Marriage and Social Control

Extract

The Nineteenth Century was ushered in with trumpet-calls to self-assertion and social freedom. A vague but long-cherished hope of the elect of humanity that the masses, each and all, might yet become persons, crystallized during the eighteenth century into a popular assertion of “equality of rights” in the body politic as “the first of rights” and essential to the process of universal individuation. Thus was born the democratic State. The Church in Christian civilization had long before recognized the independent personality of all, even of slaves and of women, in its spiritual Magna Charta, which secured to every human being the right to own his own soul and laid upon each the burden of saving it. The Protestant Reformation added to this the duty of understanding “the plan of salvation,” and hence reinforced, and in many instances initiated, the demand of the State for an intelligent electorate. Thus Church and State worked together to call into being the free, tax-supported school, and to make compulsory some minimum of formal education. The democratic State and the democratic school have worked together to create slowly legalized freedom of association for manual laborers. Labor reform organizations, springing up at once as soon as legal restrictions upon such associations were removed, have initiated the collective struggle for common industrial betterment. Of the five basic institutions of society, therefore—the family, the Church, the State, the school, and the industrial order—four are already well on their way toward thorough-going democratization. It is necessary to remind ourselves of these familiar facts in order to escape the common error of treating some one institution of society as a detached social structure, the problems concerning which are to be solved independently of other human relationship. The first, the most vital, the most intimate, and the most universal of social institutions, that of marriage and the family, has longest resisted re-adjustment to the new ethics involved in the now accepted principle of equality of human rights.