The Family—The Pivot

Extract

The family depends on two people, a man and a woman. It is probable, in our present pattern of culture, that they marry because they fall in love with one another, wish to spend their lives together, and consciously or unconsciously desire children. Before marriage, each is likely to be a self-supporting adult individual, earning and laying out money at his or her own discretion ; rooted in his or her own nationality ; a citizen able to subscribe to the funds of whatever political party he or she thinks likely to bring about the public good; a worker contributing in the vast majority of cases to the national health insurance scheme, with a call on the services of a doctor if he is ill; a person able to give to personal relationships the un-self-conscious love, co-operation, sympathy, respect and self-respect of a responsible and independent human being.

After marriage, however, everything changes; and most vividly of all, the economic position. If there are to be children, the personal relationship between two equal, different and delighted selves has to be run very awkwardly in double harness with an economic relationship of absolute power on the one side and utter dependence on the other. It should be said at once that this relationship has not always been a result of marriage. It has grown up since the Industrial Revblution, which had two evil consequences for married women. The first was the development of a habit of regarding work not as a means of getting things done—houses built, children clothed, food grown—but as a method of getting money ; so that its worth came to be assessed not in terms of achievement, but in terms of-ex-’ change.