Broken Homes | Page 3

fiber and so difficult to eradicate from even the most unfriendly soil?
It is fortunate (since the majority of case workers are unmarried) that
simply to have been a member of a family gives one some
understanding of these questions. The theorist who maintains that

marriage is purely economic, or that it is entirely a question of sex, has
either never belonged to a real family or has forgotten some of the
lessons he learned there.
Many volumes have been written upon the history of marriage, or
rather of the family, since, as one historian justly puts it, "marriage has
its source in the family rather than the family in marriage."[2] In all
these studies the influence of law, of custom, of self-interest, and of
economic pressure, is shown to have molded the institution of marriage
into curious shapes and forms, some grievous to be borne. But is it not
after all the crystallized and conventionalized records of past time
which have had to be used as the source material of such studies, and
could the spiritual values of the family in any period be found in its
laws and learned discourses? We might rather expect to find students of
these sources preoccupied with the outward aspects, the failures, the
unusual instances. It is as true of human beings as of nations, that the
happy find no chronicler. "Out of ... interest and joy in caring for
children in their weakness and watching that weakness grow to strength,
family life came into being and has persisted."[3] It is hardly
conceivable that in any society, however primitive, there were not some
real families--even when custom ran otherwise--in which marriage
meant love and kindness and the mutual sharing of responsibilities.
And these families, today as always, are the creators and preservers of
the spiritual gains of the human race. It has been beautifully said of the
family in such a form, that "it is greater than love itself, for it includes,
ennobles, makes permanent, all that is best in love. The pain of life is
hallowed by it, the drudgery sweetened, its pleasures consecrated. It is
the great trysting-place of the generations, where past and future flash
into the reality of the present. It is the great storehouse in which the
hardly-earned treasures of the past, the inheritance of spirit and
character from our ancestors, are guarded and preserved for our
descendants. And it is the great discipline through which each
generation learns anew the lesson of citizenship that no man can live
for himself alone."[4] It follows that the most trying and discouraging
feature of social work with deserted wives; namely, their determination
to take worthless men back and back again for another trial, is often
only a further manifestation of the extraordinary viability of the family.
It is true that, into this enduring quality, many elements enter, some

homely or merely material. A desire for support, or for a resumption of
sex relations, may play a part in a wife's decision to forgive the
wanderer. There are many other factors--use and wont; pride in being
able to show a good front to the neighbors; a feeling that it is unnatural
to be receiving support from other sources. Just the mere desire to have
his clothes hanging on the wall and the smell of his pipe about, the
hundreds of small details that go to make up the habit of living together,
have each their separate pull on the woman whose instinct to be wife
and mother to her erring man is urging her to give in; Home is, in both
their minds,
" ... the place where when you have to go there They have to take you
in.... Something you somehow haven't to deserve."[5]
A woman who had left her home town and found clerical work in a
strange city, in order not to be near her syphilitic husband from whom
she had determined to separate, said, "When you've been married to a
man, you can't get over feeling your place is with him."
However we may deplore the results in a given case, the spineless
woman who takes her husband back many times may nevertheless be
giving a demonstration of the thing we are most interested in
conserving--the durability and persistence of the family. And so the
social worker who is enabled by experience or imagination to enter into
the real meaning of family life is neither scornful nor amused when
Mrs. Finnegan is found, on the morning when her case against
Finnegan is to come up in the domestic relations court, busily washing
and ironing his other shirt in order that he may make a proper
appearance and not disgrace the family before the judge.
* * * * *
An attempt will be made in this small book