One of the consequences of basing marriage on the considerations stated
with cold abhorrence by Saint Paul in the seventh chapter of his epistle
to the Corinthians, as being made necessary by the unlikeness of most
men to himself, is that the sex slavery involved has become complicated
by economic slavery; so that whilst the man defends marriage because he
is really defending his pleasures, the woman is even more vehement on
the same side because she is defending her only means of livelihood.
To a woman without property or marketable talent a husband is more
necessary than a master to a dog. There is nothing more wounding to our
sense of human dignity than the husband hunting that begins in every
family when the daughters become marriageable; but it is inevitable
under existing circumstances; and the parents who refuse to engage in it
are bad parents, though they may be superior individuals. The cubs of a
humane tigress would starve; and the daughters of women who cannot bring
themselves to devote several years of their lives to the pursuit of
sons-in-law often have to expatiate their mother's squeamishness by
life-long celibacy and indigence. To ask a young man his intentions when
you know he has no intentions, but is unable to deny that he has paid
attentions; to threaten an action for breach of promise of marriage; to
pretend that your daughter is a musician when she has with the greatest
difficulty been coached into playing three piano-forte pieces which she
loathes; to use your own mature charms to attract men to the house when
your daughters have no aptitude for that department of sport; to coach
them, when they have, in the arts by which men can be led to compromize
themselves; and to keep all the skeletons carefully locked up in the
family cupboard until the prey is duly hunted down and bagged: all this
is a mother's duty today; and a very revolting duty it is: one that
disposes of the conventional assumption that it is in the faithful
discharge of her home duties that a woman finds her self-respect. The
truth is that family life will never be decent, much less ennobling,
until this central horror of the dependence of women on men is done
away with. At present it reduces the difference between marriage and
prostitution to the difference between Trade Unionism and unorganized
casual labor: a huge difference, no doubt, as to order and comfort, but
not a difference in kind.
However, it is not by any reform of the marriage laws that this can
be dealt with. It is in the general movement for the prevention
of destitution that the means for making women independent of the
compulsory sale of their persons, in marriage or otherwise, will be
found; but meanwhile those who deal specifically with the marriage laws
should never allow themselves for a moment to forget this abomination
that "plucks the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love,
and sets a blister there," and then calmly calls itself purity, home,
motherhood, respectability, honor, decency, and any other fine name
that happens to be convenient, not to mention the foul epithets it hurls
freely at those who are ashamed of it.