FACTORS IN FAMILY LIFE Considering first the forces which favour monogamous mating and the familial organization resulting therefrom, we note that the sexes are numerically equal. It is true that more boys than girls are born, in a ratio of about ioo girls to io6 boys. However, mortality is slightly greater among males, so that in adulthood the sexes exist in numbers practically equal, taken the world over. This biological fact in itself favours pair marriage, since under polyandry or polygyny many are necessarily left mateless. More over, group marriage renders the paternity of children impossible of determination, and is so disfavoured by possessiveness and jealousy that after centuries of trial and error it is sanctioned scarcely anywhere at the present time, even among savages. Furthermore, it has long been known to be a biological fact that two and only two persons are required to co-operate for the per petuation of the species. The rearing of offspring falls most naturally, perhaps, to the two who have produced them. Also mutual possessiveness, already mentioned, favours the family based on pair marriage, for man is constituted to resist encroach ment upon property or privilege. Thus a man fights those who would possess "his woman," and a woman fights those Ivho would possess "her man." These struggles to exclude competitors for favour would seem in the long run to work for pair marriage, as against other forms.
On the other hand, pair marriage with the monogamic ideal assumes that since there are enough mates for everybody, every one can and will find a suitable mate. This assumption is not warranted by facts. There is not and never has been provided any adequate social machinery whereby young people might be enabled to make genuine choice, and to find each a suitable life long mate. Moreover, the standard of living, by constantly rising, works to postpone marriage later and later. Thus a fairly large proportion of adults are at any given time unmarried, and the dissatisfactions and maladjustments arising from this situation affect society as a whole, and to the extent to which they are felt, work against monogamous marriage. Sexual instinct in human beings is not such that each person experiences a unique attrac tion during life. On the contrary, sexual impulse is in both sexes arousable by a variety of stimuli, regardless of ceremonial and legal restrictions. Mankind seems typically polygamous rather than monogamous by momentary impulse, however unfortunate for other aspects of life the satisfaction of such impulse may be. This fact perpetually threatens the family which is based on the ideal of life-long pair marriage. Furthermore, the desire for mastery over each other, individual differences in endowment, and a host of egoistic impulses, constitutionally latent in every person, work toward hostility and disruption, as the divorce courts prove.
However important the form of relationship between men and women may be for familial structure, it is really the child who chiefly determines how men and women shall live together. Ex cept for reproduction, men and women might live in a great variety of social patterns, prompted only by individual differences in impulse and resources. The civilized family, founded upon pair marriage, with the husband as the head, and with the wife and children dependent upon his ability and bounty, was arrived at through struggling with the great sex difference in reproductive function. It must be remembered that until recently women were typically engaged throughout youth and maturity in conceiving, bearing, feeding, nursing, transporting and burying infants. From girlhood, women were physically attached to infants. The period of gestation for a human infant is long. Once born it must be carried upon the back and fed from the breast for a long time, under primitive conditions. Its birth constitutes an ordeal for the mother, in the course of which she may be crippled, at least for enough days to suffice for starvation unless ministered to by others. Human infants are conceived and borne in the course of nature at the rate of one each year or two, at any season, in the cold as well as in the warm, and they become quite heavy while still too immature to walk far or to run. (B. T. Baldwin, Physical Growth from Birth to Maturity, 1921.) How to master the un certain food supply, ravenous wild beasts, hostile tribes, storms and cold is a hard puzzle for a creature carrying heavy children within and upon her body, year in and year out.
There is, nevertheless, a way to open this hard cage, that will lead to sustenance and shelter without sacrifice of the child. This way is to get the protection of those who are not cumbered with burdensome generative systems. Thus if men could be induced to supply subsistence, women could live without killing or aban doning their infants. At the same time, men were motivated by sex attraction, by the luxury of having routine labours performed for them, and doubtless by pity, to undertake the protection of women and of the helpless offspring to which they were mys teriously subject. Thus men, women and children came to be arranged in family groups, in which men were inevitably lords and masters, because they needed the arrangement least. The satis faction of the mutual need for sex leaves men unhampered, while it leaves women weighted with the burden of gestation, child birth and child care. (A. B. Parsons, Woman's Dilemma, 1926.) It must be remembered that at the beginning of this long learn ing process, men knew no direct responsibility for the child. We have said that women were mysteriously subject to child-bearing. Knowledge of the true cause of child-birth had to be worked out by accumulation of records, comparison of observations and veri fication of inferences, just as in the case of any other scientific fact. It would almost certainly be a long time before human experience would establish the fact that sexual union is the in variable cause of procreation. Child-birth was originally ascribed to the influence upon mothers of the sun, the rain, the rivers and the trees. (E. S. Hartland, Primitive Paternity, 191o.) The discovery of paternity undoubtedly modified woman's pre viously existing familial status in various ways. Men learning that they too were creators of children, realized also that in order to identify "his own flesh and blood" a man must ensure the strict fidelity of the mother to himself alone, in matters of sexual union. Special restrictions were thus imposed upon women, and a double standard of morals arose. In the earliest formulations of law, we find that "If the finger have been pointed at the wife of a man because of another man—for her husband's sake she shall throw herself into the river." No similar law required the husband to drown himself in like circumstances. (Code of Hammurabi, 225o B.c.) With sound knowledge of the true source of infants, women could take steps toward limiting the number of births. The first step in the exercise of this new power was voluntary celibacy. Celibate women had time and energy to examine closely the family situation, to appraise woman's status therein, and to formulate diverse suggestions for mitigating some of the mis fortunes due to her subordination. (K. Anthony, Feminism in Germany and Scandinavia, However, the almost sudden modification of woman's status, which the present generation witnesses, has come to pass not through feminist propaganda primarily, but through the works of persons who as a group were indifferent to the woman question. Inventors, men of science and philosophers created what is known as "the new woman," with a changing position in the family. During the 19th century, invention based on physics and chemistry harnessed power a thousandfold greater than the power of women's hands. Biologists studied the processes of reproduction, and devised scientific methods of birth-control other than celibacy. They wrought upon the origin of species and carried the convic tion to high places that human beings had in the past undergone evolution, and therefore might in future continue to change. Philosophers in the meantime had developed naturalism, humani tarianism and pragmatism—all points of view favourable to the liberation of women as individuals, which science had been ren dering practicable. (L. S. Hollingworth, "The New Woman in the Making," Current History, 1927.) By the opening of the 2oth century a "new woman" was trying to find place in the family. Freed at the same time from routine hand labour for the family and from incessant, involuntary maternity, married women in large numbers began to attempt differentiated occupation and economic independence. As a result of this breaking up of its formerly undifferentiated matrix, the family has begun to undergo internal modification and reflective scrutiny. Two chief problems now emerge as a result of woman's shift in power and attitude, i.e., the serving of food and the care of young children. In cities the apartment hotel, the restaurant, the nursery school, the managing housekeeper and the trained nurse afford solutions more or less suggestive of ultimate satisfac tion. In small towns and in the country these facilities are lacking as yet, and women still occupy the place which was traditional in the centuries immediately preceding ours.
The same influences that gave women increased power are also giving the child a modified status in the family. Psychology has developed scientific method during the half-century just elapsed. Child-study is one of the conspicuous concerns of modern psy chology, offering new insight into child life, and a new respect for the child and for his right to be set free from the family at maturity. However, the increased value of the child, affording him increased dignity of status in the family, arises chiefly from new power over procreation, which renders the child less cheap and less to be taken for granted. As time goes on and all intelli gent people gain the power of voluntary parenthood, the value of the child may well become such as to modify social attitudes in ways which we can at present but vaguely foresee. (The Child: His Nature and His Needs, The Children's Foundation, 1924.) To summarize briefly the changes which are in progress in the modern family, we may say that parenthood is becoming a volun tary matter, wives are achieving economic independence in differ entiated work, the double standard of morals is being condemned, and children are becoming less frequent and more valued. Our times bear witness to the living of many avowedly experimental lives, in the attempt to revise the family on the basis of new powers over nature. Studies are being compiled of families in which the wife and mother earns an independent salary. (V. M. Collier, Marriage and Careers, 1926.) From these studies it ap pears that men and women of intelligence and good will are consciously searching for a form of familial procedure in which the interests of men, women and children may all receive equal consideration. The outcome of the search is still uncertain.
Since the child is the core of the puzzle, since changes along the lines attempted depend upon voluntary maternity, and since methods of birth-control at present developed require intelligence and character for successful application, it follows that such changes will be confined at first and possibly for a long time to the unusually able. Whether the future will witness two kinds of familial pattern, one for the reflective, the other for the unreflec tive, or whether the unreflective will eventually change their "ways" through force of example, remains to be seen.
(L. S. H.)