Socialism and the familyWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
General
Socialism and the family
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Families; Middle class; Socialism
The appearance of the feminine mind and soul in the world as something
distinct and self-conscious, is the appearance of a distinct new engine
of criticism against the individualist family, against this dwindling
property of the once-ascendant male—who no longer effectually rules, no
longer, in many cases, either protects or sustains, who all too often is
so shorn of his beams as to be but a vexatious power of jealous
restriction and interference upon his wife and children. The educated
girl resents the proposed loss of her freedom in marriage, the educated
married woman realizes as well as resents the losses of scope and
interest marriage entails. If it were not for the economic disadvantages
that make intelligent women dread a solitary old age in bitter poverty,
vast numbers of women who are married to-day would have remained single
independent women. This discontent of women is a huge available force
for Socialism. The wife of the past was, to put it brutally, caught
younger—so young that she had had no time to think—she began forthwith
to bear babies, rear babies, and (which she did in a quite proportionate
profusion) bury babies—she never had a moment to think. Now the wife
with double the leisure, double the education and half the emotional
scope of her worn prolific grandmother, sits at home and thinks things
over. You find her letting herself loose in clubs, in literary
enterprises, in schemes for joint households to relieve herself and her
husband from the continuation of a duologue that has exhausted its
interest. The husband finds himself divided between his sympathetic
sense of tedium and the proprietary tradition in which we live.
For these tensions in the disintegration of the old proprietary family
no remedy offers itself to-day except the solutions that arise as
essential portions of the Socialist scheme. The alternative is hypocrisy
and disorder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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