=Most Social Students Advocate Marriage.=--Celibate concentration upon
a specific task, however valuable that task may be, is open, we
contend, to serious social dangers, as history amply proves. And
family life has now such varied and efficient aids from commerce,
manufacture, educational provisions in school and recreation centres,
in summer camps and special organizations of youthful energy toward
social serviceableness, that men and women can marry and rear
families, if they really desire so to do, more easily than ever
before, provided they are willing to pay the price of simplicity in
the home and in individual mastery of the technic of new ways of
living. What is needed for the best development of the family under
modern conditions is not more celibates, men and women of high ability
and noble consecration to undertake wholesale service in its behalf,
but rather that more of the best and the best-balanced men and women
be absorbed, to necessary degree, and at the right period of life, in
the task of actual transmission of their quality and tendency through
the living tissues of the social organism in the vital process of
parenthood. What is needed to secure that result is not only a new
ideal of social obligation but also, and definitely, such skill in
economic and domestic adjustments as will more and more leave a margin
of strength and energy for a chosen vocation not wholly mortgaged to
family uses, in the case of women as of men. It is quite time that
some of the rightly honored "maiden aunts of society," as our leading
spinsters have been called, used some of their wisest thought and
their most self-sacrificing service toward securing such economic and
domestic adjustments as will work toward the diminution of their own
kind!
Again it must be insisted that what society-at-large now needs most is
not celibates, however wise and good, working along one line, without
close touch with the main experiences of birth and death and common
social relationship, but rather the deepening and broadening of common
human relations through the reaction of the wise and good upon all the
fundamental ties that bind the race and the generations together. The
loss to society of those who might have been fathers and mothers and
chose to be so devoted to religious orders as to stand apart from
their race-life is an admitted calamity in the view of most people who
study mediaeval history.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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