offspring and the regulation of the sex instinct. It has now come to have another of profound import: the comradeship of congenial temperaments. At present this third motive is demanded. by the wife more than by the husband, partly because she has time to think about it, and more probably because the man's gregariousness finds satisfaction in business association with other men. Professor Thomas has expressed this admirably in the following paragraphs: "An examination, also, of so-called happy marriages shows very generally that they do not, except for the common interest of children, rest on the true comradeship of like minds, but represent an equilibrium reached through an extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after those of the children-cherishing him, in fact, as a child-or in extension to woman on the part of man of that nurture and affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably dumb) creatures. . . "Obviously a more solid basis of association is necessary than either of these two instinctively based compromises; and the practice of an occupational activity of her own choosing by the woman, and a generous attitude toward this on the part of the man, would contribute to relieve the strain and to make marriage more frequently successful." For any one to suggest a solution for all these family perplexities would require the assumption of omniscience. It is sufficient here to show that many types of family and marital relations are being evolved which give promise of greater justice and more content to all concerned. Lester Ward remarks that, while most persons suppose that nothing is so certainly fixed by nature, and even by divine decree, as the particular form of marriage which happens to prevail in their own country, there is, in fact, nothing which is so purely conventional as just the way in which men and women agree to carry on the work of continuing the race. Professor George Elliott Howard boldly declares that the problems of the family should be studied in connection "with the actual conditions of modern social life;" that it is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very different ones; and he urges that the moral leaders of men should preach "actual instead of conventional righteousness." There can be no doubt that, with relative economic independence, and with a broader and more practical education, women are rapidly passing from purely instinctive to conscious and voluntary motherhood; nor that, as they do so, they will set a higher standard of sex morality for men. In this process there will inevitably be some mal-adjustment and some unhappinesswhether more or less than our forbears endured when conditions were even farther from the ideal than now, there is no means of knowing. So far as women are concerned, this growth means a larger life, a life not exclusively domestic and maternal; and by so much as mothers are more than instinctively maternal, their children will be better born and more intelligently nurtured. CHAPTER XVI THE LARGER LIFE AND CITIZENSHIP “We're hungry ... and since We needs must hunger-better for man's love, ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING. "We are discovering women . . . our modern world is burdened with its sense of the immense, now half-inarticulate, significance of women. . . . "Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere physical need, an æsthetic by-play, a sentimental background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in man's life. She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man ... and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and controlled, bond or free? "For if she is a mate, one must at once trust more and exact more; exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of understanding. . . . "The social consciousness of women seems to me an unworked and almost untouched mine of wealth for the constructive purpose of the world."-From A New MachiavelliH. G. WELLS. THE survey of the life of the ordinary domestic woman of the past century has brought us to the conclusion that excessively feminine habits were the most serious disadvantage under which women struggled. By implication, also, men were as much too masculine" as women were too" feminine" for the uses of modern life, and the gulf between them made the adjustments of marriage unduly difficult, besides reacting injuriously upon the children. With the definite decline of militarism and paternalism at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, new types of domestic relations began to appear; but the traditional habits characteristic of the earlier régime still persisted. The restrictive theory of a female sphere ordained by God and controlled by men, culminated in America about the time of the Civil War, and was afterward rapidly broken down by vast changes in industry and in religious thought, and by the applications of science to common life which have taken place since then. Yet even now the conventional behavior associated with hyper-femininity and hyper-masculinity is still affected or unconsciously imitated in childhood, and is deemed essential-at least in women-to respectability. Evidently, so long as the standards of religion and conduct devised by men continue to be revised largely by them, progress toward a common human-as distinguished from a bi-sexual-basis of morals will be slow. |