IX

The Modern Family

The most powerful influence in shaping our lives to-day is the sexual impulse which has created the institution we call the family.  Few of us, at least in our modern democracies, live in daily fear that our neighbors will attack and kill us, or carry us off into slavery.  Even the hunger for food, that once forced men into action, plays little direct part in the shaping of the lives of most of us.  None of those who read these pages would starve if they never did any more work.  If they tried to starve, they would be arrested and sent to jail; and if they persisted, they would be fed by force.

Meantime it is sex hunger, manifesting itself in a hundred forms of beauty and ugliness, courtesy and insult, cultivated conversation and ribald jest, beautiful dancing and suggestive indecencies, honor and dishonor, self-repression and prostitution, love and lust, children of gladness and children of shame, that lifts us to such heights as we attain, or plunges us into the hells we create for ourselves.  If one could insure one good thing in life for the child one loves, one would ask, not money nor fame, but a continuously happy marriage.

In the past, women have always looked upon marriage and family life as a career; and the majority of men have found their most significant life in the building up of the family institution.  To-day, however, family life as a career is everywhere called in question.  Many women claim to prefer educational opportunity, professional recognition or an independent bank account to husband and children.  Social service is exalted; domestic service is debased.  Why is it so much nobler to care for other people’s children in a social settlement, or in a school, than to care for one’s own in a home?  Why should women mass themselves together in vast groups as industrial workers, as teachers, as suffragettes?  We hear of women’s work, of women’s careers, of women’s clubs, associations and parties, of women’s interests, movements, causes.  In November, 1911, two hundred and twenty women were arrested in London for assaulting the English government in the supposed interest of women.  Why do women prefer social to domestic service?

Two reasons spring at once to the mind of any intelligent observer of the life about him.  The first is the complexity of our modern life; the second is the nature of the institution of marriage.

A man or woman wishes to live with the one he or she loves.  Sexual love is in its very nature restricted, circumscribed, monopolistic—­in a word, monogamic.  As has been said repeatedly in this volume, the human unit is neither a man nor a woman; it is a man and a woman united in a new personality through the unifying and blending power of love.  To say that this unit is exclusive and monogamic is simply saying that it respects its own personality.  It can no longer act simply as a man or a woman; it