قراءة كتاب The Family and its Members

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‏اللغة: English
The Family and its Members

The Family and its Members

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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service, which they may rightly indulge in vacations, and not a bond that never releases from duty. They are the maiden aunts who spend affection and money upon the families of their relatives; who help their younger brothers and sisters through college; who take care of the aged and invalid in the family connection, and act often as stay and prop to all the weaker and more burdened of their kin. What many families would do without this type of unmarried woman is hard to tell. They are often grateful for their release from wearing domestic cares and enjoy their sense of power in general serviceableness to those they love while at the same time appreciating with keen satisfaction their own joy of craftsmanship in some chosen profession. Except for a brief hour now and then, when sister has a new baby or brother takes a new wife, they feel anything but troubled over their condition of single blessedness until, perhaps, a premonition of lonely old age stirs regret.

The Demand of Eugenists.—From the point of view of the eugenists, who demand more fecundity on the higher and less on the lower levels of life, one of the most sinister of all influences inimical to family life is this large and increasing band of superior and happy single women who are not even discontented and make no demand for any closer touch with life than is now given them. If it is bad for the family for a large number of women unable to find suitable permanent mates to be so eager for motherhood that they claim social permission for that public service whatever their marital position, it may be still worse for the family for a large number of highly superior women to cease to care greatly for intimate comradeship with men or for the actual experience of motherhood. Many women working and living in solitary fashion until too old to risk the chances of marriage, and able to find highest comradeship and largest comfort in other women's companionship, have been so held by family burdens in youth that this result has been inevitable. Society has, therefore, a task to prevent the weight of past generations, falling now so heavily upon some young men and upon far more young women, from operating against the well-being of the generations to come. We should make it our social business to share more justly the burdens due to old age and chronic invalidism.

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