What's Wrong With the Family?

by DELLA D. CYRUS

1

SOMETHING is wrong with the family. It is a subject on which almost everybody is ready to express an opinion in newspaper and pulpit, on platform and street corner. The trouble is the breakdown of character, they say. People nowadays think they should be happy. It’s time they got back to the old-fashioned virtues of responsibility and adherence to duty. The trouble is with modern women. They should stay home and take care of their children. Alcohol is the key to it all. People don’t believe in God and don’t go to church. There aren’t enough parks or playgrounds. The war accounts for it.

Everyone seems to know the answer, and almost everyone knows what should be done, but the symptoms continue to become more alarming, and actually nothing is done to stop the steady statistical disintegration of the family.

We are so fascinated just watching and denouncing the symptoms of family disease that, we fail to see the source of the infection — the family itself. The family falls apart in modern urban life not because human nature is more depraved than it used to be, but because the family is out of harmony with the modern world and no longer meets the most vital needs of its members. The statistics which we all view with so much alarm reflect the simple fact that the family lets people down, and there is nothing else to supply the values and satisfactions which the family once supplied.

Family life was well adapted to the ways of Europe in the twelfth century, and even to the ways of the isolated American pioneer in the nineteenth century. Then it provided its members with work, food, clothing, shelter, education, love, companionship, religion, and social life. The family was the community and the community was the family. The family as a unit produced the things necessary for its life as a unit. A man without a wife was as crippled economically and as lonesome as a woman without a husband. The more children a couple had, the better living they could make and the more secure was their future. It was a life which set the family against the world, and for its survival it cultivated strong feelings of possessiveness within the family, and strong feelings of suspicion and hostility toward outsiders.

In the heyday of the family there was incompatibility, of course, and frustration and boredom, but these things were offset by a common cause and the knowledge that every member of the family was essential. If, in the past, families faced up to their problems and stuck together, it was not because they had more character or more religion than we have, though they did have more assurance about what they believed, but rather it was because they had no alternative.

Clearly the family is no longer an independent world of its own, but completely dependent on the rest of society for the necessities of its life as well as for most of its education, culture, and amusement. Nor is the individual any longer dependent on the family for the satisfaction of his own needs. On the contrary, both men and women with earning power are better off without a family. Every child they produce decreases their standard of living. Both men and women can live comfortable lives, filled with friendships, social activities, and even love, without ever taking on the responsibilities and restrictions of family living. Even children and the aged, if sufficiently neglected, will be taken care of at public expense in the modern city.

If the family has nothing distinctive to offer in the modern city, which cannot be obtained more cheaply and less painfully elsewhere, why do people still cling to it? The fact is that no adequate alternative to family living is available for the man and woman who love each other and who want to have children.

This then is the sole cohesive element in the modern family — the love of a man and a woman and their love for their children. Not economic necessity, not to produce together the means of staying alive — just love. This means that the modern family puts a burden on love which it was not compelled to carry in the past and one which it cannot carry now.

Since our sexual morality does not approve of love outside of marriage, the family automatically fails whenever love fails. The far greater number of divorces among childless couples than among couples with children indicates that many families keep operating just to protect their young. But the increasing number of divorces among couples with children shows that parental responsibility is not enough to save an institution which draws so small and tight a circle around its members.

We are still trying to maintain the isolation of the family in a world which makes that isolation impossible, and we are still trying to find values in the family which are no longer there. We still expect to find the world there, rich, warm, various, exciting, and alive. But the world is outside. We cannot understand why we feel so restless and so unfulfilled when we exercise the old family attitudes of exclusiveness, possessiveness, and suspicion toward outsiders, which suited so well the pioneer family of the past. By trying to pretend that the family is a world of its own, we only succeed in cutting it off from the world.

2

LET us look at some specific ways in which the family fails to meet our needs as individuals. Because women usually work within the limits of the family, they suffer most from its failures. It isolates them especially from any vital relationship with the world outside the family, and under modern conditions they cannot find an adequate sense of calling or purpose within the family. Not only are they forced into unhealthy dependence on their husbands and children for most of the satisfactions of their lives, but the family does not even provide them with a physical or spiritual environment in which they can be successful wives and mothers.

Modern conveniences plus modern high standards, while freeing women from the back-breaking physical labor of the pioneer woman, have increased enormously her petty cleaning-up tasks. The number of things which modern women have to wash and polish and starch and iron and sterilize, and the number of times they have to do it, have multiplied until many housewives spend most of their time cleaning one thing or another, and cannot imagine how the pioneer woman found time to do all she did. If the pioneer woman had spent so much time on the luxury and boredom of cleanliness, she wouldn’t have been paying her way, and the modern woman knows in her heart that she isn’t paying hers either. She knows that in a world dirty and bloody with wars, alive with hatred and starving children, it is criminal waste to devote a lifetime to the cleanliness of a single family. The preparing of food has a little more status as important work and may have the virtue of saving some women from complete futility. But even this is very different from the role the pioneer woman played in providing a family with food. Then the preparing of a meal was an incidental task in the long process of growing, picking, processing, and storing in which she had taken an essential part. The modern woman, spending money earned by her husband to buy food already produced, canned, or tastelessly prepared by others, cannot have the same feeling of being an essential part of life.

Women who have servants to do their cooking and cleaning up for them are not average American women. In the best of times, the great majority of American homes are without domestic help of any kind, and the indications are that domestic help will be progressively more expensive and less available. Let the magazines call a woman Homemaker, Queen of the Kitchen, Princess of the Parlor

— the woman herself knows that she is the unhired help doing the hack work of the world. Her multitude of petty cares leaves her feeling essentially futile, menial, and lonely, until her human nature, and only incidentally her woman nature, hits back with glaring failures as wife and mother.

But, we keep arguing, housekeeping and cooking are not the essential jobs of a woman. Those jobs take time, of course, and involve a considerable amount of drudgery, but everyone has some drudgery

— even business executives and college presidents. A woman’s real job is the care and training of her children. No job is more important, more satisfying, more close to life, than the directing of young lives from infancy to maturity. A mother has a fulltime job by definition. Any woman who can’t be satisfied with a home and children should never get married. These are prevalent beliefs which amount to a national faith and sink so far into so many generations of feeling that many people are incapable of examining them at all.

If they are valid beliefs, why is there so much evidence that women are making a botch of motherhood? Why do they abandon their children or leave them with incompetent strangers and go to work outside their homes? Why are they so often unhappy and unsuccessful as mothers? Why is there so much juvenile crime, and why is there an increasing number of emotionally disturbed, maladjusted children coming to the offices of psychiatrists, child guidance clinics, and social agencies? What is so difficult about being a mother in the modern world?

There is no need to dwell on the shortcomings of the urban neighborhood, or the urban tenement, apartment, duplex, or house as a place in which to rear children. How can even that rare thing, the fenced-in yard with swing and sandbox, compare with barns, sheds, cows, horses, dogs, and all outdoors? Not having all outdoors, and often no outdoors at all, what can a child do in the polished orderliness which modern advertising tells us should be our homes, or in the crowded, dirty, disorderly rooms which are too often our homes?

Because modern families are small, children are often hungry for friends. Most children under five are thrown entirely on their mothers for a twelve hours a day, seven days a week companionship which is as much a starvation diet for them as it is for their mothers. Both are yearning for companionship with their contemporaries; both are wanting to do things in the world which can’t be done within the four walls of a house. Modern psychology has succeeded in making everyone aware of the importance of the mother-child relationship, but it seems to have left almost everybody with the impression that all that is required is that there be a relationship. All that is necessary is that mothers “stay home with their children.” Actually the intense, mutually exhausting emotional and physical relationships which develop between mothers and preschool children in the typical urban family lead inevitably to that worst of all maternal sins, overmothering with undercurrents of hostility, and that most fatal of all child responses, overdependence with undercurrents of resentment. With no place for her children to play and no aunts or grandparents to watch them, the young mother is as bound to her home as if she were tied to it with a rope, and cannot even go to the corner drugstore without running the risk that the house will burn over her children’s heads.

3

THE crucial years in the life of the family are the years during which there are children under school age. They are the years when the important groundwork of the child’s personality is being formed. They are the years which convince everybody that a woman should never try to be anything but a mother, and they account for the fact that most women linger pointlessly at home long after their job as a mother is done. They are the years which place the heaviest burdens on marriage. Divorces are not so frequent during these years as they are later, but this is the period when many marriages in fact get broken, whether or not they end in divorce.

Why are these years so difficult and so often fatal? Exactly what takes place in a family of two or three small children? The mother in this family, whether she has a fourth-grade education or a Ph.D. in philosophy, has less freedom and less leisure than anyone else in our society. Even if she has a washing machine, mangle, vacuum cleaner, and Mixmaster (sometimes she doesn’t have any of these things), she works hours which have long been illegal for anyone in industry. When her children are well, she works twelve hours a day, seven days a week. When they are ill or when there is a new baby, she works from fourteen to twenty hours, often going for months without an adequate period of unbroken sleep. And never, even in her deepest sleep, is she entirely free from her responsibility. Consequently, a woman is almost always tired during these years, if not actually ill, and this alone makes her an unhappy and unfit companion for her husband and children.

The mother’s working day is divided between caring for the house and caring for the children, which, under modern conditions, is a simple neurosisproducing situation. In the small shut-in urban dwelling, these two jobs are mutually conflicting, if not mutually exclusive. The mother and her children are constantly at cross purposes, because the children, if they are normal, are bent on noise, mess, dirt, and destruction, while she is struggling to create quiet, order, and cleanliness. Her children, because of their lack of equipment and companionship, and because of their very youngness, need her attention, her time, and her help, while she needs more time and energy than she has, to accomplish the essential jobs of washing, cooking, cleaning, and putting away. In this contest, either the house or the child is bound to lose; and whichever happens, the mother is left with a feeling of incompetence and failure. Nor is there any time or place, from her children’s waking in the morning until their going to bed at night, and sometimes not even then, which the mother can count on as her own to rest or read, to collect her thoughts, to regain her perspective and her self-respect and begin over again.

As she drags hopelessly about the work of her house, her children bump into her, spill things, write on the walls, fall down, cry, whine, fight, and require a thousand attentions which she stops her work to give. She forgets what she was trying to do before she was interrupted. The telephone and doorbells ring. Something boils over on the stove, the puppy howls to go out and makes a puddle, and the man to read the meter pounds on the back door.

This is material for boisterous, low-comedy slapstick, full of the kind of frustration and anguish which depraved people laugh at. Every father has heard the story of this day repeated until he has become bored with its shameful and petty details, and it should never be repeated again if it were not for the fact that its very triviality blinds everyone to its true significance. These troubles of a young mother are not real troubles, but such days, following one after another, month after month, and year after year, corrode the spirits of women, wear away their minds and talents, eat into their selfrespect, destroy their sense of direction, until they know hours and days of desperation and defeat so complete and final as to make it a matter of wonder that there are any good mothers at all, or that any mother is ever a successful person.

Most people recognize this period in a woman’s life as a difficult but inevitable one. The typical remark made most often by older women is: “But it only lasts a few years and then you wish you had your children back again.” This endlessly repeated bit of wisdom is, all unwittingly, the most devastating comment which could be made on the prevailing ideal for the mother. It amounts to smug acceptance of the fact that in those years the mother loses the value of her education and training for other work, loses touch with the large problems of a larger world, and loses confidence in herself as a mature citizen of the world who might have something of value to contribute to it. It is acceptance of the fact that women really have nothing to live for after their children are grown, and that if they do, by the grace of God, allow their children to grow up, they are faced with long empty years which they must fill somehow as best they can. And so they fill them with keeping their houses cleaner than ever, or by joining organizations which, though they may have social value, are too frittering and inefficient to give any strong and capable human being a clear sense of usefulness or integration in society.

“Only a few years” in the life of the child means the most crucial years of his development, during which he is cramped and lonely and pushed away and overwatched by a mother who is too tired and too busy and too unhappy to give him the kind of mothering he needs. Sometimes an honest older woman will recognize this fact by expressing deep regret over the lack of time she had for her children, and, above all, the lack of energy she had for just loving them and enjoying them when they were young.

Young mothers themselves are often the most timid about expressing dissatisfaction with their lives. Because it doesn’t occur to them that anything could be wrong with the family, they suppose the fault lies in themselves. They want desperately to be good mothers, and when they get too much of it, they are ashamed of their unhappiness. Haven’t they everything they want in the world? A home, a husband, children? Of course they have, and so to cover up their disappointment and confusion, they concentrate on all the small materialistic devices which are supposed to make a home beautiful and happy — flowered stencils for the kitchen cupboards, lace and satin for the bassinet.

Young mothers will discuss for hours the problems and irritations of home and children and will express with feeling their frustration at being tied down and their frank relief at getting their children in bed for the night, but such discussions are guiltily ended with, “Children are a lot of fun, though.” This is their wistful way of saying that they know children are supposed to be a lot of fun, and could be a lot of fun, but somehow they are hardly any fun at all.

4

MEANWHILE, what is happening to the marriage during these years? If the husband is a mature and sympathetic person who can throw himself into the spirit of the rough-and-tumble life of babies, diapers, chaotic meals, and sleepless nights; if he is vocationally adjusted, economically secure, hopeful for his future, not too overworked, and takes the attitude that things are temporarily a bit too tough for his wife, they can grit their teeth and pull through without irreparably damaging their relationship. When these favorable conditions prevail, they can, on occasion, laugh and have fun together. But obviously these are rare conditions.

Too many men in the modern city get too little satisfaction from their work, are worried about money, overworked, and apprehensive of the future. These are just the years when men are trying hardest to make a career or to make money. Far from being able to wade happily into the noisy discontent which is their homes, most men have far too little energy for their children and almost none for the problems of their wives. Instead, they need someone to sympathize with them, someone to allay their fears and listen to their plans. Above all, they need someone to play with, laugh with, and relax with.

So they come home to a physically exhausted, nervously taut, emotionally dissipated woman who still has several hours of work to do. Both are so aware of their own needs that even when they understand the needs of the other, there is little they can do about it. Both know that somewhere there should be help for this situation, that somewhere in the world there should be rest and laughter and love. Almost in spite of themselves, they hit out at each other, because it was in their marriage that both had expected to find these things.

Both are caught in a situation too painful and too difficult to understand, and the air rings with accusations, demands, resentment, or hysterics. Finally the marriage falls to pieces in fact, if not in court, or it settles down into the quietness of resignation and despair. Couples caught in this situation often feel that it could be saved if they could leave the home together and go somewhere to dance or drink or talk in a new atmosphere. But even this kind of shock treatment too often is unavailable, because it is too difficult and too expensive to get anybody to stay with the children.

Playing at home is more difficult still. If the children don’t shatter the relationship between husband and wife — and very small children are capable of breaking into life’s most poignant moments at any hour of the day or night — still the home is the wife’s eternal workshop and she, at least, cannot experience there the sense of freedom and new experience which she and her husband both need. Because playing together is so hard to arrange, a frequent solution is for the husband to go off to bowl or to work overtime, or to make love to someone who is available and gay and will take him the way he is, while the wife stays home more lonely and resentful than ever.

Add to all of these difficulties of marriage and children the problems of emotionally warped individuals who demand an abnormal amount of love and consideration, the sexually repressed or maladjusted, the physically ill who cannot carry their share of the load, and it is hard to understand, not why so many families break up, but why so many still hang together.

Men are even less critical of the family than women because, superficially, they are less affected by its shortcomings. Men suffer because women suffer, and, suffering, cannot give them what they need and expect to find in the family. But although men are aware of the disappointing contrast between what they want and what they get, they are so blinded by the traditional promises of home, love, food, and fireside that when these things are cold and unappetizing they look everywhere but at the family itself for the trouble. If, night after night, the children are crying and the living room is a shambles and the dinner isn’t ready and his wife snaps at him to stop reading his paper and lend a hand, the husband is likely to conclude that his wife is the nervous type, or women are funny, or life is hell, and let it go at that until he can get away.

That he might find what he wanted in a very different kind of family life rarely occurs to him, and he resists changing the family pattern long after his wife is willing to do so or in fact has changed it by going to work outside their home. His resistance is not difficult to understand, because young mothers who work at outside jobs can almost never make arrangements for home and children which are satisfactory for everybody.

If a good nursery school is available for the children and the family can get and pay for a first-rate housekeeper, the woman may work at an outside job she likes, to the greater satisfaction of everybody, including her husband. But desirable housekeepers and nursery schools are available to only a select few. Most mothers must resort to makeshift arrangements which are bad for the children and leave the mother with most of the work to do at home in addition to her other job. Under these circumstances, women may be more tired and demanding than when they stay at home all day, thus justifying their husbands’ reinforced conviction that home is where their place is.

The family’s failures have not ended when it has sent its last child off to school. The mother may have gained a few blessed hours which she can fill according to a plan of her own, but she is still bound to the same pattern of life and cannot, for several years, engage in any interest or work which requires more than two or three consecutive hours of her time. Because this is true, and because “there is always something to do around a house,” and because most mothers by this time don’t believe there is anything else they can do anyway, women continue to live an isolated, undernourished, haphazard life within the family, brightened now and then with meetings, bridge parties, and shopping tours.

The young child, if he is still reasonably normal, is so happy to be in school and among his contemporaries that he takes life in his stride for several years without causing anybody too much anxiety. But what about the older child and particularly the adolescent? What does the family do for him? It may have disintegrated altogether, leaving him without any real ties to anybody. Or the parents may be hanging together by threads of grim duty or resigned boredom waiting for him to get old enough so that they can stop pretending to be a family. Or the mother may have thrown all of her longing for life into plans for her adolescent child so that he is unable to have any life of his own. But even if none of these frequent conditions exist, the very best family cannot meet all the needs of an adolescent in the modern world.

The adolescent suffers as much from the social isolation of the family as he does from its individual failures. Adolescents, by definition, are trying to outgrow the family and their problem is that they have nothing to grow into. Delinquents are not delinquent because their parents don’t watch them, or because they haven’t any place to play basketball, or because there are too many beer joints on every corner. They are delinquent because, in addition to their tension over the individual failures of their individual families, they have no real part to play in the life of the world. They are boiling over with vitality and ability which our society does not want or need.

Instead of giving them an important and useful social function which their growing maturity demands, we tell them to stick to their studies, help their mothers, and stay out of trouble. We insist that they stop acting like children but refuse to let them act like adults. Juvenile Court judges and Community Welfare Councils talk about uniting community facilities for combating juvenile delinquency, or uniting delinquents to solve their own problems, but no one says anything about uniting families into the kind of communities which might give an adolescent something real to belong to.

5

WHEN we are faced with so much tragic evidence of family failure, why do we keep telling people to make better families while we accept the defects of the family itself as if they were something final and inescapable? Why do we not look at the family with loving but dry eyes and see it for what it is, an antiquated institution designed for another time and another way of life, but now badly in need of remodeling if not actually remaking?

The isolated autonomous family in the modern world is not only a source of personal failure and loneliness, but it is also the breeding place of prejudice, ignorance, fear, and hostility. How can there be successful international relations, enlightened world government, or any world peace as long as society is made up of millions of ingrown, completely self-interested families? How can such families produce world citizens who alone can change a world psychology from murderous rivalry to rational cooperation?

All changes in family living must be in the direction of a more vital relationship with the community and the world. Anything which loosens up the rigid exclusiveness of the family, broadens its sympathies, brings its individuals into significant relationships with the members of other families, is contributing toward this end. Cut in a modern city the relationships between people and families are too often superficial and essentially meaningless.

Being a citizen of the world means forming relationships beyond the rigid boundaries of the family which have some of the meaning which family relationships have had in the past — meaning discovered in the sharing of vital experiences and common goals. The unit of the family must open enough of its doors and windows to make it possible for a larger group of people to form a larger unit which embodies the basic pattern of the family — combined strength to meet common problems. Only when families are willing to release the habit and the spirit of coöperation into the community can we begin to have a community in the true sense of the word.

Current efforts toward social improvement in urban areas made by social agencies, community funds, and citizens’ committees, achieve the inadequate results one would expect in the absence of any community to improve. Such groups are always engaged in the struggle to get the lost and suffering individual or family in touch with “community resources.” The community resource method is an effort to pick up the worst casualties of a society and to relate them to a pseudo-community made up of relief agencies, hospitals, clinics, clubs, social centers, family counselors, and the like. These resources are supported and sponsored by the fortunate for the unfortunate who have no real relation to each other or to the so-called resources.

Although this method helps many people who need help and saves some from complete disaster, it is no surprise that several years of applying community resources to a family so often fail to put it back on its social feet. Nor is it any surprise that so many families continue to get out of joint with society no matter how many new resources are added to the list. People who are out of joint with life do not want to learn ceramics at a social center or find a friend at the Y.M.C.A.; they want to get back into joint with life. There must first of all be a community for people to belong to, and the community, or in other words the people themselves, must together meet their own needs. The modern city is too big to make effective community life possible, but perhaps such a life could be created by groups of families within a city voluntarily banding into communities and meeting as a group the problems and needs of its individuals. Sporadic and timid beginnings have been made in interfamily coöperation. Families have coöperated in running nursery schools, tot yards, and victory gardens. Whole communities have built common heating and refrigeration systems. Housing projects have included common nurseries, laundries, and recreational halls. During the present housing shortage, groups of families have been forced to live together as one family in the same house — with conspicuous lack of success. The horror of anything faintly suggesting communal living prevents even timid and partial coöperative projects from being taken up generally. But the need is not for halfhearted coöperative projects or for communal living. The need is for effective communities. Must we always wait for bombs, fires, and floods to see in a tardy flash that we all live together in the same world? Can’t we see now that that old bus, the family, has broken down on a lonely road at night and that we are all in it together?

6

SUPPOSE a group of families in the same neighborhood of a large city decided to pool their problems and their strength. If they began on the problems of young mothers and children, they could as a group establish a child center for children of all ages in their neighborhood, to be run for as many hours a day as the group wished, perhaps twenty-four. They could secure a spacious building with ground around it, — perhaps a school, — get equipment, and hire a trained staff, perhaps some of the mothers themselves, who might be assisted by untrained mothers who wished to assist. This center could provide everything which children need: outdoor and indoor space, things to make and do, physical care, companionship, social experience, and supervision. It could be near enough to everybody’s house to make it convenient for children to come and go easily at whatever hours fitted into their particular family plan.

The objection that this takes the responsibility for children off the mother, where it belongs, and places it on the community, where it doesn’t belong, is an irrational objection. Under our present lack of community, child welfare agencies, juvenile courts, reform schools, detention homes, and crèches testify to the fact that society is already taking unsatisfactory responsibility for too many children whose parents have given up entirely. Under a truly community plan, parents would not be relinquishing responsibility but would be pooling it. In a sense, all children would be the responsibility of all parents. Under such a plan, parents would be much less likely to give up entirely, because the burden would be shared by all. By freeing children for the kind of play and companionship which they need, a community plan would give mothers some time in which to use capacities of their own. And only when a mother has some satisfactory life of her own can she give her children the unmixed love and unselfish guidance which are her special gift.

The next step for a group of families to take in creating a community life might be a coöperative house-cleaning plan. Commercial house-cleaning companies are already in existence in some large cities, but a community might have its own, composed of some of its own members, or several communities might form such a company together. Thus all general house cleaning would become a community business, carried on by people especially trained for the job, abolishing it forever as the lonely, unpaid, soapy preoccupation of some twenty-five million women.

Another experiment for such communities could be a coöperative kitchen and dining building. Immediately, of course, the noxious ogre of communal eating raises its ugly head. But there is no reason why a community could not run, or hire to have run, a coöperative kitchen without eating in common. A central kitchen could be located near enough to everyone, so that meals could be delivered to private homes. Or a dining building could be so arranged to permit families to dine in private intimacy if they wished. Or, since it is to be a democratic community, families who wanted to could go on cooking their own meals in their own kitchens. Most families would discover that their children would heckle them into eating with other children as often as possible. And wives, whether the working kind or the staying at home kind, when offered the choice of cooking a meal or eating out, often choose the latter. Whatever inevitable objection and resistance there is to anything so strange and unproved should be weighed against the freeing of human beings for a life of meaning and hope.

If families coöperated on the problems of child care, house cleaning, and cooking, women immediately would be free and obliged to make some choices about their own lives. Some who like to be homemakers could go on being full-time homemakers. Some could work in the community enterprises themselves, while others could follow part-time or whole-time careers for which they had been trained. Some could develop talents which now atrophy. But all would have the freedom and the responsibility to do something valuable with their time. All would have the freedom and the responsibility to be part of a world larger than the family. Can anyone doubt that women so freed and so responsible would contribute more to the gracious living of the family as well as to the good living of the world?

Community coöperation need not stop with meeting these problems alone. The community could have a recreational building or buildings for children and adults. It could have a sitters bureau or a clinic or a theater. Adolescents could take an important part in group planning and administration. Many jobs could be the special responsibility of adolescents for which they would receive both pay and community status. Whatever common problems the group decided to meet, they would not be met by “resources” or by “facilities” applied from the outside, but by the people themselves working or paying in common.

The question of how poor communities could meet initial expenditures required for community projects is relevant but of incidental importance. If subsidies were required they would not change the essential pattern of common effort to meet common needs. The planning and the work would be done by the group. As a nation we pay for what we think we have to have, whether it be battleships or war memorials or institutions for the insane; and if we decided we had to have a better kind of community life, probably we could find a way to pay for that too.

Communities, to function successfully, should be planned from the ground up. At a time when so much new housing is being contemplated, it should be possible to build communities which fulfill the emotional requirements of family living, and to forget all about rows of neat little houses — this time with stainless steel sinks. Even communities without any wish for a coöperative life should be planned to eliminate many of the present hazards to family living. Houses in which there are to be children should be grouped around small parks with no traffic running in front of them. This one thing would revolutionize family life, free children for many more hours of outdoor play, and free mothers from the fatal mixture of children and housework as well as from the ever recurring nightmare of traffic accidents. Houses grouped around parks would form natural communities for groups who wished to do things in common, the park to contain all community buildings.

To name all the difficulties and probable failures of this or some other experiment in community life would be easy and endless but beside the point. The facts show that the family is failing on all sides because it is trying to live on an exclusive diet of ingrown emotion with no real common life. Since neither a common life nor a whole life can be lived within the family any longer, what but a community can revitalize and reunite the family for a common goal? Only this time the goal of the family will not be to protect itself against the world, but rather to enter into the world which is already on its doorstep. Man has split the atom and communicated with the moon. The time is now past due for him to try something more difficult and more important — living with his fellow man.