Marriage and Morals/Chapter XV

The family, though it has a biological origin, is in civilized communities a product of legal enactment. Marriage is regulated by law, and the rights of parents over their children are minutely determined. Where there is no marriage the father has no rights, and the child belongs exclusively to the mother. But although the law means to uphold the family, it has in modern times increasingly intervened between parents and children, and is gradually becoming, against the wish and intention of law-makers, one of the chief engines for the break-up of the family system. This has happened through the fact that bad parents cannot be relied upon to take as much care of their children as the general feeling of the community considers necessary. And not only bad parents, but such as are very poor, require the intervention of the State to secure their children from disaster. In the early nineteenth cen​tury, the proposal to interfere with the labour of children in factories was fiercely resisted on the ground that it would weaken parental responsibility. Although the English law did not, like that of ancient Rome, allow parents to kill their children quickly and painlessly, it did permit them to drain their children of life by a slow agony of toil. This sacred right was defended by parents, employers, and economists. Nevertheless, the moral sense of the community was revolted by such abstract pedantry, and the Factory Acts were passed. The next step was a more important one, namely, the inauguration of compulsory education. This is a really serious interference with the rights of parents. For a large number of hours on all days except holidays, the children have to be away from home, learning things that the State considers necessary for them to know, and what the parents think about the matter is legally irrelevant. Through the schools, the control of the State over the lives of children is being gradually extended. Their health is cared for, even if their parents are Christian Scientists. If they are mentally deficient, they are sent to special schools. If they are neces​sitous, they may be fed. Boots may be supplied if the parents cannot afford them. If the children arrive at school showing signs of parental ill treatment, the parents are likely to suffer penal consequences. In old days, parents had a right to the earnings of their children as long as their children were under age; now, although it may be difficult in practice for children to withhold their earnings, they have the right to do so, and this right can be enforced when circumstances arise which make it important. One of the few rights remaining to parents in the wage-earning class is that of having their children taught any brand of superstition that may be shared by a large number of parents in the same neighbourhood. And even this right has been taken away from parents in many countries.

To this process of substituting the State for the father no clear limit can be set. It is the functions of the father rather than of the mother that the State has taken over, since it performs for the child such services as the father would otherwise have to pay for. In the upper and middle classes this process has hardly taken place at all, and consequently the father remains more important, and the family ​more stable, among the well-to-do than among wage-earners. Where socialism is taken seriously, as in Soviet Russia, the abolition or complete transformation of educational institutions previously intended for the children of the rich is recognized as an important and vitally necessary undertaking. It is difficult to imagine this taking place in England. I have seen prominent English Socialists foam at the mouth at the suggestion that all children ought to go to elementary schools. “What? My children associate with the children of the slums? Never!” they exclaim. Oddly enough, they fail to realize how profoundly the division between classes is bound up with the educational system.

The present tendency in all European countries is towards a continually increasing interference of the State with the power and functions of the father in the wage-earning class, without any corresponding interference (except in Russia) in other classes. The effect of this is to produce two rather different kinds of outlook among the rich and the poor respectively, with a weakening of the family where the poor are concerned, and no corresponding change as ​regards the rich. It may, I think, be assumed that humanitarian sentiment towards children, which has caused past interventions of the State, will continue, and will cause more and more interventions. The fact that an immense percentage of children in the poor parts of London and still more in the industrial cities of the north suffer from rickets, for example, is one which calls for public action. The parents cannot deal with the evil, however much they may wish to do so, since it requires conditions of diet and fresh air and light which they are not in a position to provide. It is wasteful as well as cruel to allow children to be physically ruined during the first years of their lives, and as hygiene and diet come to be better understood, there will be an increasing demand that children should not be made to suffer unnecessary damage. It is true, of course, that there is a vehement political resistance to all such suggestions. The well-to-do in every London borough band themselves together to keep down the rates, that is to say, to ensure that as little as possible shall be done to alleviate illness and misery among the poor. When local authorities, as in Poplar, take really effective measures to diminish infant mortality, they are ​put in prison.^[1] Nevertheless, this resistance of the rich is continually being overcome, and the health of the poor is continually being improved. We may, therefore, confidently expect that the functions of the State in regard to the care of wage-earners’ children will be extended rather than curtailed in the near future, with a corresponding diminution in the functions of fathers. The biological purpose of the father is to protect children during their years of helplessness, and when this biological function is taken over by the State, the father loses his raison d’être. We must, therefore, in capitalistic communities expect an increasing division of society into two castes, the rich preserving the family in its old form, and the poor looking more and more to the State to perform the economic functions traditionally belonging to the father.

More radical transformations of the family have been envisaged in Soviet Russia, but in view of the fact that eighty per cent of the population consists of peasants, among whom the family is still as strong as it was in Western ​Europe in the Middle Ages, the theories of Communists are likely to affect only a comparatively small urban section. We may, therefore, get in Russia the exact antithesis to the situation we have been considering in capitalistic countries, namely an upper class which dispenses with the family, and a lower class which retains it.

There is another powerful force which is working in the direction of the elimination of the father, and this is the desire of women for economic independence. The women who have been most politically vocal hitherto have been unmarried women, but this state of affairs is likely to be temporary. The wrongs of married women in England are at the moment much more serious than those of unmarried women. The teacher who marries is treated in just the same way as the teacher who lives in open sin. Even public maternity doctors, if they are women, have to be unmarried. The motive for all this is not that married women are supposed to be unfit for the work, nor is it that there is any legal barrier to their employment; on the contrary, a law was passed not many years ago explicitly laying it down that no woman should suffer any disability through marriage. The ​whole motive for the non-employment of married women is a masculine desire to preserve economic power over them. It is not to be supposed that women will submit indefinitely to such tyranny. It is, of course, a little difficult to find a party to take up their cause, since the Conservatives love the home, and the Labour Party loves the working man. Nevertheless, now that women are a majority of the electorate, it is not to be supposed that they will submit for ever to being kept in the background. Their claims, if recognized, are likely to have a profound effect upon the family. There are two different ways in which married women might acquire economic independence. One is that of remaining employed in the kind of work that they were engaged upon before marriage. This involves giving their children over to the care of others, and would lead to a very great extension of crèches and nursery schools, the logical consequence of which would be the elimination of the mother as well as of the father from all importance in the child’s psychology. The other method would be that women with young children should receive a wage from the State on condition of devoting themselves to the care of their children. This ​method, alone, would, of course, not be adequate, and would need to be supplemented by provisions enabling women to return to ordinary work when their children ceased to be quite young. But it would have the advantage of enabling women to care for their children themselves without degrading dependence upon an individual man. And it would recognize, what in these days is more and more the case, that having a child, which was formerly a mere consequence of sexual gratification, is now a task deliberately undertaken, which, since it redounds to the advantage of the State rather than of the parents, should be paid for by the State, instead of entailing a grave burden upon the father and mother. This last point is being recognized in the advocacy of family allowances, but it is not yet recognized that the payment for children should be made to the mother alone. I think we may assume, however, that working-class feminism will grow to the point where this is recognized, and embodied in the law.

Assuming such a law to have been passed, its effects upon family morals will depend upon how it has been drafted. The law may be so drafted that a woman receives no payment if ​her child is illegitimate; or again, it might be decreed that if she can be proved even once guilty of adultery, the payment should be made to her husband instead of to her. If such is the law, it will become the duty of the local police to visit every married woman and make an inquisition into her moral status. The effect might be most elevating, but I doubt whether those who were being elevated would altogether enjoy it. I think there would presently come to be a demand that police interference should cease, with the corollary that even the mothers of illegitimate children should receive the allowance. If that were done, the economic power of the father in the wage-earning class would be completely at an end, and the family would probably cease after a time to be biparental, the father being of no more importance than among cats and dogs.

There is, however, in these days, on the part of the individual woman such a horror of the home that I think most women would very much prefer to be enabled to continue the work they were doing before marriage, rather than to be paid for taking care of their own children. There would be a sufficient number of women willing to leave their own homes in ​order to look after young children in a crèche, because that would be professional work; but I do not think that most working women, if the choice were offered them, would be as happy being paid to look after their own children in the home as going out to work to earn wages at the job on which they were engaged before marriage. This, however, is purely a matter of opinion, and I cannot pretend that I have any conclusive grounds. However that may be, it seems, if there is any truth in what we have been saying, that the development of feminism among married women is likely, in the not distant future, even within the framework of capitalist society, to lead to the elimination of one if not both parents from the care of the young in the wage-earning class.

The revolt of women against the domination of men is a movement which. in its purely political sense, is practically completed, but in its wider aspects is still in its infancy. Gradually its remoter effects will work themselves out. The emotions which women are supposed to feel are still, as yet, a reflection of the interests and sentiments of men. You will read in the works of male novelists that women find physical pleasure in suckling their young; you ​can learn by asking any mother of your acquaintance that this is not the case, but until women had votes no man ever thought of doing so. Maternal emotions altogether have been so long slobbered over by men who saw in them subconsciously the means to their own domination that a considerable effort is required to arrive at what women sincerely feel in this respect. Until very recently, all decent women were supposed to desire children, but to hate sex. Even now, many men are shocked by women who frankly state that they do not desire children. Indeed, it is not uncommon for men to take it upon themselves to deliver homilies to such women. So long as women were in subjection, they did not dare to be honest about their own emotions, but professed those which were pleasing to the male. We cannot, therefore, argue from what has been hitherto supposed to be women’s normal attitude towards children, for we may find that as women become fully emancipated their emotions turn out to be, in general, quite different from what has hitherto been thought. I think that civilization, at any rate as it has hitherto existed, tends greatly to diminish women’s maternal feelings. It is probable that a high civilization will not ​in future be possible to maintain unless women are paid such sums for the production of children as to make them feel it worth while as a money-making career. If that were done, it would, of course, be unnecessary that all women, or even a majority, should adopt this profession. It would be one profession among others, and would have to be undertaken with professional thoroughness. These, however, are speculations. The only point in them that seems fairly certain is that feminism in its later developments is likely to have a profound influence in breaking up the patriarchal family, which represents man’s triumph over woman in prehistoric times.

The substitution of the State for the father, so far as it has yet gone in the West, is in the main a great advance. It has immensely improved the health of the community, and the general level of education. It has diminished cruelty to children, and has made impossible such sufferings as those of David Copperfield. It may be expected to continue to raise the general level of physical health and intellectual attainment, especially by preventing the worst evils resulting from the family system where it goes wrong. There are, however, very grave ​dangers in the substitution of the State for the family. Parents, as a rule, are fond of their children, and do not regard them merely as material for political schemes. The State cannot be expected to have this attitude. The actual individuals who come in contact with children in institutions, for example school teachers, may, if they are not too overworked and underpaid, retain something of the personal feeling that parents have. But teachers have little power; the power belongs to administrators. The administrators never see the children whose lives they control, and being of an administrative type (since otherwise they would not have obtained the posts they occupy), they are probably peculiarly apt to regard human beings, not as ends in themselves, but as material for some kind of construction. Moreover, the administrator invariably likes uniformity. It is convenient for statistics and pigeonholing, and if it is the “right” sort of uniformity it means the existence of a large number of human beings of the sort that he considers desirable. Children handed over to the mercy of institutions will therefore tend to be all alike, while the few who cannot conform to the recognized pattern will suffer persecution, not ​only from their fellows, but from the authorities. This means that many of those who have the greatest potentialities will be harried and tortured until their spirit is broken. It means that the vast majority who succeed in conforming will become very sure of themselves, very prone to persecution, and very incapable of listening patiently to any new idea. Above all, so long as the world remains divided into competing militaristic states, the substitution of public bodies for parents in education means an intensification of what is called patriotism, i.e., a willingness to indulge in mutual extermination without a moment’s hesitation, whenever the governments feel so inclined. Undoubtedly patriotism, so called, is the gravest danger to which civilization is at present exposed, and anything that increases its virulence is more to be dreaded than plague, pestilence and famine. At present young people have a divided loyalty, on the one hand to their parents, on the other to the State. If it should happen that their sole loyalty was to the State, there is grave reason to fear that the world would become even more bloodthirsty than it is at present. I think, therefore, that so long as the problem of internationalism remains un​solved, the increasing share of the State in the education and care of children has dangers so grave as to outweigh its undoubted advantages.

If, on the other hand, an international government were established, capable of substituting law for force in disputes between nations, the situation would be entirely different. Such a government could decree that nationalism in its more insane forms should be no part of the educational curriculum in any country. It could insist that loyalty to the international super-State should everywhere be taught, and that internationalism should be inculcated as a sentiment in place of the present devotion to the national flag. In that case, although the danger of too great uniformity and too severe a persecution of freaks would still exist, the danger of promoting war would be eliminated. Indeed, the control of the super-State over education would be a positive safeguard against war. The conclusion seems to be that the substitution of the State for the father would be a gain to civilization if the State were international, but that so long as the State is national and militaristic it represents an increase of the risk to civilization from war. The family is decaying fast, and internationalism is growing ​slowly. The situation, therefore, is one which justifies grave apprehensions. Nevertheless, it is not hopeless, since internationalism may grow more quickly in the future than it has done in the past. Fortunately, perhaps, we cannot foretell the future, and we have therefore the right to hope, if not to expect, that it may be an improvement upon the present.