The family : an ethnographical and historical outline with descriptive notes, planned as a text-book for the use of college lecturers and of directors of home-reading clubs

Preface

IT is notable that almost all of the amazing quickening of the past two or three decades in the art of teaching has been confined to kindergarten and school. College teaching has changed, of course, and to a considerable extent during this period, but the change is, for the most part, merely a reflex from elementary school-teaching ; it is not spontaneous. Through the demand for more varied interests and more direct personal observation in kindergarten and school, the curriculum of the college has also been broadened and varied, and the laboratory has encroached upon the lecture room. Imitation of the ever-widening university curriculum has played a part here, too. The purposive indifference to pedagogic method in the professional schools of the university has also been widely imitated in the college. This lack of spontaneous development in college instruction has led, together with other factors, to the swamping of the college in the school and university. This is not the place to discuss in any detail the relations of these three agents of education. It is plain, however, that if the college is to be continued as a distinct educational agency in the belief that its training and inspiration are essential to scholarly, effectual, and social habits of thought and work, something more is necessary than its mere readjustment in the time-table of education. Its subjects of study and methods of teaching must be differentiated from those of school

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Preface and university. An attempt in this direction is one of the two objects of this text-book.

The systematic study of particular social groups is peculiarly fitted for the college curriculum. The classification of social facts from written records and personal observation demands maturer powers of observation and analysis than any but the exceptional high school student possesses. Such a discipline is, however, on the other hand, essentially preliminary to university work. Much of the effort of university students in sociology, not to speak of other subjects, is futile because of their lack of training in scientific method. 1

The family is, for several reasons, a particularly well-chosen subject for the elementary student of society. Many of the facts discussed have been part of his or her personal experience, and yet so different are the popular and the scientific points of view in regard to social facts that the student's power of apperception will be developed through numberless opportunities to consider long-known facts in wholly novel relations to one another. The subject calls for the classification of a pretty definite number of specific facts ; the descriptive work may be well defined and concise. And yet the family's function and structure are so closely connected with the social organisation in general that in their study an outlook is opened upon other social groups and upon the working of farreaching social laws.

No attempt has been made to give more than an

1 Compare Steinmetz : Classification des types sociaux et catalogue des peuples in I'anne'e sociologique, 1898-1899, pp. 43-147, for this failure in method on the part of sociologists in general.

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outline of the topics to be discussed in the class-room. The instructor, therefore, is not relieved of a thorough study of the subject he is teaching. A text-book cannot take the place of scholarship. It may, however, serve to a certain extent as a time-saving device. The data in Notes D, for example, will aid the instructor as a check upon the accuracy and completeness of the students' analyses. The bibliographical notes will also serve as time economies. In other words, this text-book aims to be a pedagogic device for the university lecturers who are so commonly called upon to conduct elementary courses in sociology. The college method ought to be, in my opinion, primarily pedagogic, but the borrowed university scientist, who naturally finds this additional tax of college teaching upon his already overtaxed time irksome, slips, as I have already suggested, into the lecture and seminar method of the university, to the loss — and satisfaction — of his class.

The history of theory has been purposely omitted from these outlines. Except for the advanced student, analysis of descriptive data is more profitable than study of family theory. In other words, in studying the family, ethnography, and in particular ethnography as it touches in its function of classification upon ethnology, is better adapted than ethnology proper for the elementary student. In sociology, for example, as in other sciences, the habit of evolutionary thought is almost too readily acquired by the embryonic scientist. Stages of development are clamoured for and pursued. This is merely one of the innumerable expressions of the mind's classifying habit, a habit which may lead to non-scientific just as well as to scientific results. Freed viii Preface

from the history of theory, freed also from illustrative facts, the latter being contained in Notes D, the lecture outlines are reduced to the presentation of a few important and well-established deductions and to schemes of classification.

Notes A contain references to fuller discussions of the topics than that given in the lecture outlines. References to especially interesting illustrative data are also given in these notes. Notes B contain brief summaries of theory bearing on topics in the lecture outlines. These notes will be of use in assigning special tasks to the student who is exceptionally qualified to work in the field of controversy. Notes C contain further suggestions for original research by the advanced student. The bibliographical notes, as well as the list of authorities given in the Introduction, have been carefully compiled from a primarily pedagogic standpoint. From a bibliographical standpoint they are incomplete.

The Introduction suggests methods for the class instructor to follow. Through the analysis of written records the student will receive training in the use of primary sources of authority — one of the chief requisites of scholarship. The plan for personal observation of a small number of families has many advantages for the student, — the training of his faculty of observation (a faculty that is lamentably undeveloped in the average college student), the development of social tact and sympathy, the broadening of his interests in and his knowledge of his social environment, and, consequently, the enlarging of his opportunities for usefulness to his community. From a narrower pedagogic point of view the under-

Preface ix

lying object of both plans of study is drill in the application by the student of knowledge acquired in the lecture room. The average college student is mentally lazy. It is the universal experience of college instructors that text-book or lecture-imparted information is rarely assimilated by their students. How seldom does one see any effort to apply the facts or methods learned in one course to another course, or to personal experiences outside of college walls. The college note-book is a kind of intellectual graveyard. Unwillingness to think in concrete terms is another evidence of this mental supineness. A carefully supervised use of the schedules for recording the observations of the families visited and a thoughtful classification of social facts noted from ethnographical or historical records will lead the student into definite and concrete ways of thinking. Furthermore, it will train him to test and evaluate evidence, — both documentary evidence and evidence 1 that has been directly acquired, — a particularly useful lesson for the sociological student.

Ethical considerations have been relegated to a distinct lecture. For the sake of ethical thought and practice, if for nothing else, the question of what ought to be must at first be clearly separated from the question of what is. The confusion of these two points of view is responsible for what sometimes proves to be distinctly unethical conduct.

One form of this confusion is too commonly back of the widespread unwillingness in modern civilisation to enlighten boys and girls in many matters of marriage and parenthood. It is hoped that where outside x Preface

of the college lecture room this reluctance is beginning to disappear this text-book may be of use. Unfortunately, in many parts of our country, a college education is not yet considered as necessary or as desirable for young women as for young men. The supporters of the argument that the place for girls is exclusively in the home must take their stand on the ground that the home education given to girls of college age, seventeen to twenty-one, is, or may be, superior to academic education {plus home education), i. e., it more adequately trains the girl for her future life. Perhaps this text-book will prove a useful guide for the intelligent mothers who hold this view of the value of home-training and who, single-handed, undertake the responsibility of fitting their daughters for useful and joyous womanhood. This is the second object of this text-book.

General unwillingness to learn the story of social origins and developments, particularly those of sexual and familial relations, is the mental attitude of the average person. It is, perhaps, the most notable of all survivals of primitive taboos and it still serves the same purpose as the primitive taboo, i. e., the preservation of the group's social customs and traditions. To-day, to be sure, it is doing this only to a limited extent. The economic and legal changesof the nineteenth century in family structure and, more significant even than these changes, contemporary proneness to discuss such subjects as prostitution, divorce, etc., demonstrate a giving way of familial customs and traditions. Curiously enough, where such discussions abound, loathness to examine the history of the subject sentimentally persists. The plea is made that

Preface *i

knowledge of the origin and career of a perhaps still cherished family usage will lessen its current valuation. There is some truth in the warning that in such cases especially a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In most cases, however, the rejoinder is increase the knowledge. Fuller knowledge makes us realise that an humble origin, or what we may please to call an humble origin, is in no way prejudicial to the developed form or function. 1

Inquiry-precluding taboo and, for that matter, contempt-breeding knowledge, are dangerous dSris choking up possible outlets for a stream of progressive and inspiring moral theory. The dogma that marriage is an unquestionable sacrament and the dictum that it is merely a survival of a past form of property-holding are both dams of this kind.

If the golden rule of democracy, equal opportunity for all for the development of personality, is to become a more influential social ideal than it is now, if individualism and altruism are to be reconciled in the view that child-bearing and rearing is the most important of all social services, the desirability of change in many social relations in and out of the family will have to be frankly faced, and, if necessary, new adaptations must be welcomed. To this end knowledge of the past and unhampered discussion of ethical desiderata for the future are necessary. For those persons to whom truth for truth's sake is not always a justification this should be my warrant for the notice of certain facts which are generally ignored and for what may

1 Cp. the luminous discussion of existential and spiritual judgments by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York, London, and Bombay, 1902, p. 4.

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seem in Lecture 15 undue frankness in refusing to shirk consideration of possible issues.

In view of the simple character of the lecture outlines as schemes of classification references to authorities are seldom made. All of the works given in the bibliographical notes have been of more or less service. I am under special obligation to Post, Dargun, and Steinmetz. The notes by Steinmetz which are scattered through the answers to the question schedules on the juridical relations of the natives of Africa and Ocean ica of the Internationale Vereinigung fur vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft una 1 Volkswirtschaftslehre zu Berlin, as well as his methodological criticism in Die neueren Forschungen zur Geschichte der menschlichen Familie (Zt. f Socialw., II, 1899, 685-695), are especially valuable. Howard's useful summaries in the introductory chapters of his History of Matrimonial Institutions -were time-saving in the preparation of the bibliographical notes. Professor Giddings has been kind enough to read Lecture 15 in manuscript and to suggest a clearer statement than that originally made about the desirability of youthful trial marriage.

Contents

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