This Noble Land

by James A. Michener

  The young boy and girl also had well-defined tasks; they helped their parents by doing various chores, such as chopping wood for the fireplace, learning to spin and sew if you were a girl, helping with the garden and, most demanding of all, mastering the school lessons on which their futures depended. At night, by the light of the fireside, they read either their next day’s lessons or one of the precious books obtained by their parents.

  As the children reached age sixteen or seventeen, they became attracted to the young neighbors of the opposite sex, and by eighteen or nineteen the young people would marry and start families of their own. I have never seen a reliable study of how the young men and women who did not find partners in those early years of courtship existed in a frontier society. Their lot could not have been enviable, but in the early literature of our nation we do find examples of the unmarried aunt who remained with her sister or brother when either of them married, so perhaps that was the norm. But a good deal of active family planning and devising occurred in the effort to find a husband for the unmarried daughter or niece. I have a less clear picture of how the unmarried man survived.

  So in the colonial family everyone knew his or her place and what was expected, and deviation was neither allowed nor forgiven. Inevitably there was deviation, as Nathaniel Hawthorne showed with such compassion in his novel The Scarlet Letter, in which Hester Prynne was caught in adultery and paid a terrible price for it. And there was always the risk for an older woman living alone that she would be accused of being a witch and condemned to be submerged in water after being strapped into the ducking stool or even be hanged.

  In the course of my research on the settlement of Colorado I read scores of journals of the families who in the 1840s made the covered-wagon trek from New England or Pennsylvania clear across the continent to California or Oregon. The travail that this involved is staggering for the modern reader to imagine: broken wheels, dead oxen, cholera sweeping the entire trail like a plague, being snowbound in blizzards, diminishing food supplies and death en route. It was a wonder anyone made it to his or her destination, but most did.

  Motion pictures and television, not satisfied with the dangers listed above, have added the inevitable attack by Indians in which the trekkers bravely fight off the savages. Pure bunk! The record is that almost never did the Indians attack a wagon train; they watched from afar. If the would-be settlers fired at them because they felt threatened, the Indians did retaliate, but never in large numbers or with much effectiveness.

  Out in the West the general characteristics established by the colonial family persisted, for when the travelers reached their western goals, the husbands still had to clear the fields and build the cabins and the wives had to spin and weave and make a home. The children, too, had the same tasks their predecessors had been saddled with two hundred years before. Of course, crude machines were slowly being invented to help in everyday work, but the basic, conservative threads of American family life were honored and firmly ingrained in American behavior. It was found to be a pattern that men and women violated at great risk.

  This pattern proved so viable and productive that it prevailed through the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. In the 1920s, when I began to consider patterns of family life, I accepted the established form with never a question as to its efficiency as a way of ordering male and female relationships. I not only approved of what I saw but also became an ardent advocate of the system. My strong adherence to the traditional American family is curious, since during my early years I never lived in a house occupied by a husband or any other man. I was raised solely by women, and because I was aware of what I was missing I still feel that I was in some ways deprived.

  Assault on the family as World War II begins. With the dislocations imposed by the war, including not only the shipment of our men to Europe and the Pacific but also the influx of women into the factory workforce, old patterns of life underwent such radical change that the traditional family was assaulted from every side. Indeed, well-authenticated data from the Census Bureau and other equally qualified sources present a portrait of family life today that is vastly different from what it was only a quarter of a century ago.

  The number of divorced persons in the United States has nearly quadrupled, from 4.3 million in 1970 to 16.7 million in 1993, representing 9 percent of all adults aged eighteen and over in 1993. One study projected that of every thousand marriages that took place in the United States in 1985, 516 would end in divorce, with the wife and sometimes the children being abandoned. The proportion of men and women aged thirty to thirty-four who have never married has tripled since 1970. For women, the proportion has grown from 6 percent to 19 percent; for men, the proportion has increased from 9 percent to 30 percent between 1970 and 1993. Obviously, many American men have become afraid of marrying.

  What is fueling the attack on the traditional patterns of family living can best be studied on three different levels, dictated by the ages of the participants. First is the radically changing sexual behavior of young people in the thirteen–twenty age group. Second is the altered courtship behavior of those in the twenty–thirty-five age group who are seriously looking for a mate. Third are the couples already married who face new problems in trying to keep their marriages functioning.

  Assault on the family: the sexual behavior of youth. I am shocked when I read reports based on thorough research that many American children are engaging in sexual activity in their earliest teens or even at eleven or twelve. Government data in 1990 show that 41 percent of all teens aged fifteen to seventeen had experienced full sexual participation. This premature adventuring does not necessarily lead to a satisfactory later married life, and the practice has become so widespread that I doubt it can be reversed.

  The persistent pressures of our society, especially those advanced by television and advertising, provide such a constant barrage of sexual images and suggestive behavior that young people are invited to start their sexual lives at increasingly younger ages.

  The shocking advertisements of one manufacturer of blue jeans for adolescents were such blatant invitations to engage in sexual behavior that the public was vocal in its outrage, and the ads had to be discontinued. But others took their place, providing a constant show of sexual titillation.

  Society has become almost indifferent to the fact that babies are born to thirteen- and fourteen-year-old mothers, and that young fathers accept no responsibility for the child rearing.

  Teenage pregnancy has become so common that schools across the nation have found it necessary to offer special classes for high school girls and even grammar school girls who bring their babies to school. Today’s young women beyond school age face no social ostracism if they have babies outside wedlock. Cohabitation is so common among all classes that illegitimacy naturally follows, and the added difficulty young women face in trying to find husbands makes it fashionable for women of strong character to have babies whether or not they have husbands. The insouciance with which attractive professional women have babies outside wedlock makes the practice seem almost the norm.

  Of every thousand babies born in the nation, 326 will be to unwed mothers, and the babies will never know a father or become accustomed to a man in the household. Of the young girls who had illegitimate babies in 1994, 393, 685, or 30.5 percent, were under the age of twenty. In 1994 there were 933 infants diagnosed with AIDS, and each year an estimated 5,000 babies are born with fetal alcohol syndrome as a result of alcoholism on the part of the pregnant mother.

  Children’s failure to receive any family discipline in the matter of having babies has inevitably followed upon the disintegration of discipline involving less complex problems. For some years I lived in an apartment house in which a spineless father and a weak mother ineffectually tried to discipline their feckless fourteen-year-old son. He started by shouting ‘Shut up!’ at his mother, and soon escalated to assertions that he would behave as he damn pleased. He began using such obscene lang
uage that another man who rented a room alongside mine suggested that he and I grab the kid and knock some sense into him. But I demurred: ‘If we do that we could go to jail; if we touched him, his mother would leap to his defense.’ So we listened in disgust, knowing that a modicum of discipline, gently but firmly administered, could have made all the difference.

  Add to this lack of control at home the declining influence of our churches, the absence of discipline in our schools, the proliferation of gangs and the incursion into family life of drugs, alcohol and tobacco, and chaos is created in which it is virtually impossible for children to mature in a normal way.

  One fact should be understood, and here I speak from an intense personal indoctrination: the claim that a child who grows up in a family with no father on the premises is somehow doomed to a life of ultimate failure condemns entire generations of children, especially those who are black, to malfunctioning lives and tragedy. What nonsense! I can point to scores of fatherless young people who have won enviable and secure positions for themselves. In an era in which as many as one fourth of our nation’s children are being raised in single-parent homes, we are indeed fortunate that so many are able to overcome early adversities.

  Since I was also fatherless, I saw firsthand the wonderful work that women can accomplish in raising adoptive children. From the beginning I was aware that I would have been better off had we had a father in our home, but when I saw how some husbands along our street behaved—drunken binges, physical attacks on their wives, brutal treatment of their children—I was grateful to have escaped that kind of parenting, although I retained my deep respect for the family as an institution, and still do. I am a family man, and I suppose my success as a teacher at all grade levels was a kind of sublimation of my desire for family.

  Assault on the family: altered patterns of courtship and marriage. When Shakespeare dealt with the angst of young love in Romeo and Juliet, that tempest ended in a double suicide. It still happens today, as the dean of any large college can attest. Even if the threat of suicide is dampened, the psychological disturbance continues.

  I do not take courtship traumas lightly. As a professor dealing with the young of marriageable age, I never lost sight of the fact that it was infinitely more important that the young student before me find a partner of the other sex with whom she or he could establish a lifelong association than it was to get an A from me. I still subscribe to that comparison of values.

  My attitudes toward the changed patterns of courtship stem from a peculiar Pennsylvania background. In colonial days our Dutch farm families engaged in the custom of bundling, in which a young couple who were obviously serious in their intentions were allowed to conduct the next stages of their courtship while in a kind of bed, ‘totally clothed or partially so, but separated at first by a stout board placed between them.’ It was customary in those days for a wedding to be conducted only after the bride was pregnant. Of course by the time I came along, the formal practice had long since been discarded, but a kind of ipso facto bundling did take place among the local descendants of the old, so-called ‘Dutch,’ German families. It was orderly. It was more or less supervised. Pregnancies rarely ensued but promising marriages did. Having been familiar with such behavior, I was prepared for the 1960s radical revision of courtship patterns, but even so I was astonished when I heard that the twenty-one-year-old son of a strict Republican family had brought his nineteen-year-old girlfriend home for a weekend and assumed that she would share his bedroom. When I asked another member of the family how his parents had reacted to this type of courtship, she said: ‘Mom and Pop ricocheted around the walls but they said nothing to Louis or Louise.’ In our town, bundling had come full circle over a span of nearly three hundred years.

  Couples are marrying somewhat later in life. The reasons for this are complex. The desirability of completing one’s education and the increased importance of having completed at least some college work impose a delay in courtship and marriage. Also, the general difficulty of finding work at any level is a factor. And the prohibitive cost of housing frightens young people. Equally important is a change in what young people see as fashionable: a long and perhaps intimate courtship and a marriage in the late twenties.

  Young women of marriageable age and eligibility are finding it difficult to meet marriageable men. I am perhaps influenced too much by two areas in which I have worked in recent years: Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas. Because each is the capital city of a government staffed by successful men who are already married and hordes of unusually attractive young women in junior positions or working as secretaries, a normal marriage market does not exist. This means that many young women who are eminently suited for marriage do not find husbands, a sad loss for our society.

  I have encountered a shocking number of fine young men who in former times would long since have been married (the pressures of society would have demanded it) who are today reluctant to commit themselves to matrimony. They tell me: ‘I like girls but I’ve opted out of the marriage market. I have doubts about my ability to live peaceably with the new type of woman.’ This is not mere verbalization with no substance; it is very real. My wife and I lived in two excellent locales near big cities in which many of the small farms in our district were occupied on a permanent basis by two men who were obviously content with that arrangement and intended to make it their lifelong preference. We liked the men and had friendly social contacts and felt easy with them. In my work in the arts I have been admirably served by young men who have decided not to marry, and I would be in a less favorable condition today without having had their help. But I am distressed by the fact that these men have removed themselves as potential husbands for the young women with whom I work. This self-imposed removal from the normal social mix means that quite a few young women will not find husbands. (This is another reason why such young women are increasingly willing to accept or even encourage motherhood without being married.)

  And there is, off to one side and often no longer hidden in a closet, another group who are devising their own radically new definitions of what a family is. They are the homosexual men and the lesbian women who form solid attachments to people of their own sex and establish what they call families. Some are fragile arrangements of the moment, others as devoted to a lifelong commitment as a couple in a traditional marriage. They pose difficult problems for the general public, and most states have withheld from such unions the rights accorded to what people call ‘real marriages.’ Fights over how legally to classify the new arrangements will probably continue into the next century. Again, although I must view the loss of the traditional family with regret, it is undoubtedly in America’s best interests to begin to become more tolerant—socially, politically and economically—of alternate lifestyles.

  I have detected a profound and frightening change in the attitudes of young women and men toward one another. They seem, in recent years, to have adopted fierce adversarial stances, one against the other. Young men have grown afraid of young women they have found to be just as capable as themselves. The old sense of an easy companionship through the period of courtship has been converted into a tense battleground. I do not believe that an aggressive women’s liberation movement is to blame; I rather think it is some visceral reaction of men who feel their importance has somehow been attacked and diminished. I know that I could never have dated a young woman who earned a higher salary than mine, but I suspect that I am the slave of hide-bound traditions. I do know, from what people of both sexes tell me when I investigate their inhibitions, that young men today face a much more difficult pattern of courtship than I did. In my early years it never occurred to me that women had interests far different from mine. I was a happy naïf.

  (I recall an amusing cartoon, perhaps in The New Yorker, showing a group of prehistoric women in the Lascaux cave, some of them on a scaffold as they work on the newest mural of bison and other creatures of the period. Says the master painter, a dumpy, middle-aged woman, as she
leans down to talk to her younger helpers: ‘Have you ever asked yourselves why it is there have never been any serious male artists?’)

  I have sympathized with and supported the various movements of young women to gain an equal footing with men in the educational and business worlds. I was a women’s libber from the start, utilizing a woman lawyer, a woman agent, a woman editor, a woman publisher, a woman accountant and a woman office manager, not to mention the endless series of women secretaries. At present I employ in one capacity or another four extremely helpful women, and if the female component had been erased from my working life I doubt that I could have accomplished much.

  My basic convictions are firmly held and will never change. I was appalled when my adoptive state of Colorado revoked legislation that had assured the gay community equal rights, and I applauded when a boycott was mounted against the state. I was dismayed when various courts gave Irish patriotic and religious marching societies the right to bar homosexuals from joining in their Saint Patrick’s Day parade. I wondered what Saint Pat would have thought of that!

  Concerning the right of women to be Protestant or Catholic clergy I am ambivalent. I think that in the Catholic religion, the tradition of men-only priests is so powerful, dating back to the fulminations of Saint Paul, that its refusal to admit women to its clergy is understandable and perhaps forgivable. But I find it easy to accept a woman clergy in the Protestant churches. Indeed, the Presbyterian church that stands next to my home has a most admirable woman leader, and I believe her presence adds to that church’s popularity and vitality.

  In sports I believe that reasonable adjustments have been made. I’m delighted to see the strides achieved in women’s basketball in our universities and find their playoffs for the national championships almost as exciting as the men’s; and I wonder why professional women’s teams have not prospered here as they have in Europe. I have known several superb women players who, if they wanted to continue basketball after graduation from college, have had to emigrate to Italy or to the surrounding countries in which women’s leagues flourish and pay substantial salaries. I have awaited the formation of such a league in the United States but do not foresee that it is likely to happen in the near future.