In modem industrial society, couples facing a crisis affecting survival often stick together, only to separate when the emergency has passed.
The battle for survival in modem societies is usually a battle for emotional survival and the tools of war are correspondingly psychological, aimed at maiming the enemy's sell-esteem or causing him shame rather than at killing him.
In such psychological warfare (for example, the battle of the sexes between spouses), it is difficult to decide who is the winner and who is the loser. There may be other parties in the picture operating unwittingly in subtle ways (the mother-in-law gets most of the blame), so that it is difficult to name the players without a program.
The institution of marriage has failed to adapt itself sufficiently to current requirements. The constant battle of the sexes and the family turmoil raging today are evidence of the haphazard efforts of individuals to reconcile their traditional role images with current realities. With little help from any social quarter, men and women are fighting lonely battles to find their place in the sun. Plagued by guilt and uncertainty, they struggle to discover their "identity" yet are unable to accept themselves if they do catch a glimpse of their-genuine needs, desires, and goals. For what they glimpse is not what they have been conditioned to believe is "good" or "right" according to age-old systems of beliefs, developed on the basis of requirements which died at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
The man, who, through education and training, has learned to find his greatest fulfillment in reading or art or hairstyling or general scholarship rather than in athletic or business competition, must find ways to reconcile his preference with many age old images regarding "masculinity." The college-educated woman who finds happiness and self-respect in professional achievement has the task of reconciling her learned needs and preferences with the "feminine" image which continues to define womanliness in terms of domestic and mothering abilities.
Today both sexes can perform most social functions equally well, and the rigid social resistance to role diffusion is becoming a genuine frustration to those who seek self-expression in roles outside the boundaries of their defined sex roles.
Members of the younger generation today often shock and frighten their parents and grandparents by their apparent determination to break through traditional role designations. But it is a major task of this and future generations to find solutions to the sex-role problems which their parents have left unresolved. The extreme manifestations of what parents see as sex-role confusion-such as boys dressing more like girls, girls dressing more like boys, and the increase in homosexuality-frighten parents because they cannot imagine a future different from the past they have known.
The Industrial Revolution has indeed been accompanied by a trend toward the development of great similarity in the social roles of males and females. This does not mean that the biological differences between men and women have been destroyed or that homosexuality will be the eventual outcome. We tend to forget that there is a difference between social roles and the players who fulfill those roles. For example work done by Robert Hess (and others) illustrates a considerable consistency in the manner in which second-grade children describe fathers, presidents, and Uncle Sam. Yet the ideal father they picture may be very different from the actual man at home who is their biological father. A mother may be playing what is thought of as the father's role when she disciplines children, but there is no implication that she is being more masculine because of this. Studies of families where the father was overseas for at least two years during World War II indicate that where the mother had a clear and essentially loving picture of her husband, the children immediately related to the father upon his return as if he had never left. Yet while he was gone, it was the mother who was fulfilling both parental roles.
However, it is possible for our basic conception of a role to change. Many of the important roles in our society are dependent upon intelligence, the ability to operate machines, the ability to work for or with other people, or the power to utilize certain specialized knowledge, like the mathematics of physics; these are capacities which both men and women possess. Therefore, role distinctions are being made less on a sexual than on a functional basis. It would be difficult for the average American to accept the situation in Russia, where two thirds of all physicians are women, and yet a few years of living in such a society would have to at least partially destroy our cultural bias that male physicians are superior.
Some of the young people today who are vehemently against marriage are actually struggling to find new attitudes to match new social realities. Accomplishment of this aim will necessarily involve vast changes in the marriage process and in family structure.
In summary, marriage used to be an institution for the physical survival and well-being of two people and their offspring. This function gave rise to a particular rule-governed structure suitable to the situation. Today, except in time of war or accident, the struggle for survival in industrialized societies does not require purely physical strength. Instead, we have primarily the struggle for psychological and emotional survival. The family unit is the natural unit for human survival regardless of what the hazard is. But so far, the changes in the structure, form, and processes of marriage have been too few and too unsystematic to cope with the new psychological and emotional problems. Marriage still is an anachronism from the days of the jungle, or at least from the days of small farms and home industries.
Divorce, marital strife, desertion, and emotional and physical illness are a few symptoms of this cultural lag in the institution of marriage, and they seem to be on the increase. We cannot return to the "simple" life of an agricultural or primitive community in this atomic, industrial age; we must modify our outmoded attitudes, beliefs, and institutions to accommodate current social realities.
Marriage is still a necessary institution. But it must be adjusted to new social and economic conditions. Above all, the new roles and relationships of men and women must be recognized. It is not surprising that an anachronistic social institution cannot function; nevertheless, it is tragic that so many marriages fail and so little have being done about it.
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