The Drifting Home,

By ERNEST R. GROVES '03. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1926, viii, 217 pp.

It is no mean achievement for an author of a work dealing with a highly controversial subject to write with such fairness, candor and insight that all partisans will be satisfied. This Professor Groves has done. The members of the homestead family, unaffected by the stress of modern life, as well as young "companionators," whose restricted kind of family life denotes unmistakably the influence of fundamental changes going on in our modern life, need to read "The Drifting Home."

The book treats the outstanding problems of the modern home which result from the demands put on it by modern civilization, without undue pessimism as to the future. The predicament of the present family is at bottom the result of science, rather a badly balanced science, and it is science in the larger sense applied to education for parenthood that will conserve home life and build the better homes of the future, if it is to be done at all. The new woman and the new man are already turning to science for marriage guidance and parents need the aid of science in the training of children so that distorted personalities, emotional immaturities, father or mother fixations, and the like can be averted. All parents should read in chapter VIII the parents' code of conduct which demands that the parents' influence must square with the child's needs.

The home is changing. This is the most significant fact regarding the home. Both parts of the home, marriage and parenthood, are feeling the sweep of modern life which forces a modification of former habits and motives. The author thinks that it is futile to look ahead unless we can detect the direction of the present swift current of change, which is the main purpose of his book. He notes the passing of man's dominance. On this point he says : "Whether man is to be hampered by the new woman, as woman has been by the man of the past, or whether there can be for most men and women not only a satisfactory division of labor, but also of self-expression, time, which lifts the curtain upon the social stage, alone can reveal." He suggests that experience may prove that the woman that has accepted man's dominance has been the fundamentally woman-like type and that the future home, after a period of violent social collision, will settle down to something much like what has been. Another influence changing home life is found in the modern opportunities for material culture. All in all, this materialism as some would call it, has given the family its most staggering blow. It is largely responsible for a new type of marriage. whose central idea is the deliberate intent that there shall be no children. Sex thus has to assume the task of providing a basis for the home. The risks incident to this are clearly stated by the author: "Sex, as an idealized, motivating attraction, impels toward marriage and provides its beginning. When it becomes an end in itself, the marriage has an abnormal degree of hazard. ... A marriage that has for its sole program the production of immediate pleasure and the establishment of mutual convenience has no basis for normal growth. . . With only sex and comfort as motives, and no functioning of parental love, there is little to protect restless couples from divorce. . . . Nature leads the self-seekers through parenthood into a larger marriage experience than mere physical advantage can accomplish. If contraceptive birth control becomes positive in its certainty, modern marriage must face a severe testing."

There can be no question that the future of the family is not as strongly established in the minds of modern men and women as was true in the thinking of even a decade ago. It is to be expected that the family, like other institutions, such as the church and school, should come in for a critical examination. At present the gulf between the two sexes is increasing and the author prophesies for some time to come a considerable disturbance in the inner life of families. Higher standards than ever will continue to be demanded of marriage experience, with pleasure as the basis of judgment. For the present a high percentage of marriage failures must be expected. People enter marriage with too much ignorance as well as too great demands. The author says that the lesson for those who are concerned for the welfare of the home is that we must make ever greater use of science in our education to prepare people to live happily together in marriage. He believes, finally, that the companionate is with us to stay and will no doubt prove to be an aggressive rival for the historic type of orthodox family. A SOT cial situation has given rise to the companionate and has accordingly undermined the fully developed form of family. Until these social conditions fundamentally change we may expect the companionate to continue to rival the family for popular favor.