for men to support families, and therefore more reluctant to establish them. Riehl urges that not only should married women remain at home; unmarried women should play the part of "aunt" in some one's household--he says _alte Tante_, but it is not necessary to load the theory too heavily with the adjective. (2) The other horn of the dilemma is accepted by many writers, especially among socialists. These writers assume that the family necessarily involves not only an exclusively domestic life for all women, but also their economic dependence. They believe this dependence to be not merely a survival of barbarism, but an actual immorality in its exchange of sex attraction for economic support. Hence they would abandon the family or greatly modify it. It must no longer be "coercive"; it will be coercive under present conditions.
True it is that if a woman steps out of her profession or trade for five, ten, twenty years, it is in many cases difficult to reenter. But there are some occupations where total absence is not necessary. There are others where her added experience ought to be an asset instead of a handicap. A mother who has been well trained ought to be a far more effective teacher in her wholesome and intelligent influence. She ought to be a more efficient manager or worker in the great variety of civic and social enterprises of both paid and unpaid character. There is no doubt that the present educational and social order is suffering because deprived of the competent service which many married women might render, just as women in their turn are suffering for want of congenial occupation, suited to their capacities and individual tastes. A growing freedom in economic pursuit would improve the home, not injure it. For nothing that interferes with normal development is likely to prove beneficial to the family's highest interest.
The fallacy of those who would abolish the family to emancipate woman from economic dependence is in supposing that because the woman is not engaged in a gainful occupation she is therefore being supported by the man for his own pleasure. This is to adopt the absurd assumptions of the very condition they denounce. This theory at most, applies to a marriage which is conceived from an entirely selfish and commercial point of view. If a man marries for his own pleasure and is willing to pay a cash price; if a woman marries for cash or support and is willing to pay the price, there is no doubt as to the proper term for such a transaction. The result is not a family in the moral sense, and no ceremonies or legal forms can make it moral. A family in the moral sense exists for a common good, not for selfish use of others. To secure this common good each member contributes a part. If both husband and wife carry on gainful occupations, well; if one is occupied outside the home and the other within, well also. If there are children, the woman is likely to have the far more difficult and wearing half of the common labor. Which plan is followed, i.e., whether the woman works outside or within the home, ought to depend on which plan is better on the whole for all concerned, and this will depend largely on the woman's own ability and tastes, and upon the number and age of the children. But the economic relation is not the essential thing. The essential thing is that the economic be held entirely subordinate to the moral conception, before marriage and after.
If there were no other reason for the better and wider education of woman than the desirability of more intelligent consumption, society would have ample ground to demand it. Sec. 6. UNSETTLED PROBLEMS: (2) POLITICAL The family may be regarded as a political unit, first in its implication of some control of the members by the common end, and in the second place in its relation to the authority of the State. =1. Authority within the Family.=--If the political character of the family were kept clearly in mind, the internal relations of the members of the family would be on a far more moral basis and there would be less reason for friction or personal clashes. If there is a group of persons which is to act as a unity, there must be some leadership and control. In many cases there will be a common conviction as to the fittest person to lead or direct, but where the group is a permanent one with frequent occasions for divergent interests, unity has been maintained either by force or by some agency regarded by the people as embodying their common will. In the earliest forms of society this, as we have seen, was not clearly distinguished from personal and individual command. But as the conception of the political worked free from that of the personal agent, it could be recognized more and more that the ruler was not the man--not Henry or William,--but the King or the Parliament, as representing the nation. Then government became a more consciously moral act. Obedience was not humiliating, because the members were sovereign as well as subject. It was not heteronomy but autonomy. In the family the personal relation is so close that this easily overshadows the fact that there is also a family relation of a political sort. The man in the patriarchal family, and since, has exercised, or has had the legal right to exercise authority. And with the legal theory of inequality to support him it is not strange that he should often have conceived that obedience was due to him as a person, and not to him as, in certain cases, best representing the joint purpose of the family, just as in other cases the woman best represents this same purpose.
The "pseudo-domestic" theory on this point is suggested by its general position on the economic relations of the family as already stated. It believes that the family must be maintained as a distinct sphere of life, coordinate in importance for social welfare with the intellectual, artistic, and economic spheres. It holds, further, that the family can be maintained in this position only if it be kept as a unique controlling influence in woman's life, isolated from other spheres. This of course involves an exclusion of woman from a portion of the intellectual and political life, and therefore an inferiority of development, even if there is not an inferiority of capacity. Some of this school have maintained that in America the rapid advance in education and intelligence among women has rendered them so superior to the average man who has to leave school for business at an early age that they are unwilling to marry. A German alliterative definition of woman's "sphere" has been found in "the four K's"--Kirche, Kinder, Kueche, und Kleider.
If the permanence of the family rests on the maintenance of a relation of inferiority, it is indeed in a perilous state. All the social and political forces are making toward equality, and from the moral standpoint it is impossible successfully to deny Mill's classic statement, "The only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals." But some of the advocates of equality have accepted the same fallacious separation between the family and modern culture. They have assumed that the family life must continue to be unscientific in its methods, and meager in its interests. Some women--like some men--undoubtedly place a higher value on book learning, musical and dramatic entertainment, and other by-products of modern civilization than on the elemental human sympathies and powers which these should serve to enrich. It is too easily granted that the opportunity and duty of woman as wife and mother are limited to a purely unscientific provision for physical wants to the exclusion of scientific methods, intellectual comradeship, and effective grappling with moral problems.
Provisions for health and instruction and proper social life in school, provisions for parks and good municipal housekeeping, for public health and public morals,--these demand the intelligent interest of the parent and have in most cases their natural motive in the family necessities. A theory of the family which would limit the parent, especially the mother, to "the home" needs first to define the limits of "the home." To measure its responsibilities by the limit of the street door is as absurd as to suppose that the sphere of justice is limited by the walls of the courtroom. A broader education for women is certainly justified by precisely this larger meaning of the care of children and of the family interests. The things of greatest importance to human life have scarcely been touched as yet by science. We know more about astrophysics than about health and disease; more about waste in steam power than about waste in foods, or in education; more about classical archaeology than about the actual causes of poverty, alcoholism, prostitution, and childlessness, the chief enemies of home life.
In the light of the actual possibilities and needs of family life two positions seem equally absurd: the one that family life can be preserved best by isolating it, and particularly its women, from culture; the other, that it does not afford an opportunity for a full life. Neither of these errors can be corrected apart from the other. It is in the mutual permeation and interaction of the respective spheres of family and cultural life, not in their isolation, that the family is to be strengthened. Here, as in the economic field, no one family can succeed entirely by itself. The problem is largely a social one. But every family which is free and yet united, which shows comradeship as well as mutual devotion, is forcing the issue and preparing the way for the more perfect family of the future.
The other class finds in the bond itself, under certain conditions, a seemingly fatal obstacle to the very purpose which it was designed to promote: unfaithfulness, cruelty, habitual intoxication, and other less coarse, but equally effective modes of behavior may be destructive of the common life and morally injurious to the children. Or alienation of spirit may leave external companionship empty of moral unity and value, if not positively opposed to self-respect. This class is evidently actuated by sincere motives. How far society may be justified in permitting dissolution of the family under these conditions, and how far it may properly insist on some personal sacrifice for the sake of larger social ends is simply another form of the problem which we considered in the economic field--the antithesis between individual rights and public welfare. The solution in each case cannot be reached by any external rule. It will be found only in the gradual socializing of the individual on the one hand, and in the correlative development of society to the point where it respects all its members and makes greater freedom possible for them on the other. Meanwhile it must not be overlooked that the very conception of permanence in the union, upheld by the state, is itself effective toward thoughtful and well-considered action after as well as before marriage. Some causes of friction may be removed, some tendencies to alienation may be suppressed, if the situation is resolutely faced from the standpoint of a larger social interest rather than from that of momentary or private concern.
We do not know in any full sense whence the life of the spirit comes, and we cannot, while standing upon the platform of ethics, predict its future. But if our study has shown anything, it is that the moral _is_ a life, not a something ready made and complete once for all. It is instinct with movement and struggle, and it is precisely the new and serious situations which call out new vigor and lift it to higher levels. Ethical science tracing this process of growth, has as its aim not to create life--for the life is present already,--but to discover its laws and principles. And this should aid in making its further advance stronger, freer, and more assured because more intelligent. On the early history of the Family, see the works cited at close of ch. ii.; also Starcke, _The Primitive Family_, 1889; Westermarck, _The History of Human Marriage_, 1901; Howard, _A History of Matrimonial Institutions_, 3 vols., 1904. On present problems: H. Bosanquet, _The Family_, 1906; Parsons, _The Family_, 1906; Bryce, _Marriage and Divorce in Roman and in English Law_, in Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 1901; Ellis, _Man and Woman_; Thomas, _Sex and Society_, 1906; Bebel, _Woman and Socialism_; Riehl, _Die Familie_.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.