Modern industrial and scientific development could not fail to affect the family, especially in the milieus of the cities, whose populations have grown continuously ever since factories multiplied in them and villagers began moving to them for work. The function of industrial production shifted to the workplace instead of the home, and this produced in the family an inclination to move about after settledness, and a kind of loosening and drawing apart among its members, once they began — men and women alike — to leave the house for work, where they labor the whole day long. This going out and this drawing apart were a first step in freeing the woman and the children from the man's authority. With the spread of the principles of liberty, equality, and democracy in the nineteenth century, the family received its share of the influence of these principles: the share of freedom belonging to woman and children grew, and the authority of the parents dwindled; and with the spread of the principles of independence and self-government, the children's independence in
planning their own future increased, and the man was compelled to share with his wife the responsibility of household management and to take part in the work of the home, just as she shared with him the work outside the home to increase the family income.
With the multiplication of specialists, the expansion of the sciences in all their variety, the growth of schools, the spread of day nurseries and kindergartens, and the advance of the mechanical arts, the functions of instruction and amusement shifted from the home to institutes of learning and to the cinema and theater houses, since these institutions became more capable than the family of performing these two functions, just as the specialists are more capable than the parents of performing them.
With the spread of the principle of individualism and the rise of the level of culture, the family shrank in size; married sons became independent
of their parents; the cultivated inclined toward the limitation of offspring, and they freed themselves from the restraints laid down of old by the elders of the family, who had regarded in them their own interests and not the interest of the new generation.
The typical modern family has become small in size, with a small house that does not allow the lodging of unwanted relatives and guests. Its members are marked by relative independence; it is democratic and individualist, not tightly welded and clustered as was the case in olden times. All these characteristics are expected to grow steadily in the future.
These sweeping developments have led some researchers in the West to predict the collapse of the family in the future, the most famous of them being the scholar "Müller-Lyer," who holds in his book "The Family" that the world has passed through two eras, the era of the tribe and the era of the family; these two eras are over, and now has come the era of the individual.
Said this researcher: In the age of the first system the individual sacrificed for the interest of the tribe, and at times of the whole family. The traces of tribal domination remain powerfully influential in the primitive and half-civilized countries. In the age of the family system the individual sacrificed for the interest of his family, and the woman was first in sacrifice among all the members of the household. Family traditions still hold great sway even in the civilized Arab countries, but they hold stronger sway in the countries of ancient traditions, such as China and Japan and the rest of the lands of the East. Now, however, we have entered the era of the individual, and his interest has become first in claim to attention and precedence, because the home is no longer the goal sought, but rather the happiness and well-being of the individual.
The writer holds that there are other causes — besides the economic causes — which threaten the family with collapse. Among them, that the friendly ties which young men and young women form outside their family circle equal family ties in importance and constancy, if they do not surpass them. Then too, the rise of specialists in education has curtailed the function of the parents; and the like may be said of the wave of birth limitation that sweeps over civilized people in the present age.
And there are those who believe that science will succeed in delivering woman from the hardship of pregnancy and nursing by means of artificial procreation, and that society will take charge of the care of children — the proof being the increase of nurseries and juvenile homes and the great demand upon them: an experiment in which Russia has gone a long and successful way. (Here ends the statement of Müller-Lyer.)
