Suppose, again, a woman presents herself at the Labor Exchange, and
states her trade as that of a White Slave, meaning the unmentionable
trade pursued by many thousands of women in all civilized cities. Will
the Labor Exchange find employers for her? If not, what will it do with
her? If it throws her back destitute and unhelped on the streets to
starve, it might as well not exist as far as she is concerned; and the
problem of unemployment remains unsolved at its most painful point. Yet
if it finds honest employment for her and for all the unemployed wives
and mothers, it must find new places in the world for women; and in so
doing it must achieve for them economic independence of men. And when
this is done, can we feel sure that any woman will consent to be a wife
and mother (not to mention the less respectable alternative) unless her
position is made as eligible as that of the women for whom the Labor
Exchanges are finding independent work? Will not many women now engaged
in domestic work under circumstances which make it repugnant to them,
abandon it and seek employment under other circumstances? As unhappiness
in marriage is almost the only discomfort sufficiently irksome to
induce a woman to break up her home, and economic dependence the
only compulsion sufficiently stringent to force her to endure such
unhappiness, the solution of the problem of finding independent
employment for women may cause a great number of childless unhappy
marriages to break up spontaneously, whether the marriage laws are
altered or not. And here we must extend the term childless marriages to
cover households in which the children have grown up and gone their own
way, leaving the parents alone together: a point at which many worthy
couples discover for the first time that they have long since lost
interest in one another, and have been united only by a common interest
in their children. We may expect, then, that marriages which are
maintained by economic pressure alone will dissolve when that pressure
is removed; and as all the parties to them will certainly not accept a
celibate life, the law must sanction the dissolution in order to prevent
a recurrence of the scandal which has moved the Government to appoint
the Commission now sitting to investigate the marriage question: the
scandal, that is, of a great number matter of the evils of our
marriage law, to take care of the pence and let the pounds take care of
themselves. The crimes and diseases of marriage will force themselves
on public attention by their own virulence. I mention them here only
because they reveal certain habits of thought and feeling with regard to
marriage of which we must rid ourselves if we are to act sensibly when
we take the necessary reforms in hand.