"often told it is by maiden ladies"! There is but one intelligent attitude concerning them are they true or false? Granting, then, that these conditions are truthfully represented, what can be said to the argument which Mr. Allen founds upon them?
I. Marriages are decreasing in many civilized countries. There are local causes for this tendency among men, but the principal and prevailing one with women is that they are passing from the rule of force to a state of freedom, and use their newly found liberty to reject what seems to hamper and handicap them. They are emerging from the condition in which marriage is consequent upon physical or social constraint, and they have not generally arrived at the point where it is for them the result of deliberate choice or response to natural instinct. In China, India, Persia, and Arabia, where marriages are still controlled by force, the number would be diminished at once, without the influence of higher education or industrial training, were the women allowed simple freedom of choice.[1] This decrease would not indicate "the dulling of feminine instinct," but the vitality of it—since marriages are made there in defiance of natural selection, and represent the worst condition of servitude. In more civilized states the popularity of marriage does not depend wholly upon the way in which women regard it, but upon the way in which it is treated by men. The laws of some countries render it easier for a man to live illegitimately with a woman than to marry her;[2] true marriage is discouraged by social usage and dishonored by false philosophy. Few thoughtful minds will deny that the customs which render it difficult for a young man to marry, which send him hither and thither to gain a fortune, succeed in a profession, or dissipate his strength, when he should be choosing his sweetheart, are harmful, and divert men "from the true problem of their sex to fix it on side issues of comparative unimportance."
Boys, as well as girls, should be taught that the full meaning of human life is missed unless they deserve and find a fitting mate. Authors who represent wifehood and maternity[3] as onerous and unattractive, however necessary, or who surround illicit and in-
- ↑ It is related that in 1878 eight young girls living near Canton, having been betrothed, arrayed themselves one evening in fine attire, bound themselves together, and plunged into the river to avoid marriage.
- ↑ In Germany, where marriage is forbidden the younger soldiers, the birth statistics are disadvantageous to the state.
- ↑ Some English conservatives discourse on these topics in a strain wholly abhorrent to healthy women. They write of "the inexorable law from which, however distasteful, a woman can not escape"; "the stern law that makes women wives and mothers." One would imagine from them that marriage and motherhood made a yawning grave of hope and aspiration. Normal women, who have passed through these experiences, use no woful tones in description.
