THE MARRIAGE AGE FOR GIRLS
Let us clearly understand, in the first place, that in this chapter we discuss principles and averages, and that, supposing our conclusions be accepted as true, they cannot for a moment be quoted as decisive in their bearing upon special cases. The impartial reader will not suppose that such folly is contemplated, but those who discuss and advocate new views very soon learn that many readers are not impartial, and that for one cause or another they do not fail of misrepresentation. This is not a case, then, of "science laying down the law," and ordering this individual to marry at this age, and that not to marry at another; and yet though this rigorous individual application of our principles is absurd, they are none the less worth formulating, if it be possible.
The question before us is very far from simple: it is not in the nature of human problems to be simple, the individual and society being so immeasurably complex. We have to consider far more points than occur on first inspection. We have to ascertain when the average woman becomes fit for marriage. But we must remember that we are dealing with marriage under the conditions imposed by law and public opinion. Therefore, fit for mating and fit for marriage are not synonymous, and to ascertain the age of physiological fitness for mating, though an important contribution to our problem, is not the solution of it. We have further to consider how the taste and inclination of the individual vary in the course of her development. We have to ask ourselves at what age in general she is likely to make that choice which her maturity and middle age will ratify rather than for ever regret. We have to consider the relations of different ages to motherhood, both as regards the quality of the children born, and as regards their probable number under natural conditions. These are questions which certainly affect the individual's happiness profoundly, and yet that is the least of their significance. Again, we have to observe how the constitution of society varies as regards the age of its members, according as marriage be early or late. In the former case more generations are alive at the same time, and in the latter case fewer. The increasing age at marriage would have more conspicuous results in this respect if it were not for the great increase in longevity; so that, though the generations are becoming more spread out, we may have as many representatives of different generations alive at the same time as there used to be; but of course there is the great difference that society is older as a whole. This is a fact which in itself must affect the doings and the prospects of civilization. An assemblage of people in the twenties will not behave in the same way as those in the forties. The probable effect must be towards conservatism, and increasing rigidity. It is a question to be asked by the historian of civilization how far these considerations bear upon the history of past empires.
Another and most notable result of the modified relation between the generations which ensues from increasing the age at marriage, is that the parents, under the newer conditions, must necessarily be, on the average, psychologically further from their children. The man who first becomes a father at twenty-five, shall we say, may well expect still to have something of the boy in him at thirty, especially as children keep us young. He is thus a companion for his child and his child for him. The same is true of women. It is good that a woman who still has something of girlhood in her should become a mother. When the marriage age is much delayed, people of both sexes tend to grow old more quickly than if they had children to keep them young, and then when the children come the psychological disparity is greater than it ought to be—greater than is best either for parents or children.
Before we consider the question of individual development, let us note the general trend of the marriage age. There is no doubt that this is progressively towards a delay in marriage. We have only to study the facts amongst primitive races, and in low forms of civilization, to see that increase in civilization involves, amongst other things, increasing age at marriage. In his book, "The Nature of Man," Professor Metchnikoff quotes some statistics, now very nearly fifty years old, showing the age at first marriage in various European countries. The figure for England was nearly 26 for males and 24.6 for females; in France, Norway, Holland, and Belgium the figures for both sexes were considerably higher, the average age in Belgium being very nearly 30 for men and more than 28 for women. In England the age has been rising for many years past, and probably stands now at about 28 for men and 26 for women. It need hardly be pointed out that this increase in the age of marriage is one of the factors in the fall of the birth-rate, which is general throughout the leading countries of the world, proceeding now with great rapidity even in Germany.
On the whole, it is further true that the marriage age rises as we ascend from lower to higher classes within a given civilization, though a very select class among the wealthy offer an exception to this.
Now nothing is more familiar to us all than that there is a disharmony, as Professor Metchnikoff puts it, between these ages for marriage and the age at which the development of the racial instinct is unmistakable and parenthood is indeed possible. The tendency of civilization is to increase this disharmony, and it is impossible to believe that this tendency can be healthy either for the civilization or for the individual.
Still concerning ourselves with the more general aspects of the question, let it be observed that, as regards men, this unnatural delay of marriage very frequently brings consequences which, bearing hardly on themselves, later bear not less hardly on hapless womanhood. The later the age to which marriage is delayed, the more are men handicapped in their constant struggle to control the racial instinct under the unnatural conditions in which they find themselves. The great majority of men fail in this unequal fight, and of those who fail an enormous number become infected by disease, with which, when they marry, they infect their wives, sometimes killing them, often causing them lifelong illness, often destroying for ever their chances of motherhood, or making motherhood a horror by the production of children that are an offence against the sun. These are facts known to all who have looked into the matter, but there is no such thing as decent public opinion on the subject, and the author or speaker who dares to allude to them takes his means of living, if not his life, into his hands.
No doubt men are largely responsible themselves for the rising marriage age, but women are also responsible in some measure. This must mean on the whole an injury to themselves as individuals, to their sex, and to society. Both sexes demand a higher standard of living; the man spends enough in alcohol and tobacco, as a rule, to support one or two children, and then says he is too poor to marry. There is everything to be said for the doctrine that people should be provident, and should bring no more children into the world than they are able to support; but before we accept this plea in any particular case, we should first inquire how the available income is being spent. At present, every indication goes to show that we are following in the track of all our predecessors, spending upon individual indulgence that which ought to be dedicated to the future, and thereby compromising the worth or the possibility of any future at all.
In the light of these considerations and many more, some of which we shall later consider, I deplore and protest against with all my heart, as blind, ignorant, and destructive, the counsel of those women, some of them conspicuous advocates of the cause of woman's suffrage—in which I nevertheless believe—who advise women to delay in marriage, or who publish opinions throwing contempt upon marriage altogether. Later, we must deal in detail with marriage; here we are only concerned with the marriage age. It will then be argued that the conditions of marriage must sooner or later be modified in so far as they are at present inacceptable to a certain number of women of the highest type. This may be granted without in any degree accepting the deplorable teaching of such writers as Miss Cicely Hamilton, in her book entitled "Marriage as a Trade." Every individual case requires individual consideration, and no less than any individual case ever yet received. But in general those women who counsel the delay of the marriage age are opposing the facts of feminine development and psychology. They are indirectly encouraging male immorality and female prostitution, with their appalling consequences for those directly concerned, for hosts of absolutely innocent women, and for the unborn. Further, those who suppose that the granting of the vote is going to effect radical and fundamental changes in the facts of biology, the development of instinct, and its significance in human action, are fools of the very blindest kind. Some of us find that it needs constant self-chastening and bracing up of the judgment to retain our belief in the cause of woman's suffrage, of the justice and desirability of which we are convinced, assaulted as we almost daily are by the unnatural, unfeminine, almost inhuman blindness of many of its advocates.
We have constantly to remind ourselves that our immediate concern and duty are not with the world as it might be, or ought to be, or will be, but with the world as it is. There are many good arguments, admirably adapted to an imaginary world, why the marriage age should be increased. But these forget the possible, nay the inevitable, consequences, if such an increase show itself in one nation and not in another, in one class of society and not in another. It is a good thing, and it is the ideal of the eugenist, as I ventured to formulate some years ago, that every child who comes into the world should be desired, designed, and loved in anticipation. But if in France, shall we say, such a tendency begins to obtain a generation earlier than it does in Germany, there will come to be a disparity of population which, continuing, must inevitably mean sooner or later the disappearance of France.
Or again, difference in the marriage age in different classes within a given community has very notable consequences, as Sir Francis Galton showed in his book, "Hereditary Genius," and later, in more detail, in his "Inquiries into Human Faculty." He shows that, other things being equal, the earlier marrying class or group will in a few generations breed down the others and completely supplant them. If the natural quality of the one class differ from that of the other, the ultimate consequences will be tremendous. It has been proved up to the hilt that in Great Britain these differences in marriage in different classes exist, and that, on the whole, the marriage age varies directly as the means of support for the children, to say nothing of natural and transmissible differences in different classes. One can only, therefore, repeat what was said some time ago in contribution to a public discussion on this subject that, "considering the present distribution of the birth-rate, nothing strikes a more direct blow at the future of England than that which tends to increase the marriage age of the responsible, careful, and provident amongst us whilst the improvident and careless multiply as they do."
Let us now consider another possible factor in this question, and then we must proceed to look at the individual woman as the question of the marriage age affects her.
The Marriage Age and the Quality of the Children.—Both from the point of view of the race and from that of the individual who desires happy parenthood it is necessary to learn, if possible, how the age of the parents affects the quality of their offspring. If motherhood is to be a joy and a blessing, the children must be such as bring joy and blessing. My provisional judgment on this matter is that we are at present without anything like conclusive evidence proving that the age of the parents affects the quality of their children.
Let us look at some of the arguments which have been advanced. The school of biometricians, represented most conspicuously in latter years by Professor Karl Pearson, have desired us to accept certain conclusions which are singularly incompatible with the opinion of their illustrious founder, Sir Francis Galton, in favour of early marriages among those of sound stock. By their special procedure, as rigorously critical in the statistical treatment of data as it is sweetly simple in its innocent assumption that all data are of equal value, they have proposed to show that the elder members of a family are further removed from the normal, average, or mean type than the younger members. This, according to them, may sometimes work out in the production of great ability or genius in the eldest or elder members, but oftener still shows itself in highly undesirable characters, whether of mind or of body, the latter often leading to premature decease. There is hence inferred a powerful argument against the limitation of families, which means a disproportionate increase amongst the aberrant members of the population.
This argument really offers as good an example as can be desired of the almost unimaginable ease with which these skilful mathematicians allow themselves to be confused. Their inquiry has ignored the age of the parents at marriage—or, better still, at the births of their respective children—and has assumed that the number of the family was the all-important point: a good example of that idolatry of number as number which is the "freak religion" of the biometrician. Supposing that the conclusion reached by this method be a true one—which it would need more credulity than I possess to assert—we must conclude that, somehow, primogeniture, as such, affects the quality of the offspring, and, on the other hand, that to be born fifth or tenth or fifteenth involves certain personal consequences of a special kind. Evidently we here approach less sophisticated forms of number-worship, as that which attached a superstitious meaning to the seventh son of a seventh son.
It seems, therefore, necessary to point out—surprising though the necessity be—that, if the biometrical conclusion be valid, what it demonstrates must surely be not the occult working of certain changes in the germ-plasm, for instance, of a father, because a certain number of his germ-cells, after separation from his body, have gone to form new individuals (changes which would not have occurred if those germ-cells had perished!), but rather a correlation between the age of the parents and the quality of their offspring. How cleverly the biometricians have involved one muddle within another will be evident not only from considering the evident absurdity of supposing—as their argument, analyzed, necessarily supposes—that a man's body can be affected by the diverse fates of germ-cells that have left it, but also when we observe that one of the commonest and most obvious causes of the reduction in the size of families is the increasing age at marriage of both sexes. Two persons may thus marry and become parents at the age of say thirty, their child ranking as first-born, of course, in the biometricians' tables; but had they married ten years sooner, a child born when the parents were thirty might rank as the tenth child, and would be so reckoned by the biometricians. One does not need to be a biologist to perceive that conclusions based upon assumptions so uncritical are worth nothing at all, and it is tempting to suggest that the biometricians are so called, on a principle long famous, because they measure everything but life.
It is plainly unnecessary, therefore, for us to trouble about collecting the innumerable instances where children late in the family sequence have turned out to be illustrious, or have proved to be idiots. It is unnecessary because the most obvious criticism of the contention before us disposes of the proof upon which it is sought to be based. Nevertheless, of course, though the particular contention about the size of the family must necessarily be meaningless, unless, as is so very improbable, it should be shown some day that the bearing of children affects the maternal organism in some way so as to cause subsequent children to approximate ever nearer to the type of the race; yet it is quite conceivable, though quite unproved, that the age of the parents involves changes in the body which affect, for good or for evil, either the construction or the general vigour of the germ-cells. As to this nothing is known, but a great weight of evidence suggests that little importance, if any, can be attached to this question. Women marrying at forty or more may give birth to splendid specimens of humanity or to indifferent ones, and the same may be said of the girl of seventeen, though as to this more must be said. Similarly, also, it is impossible to make any general contrasts between the offspring of fathers of eighteen or fathers of eighty. Correlations may exist, but we know nothing of them yet.
Our conclusion then is that, with regard to the quality of the children of any given mother, we cannot say that she should marry at any particular age, within limits, rather than another. On the other hand, it is evident that if she be highly worthy of motherhood we shall desire her to have a large family, and therefore must encourage her early marriage, as the late Sir Francis Galton so long maintained.
Physical Fitness for Marriage.—We must carefully distinguish between the question we have just been discussing and that of the marriage age from the mother's point of view. We shall find that the best age for marriage, so far as this question is concerned, is neither puberty, on the one hand, nor the average marriage age amongst civilized women, on the other hand.
If things were as we should like them to be, there would be a harmony between the occurrence of puberty and fitness for marriage. But there can be no question that the goal of evolution, which is perfect adaptation, has not yet been attained by mankind, and indeed reason can be given to show that the goal recedes as we advance towards it. The practice of lower races, amongst whom the girls often marry at puberty or before it, is much less injurious to the individual and the race than we might suppose; but the harmony between the maternal body and the maternal function is much less imperfect in lower races of mankind than it is among ourselves. Just as we find that, among the lower animals, the phenomena of motherhood are simple, easy, and almost painless, so we find that, though owing to the erect attitude, as much cannot be said for human beings anywhere, yet these phenomena are far less severe among the lower races of mankind than among ourselves. The reason is to be found in the astonishing progressive increase in the size of the human head in the higher races. The large size of the head in adult life is foreshadowed in its size at birth, and this it is which constitutes the crux of motherhood among the higher races. It is undoubtedly true that the maternal body, by a process of natural selection, has been evolved in the direction of better correspondence with, and capacity for, that enlarged head of which civilization is the product. But at the present stage in evolution the great function of giving birth to a human being of high race—more especially to a boy of such a race—is graver, more prolonged, and more hazardous than the maternal function has ever been before. The gravity of the process has increased proportionately with the worth of the product.
There are yet further consequences of the development which will convince us how important it is that we should come to right conclusions regarding the physical fitness of girls for marriage. Even to-day, when the work of Lord Lister has been done, and when maternity hospitals—far more dangerous than a battlefield less than two generations ago—can show records from year to year without the loss of a single mother, the fact remains that several thousands of women in Great Britain alone lose their lives every year in the discharge of their supreme duty. It is also the case that large numbers of infants lose their lives during, or shortly after, birth, owing to causes inherent in the conditions of birth, and practically beyond any but the most expert control. In many cases no skill will save the child. A considerable preponderance of the victims are of the male sex, so that there is thus early begun that process of higher male mortality, which is the chief cause of the female preponderance that is so injurious to womanhood and to society. There are thus many and weighty reasons, individual and social—reasons in the present generation and in the next—which conduce to the importance of discovering the best age for marriage from the physical point of view.
We may probably accept the long-standing figures of Dr. Matthews Duncan, one of Edinburgh's many famous obstetricians, who found that the mortality rate in childbirth, or as a consequence of it, was lowest among women from twenty to twenty-four years of age. Therefore it may safely be said that, on the average, and looking at the question, for the present, solely from this point of view, a girl of twenty-one to twenty-two is by no means too young to marry. Of course it would be monstrously absurd to take such a statement as this and regard it as conclusive, even had it been communicated from on high, for any particular case; but as an average statement it may be confidently put forward. At this age, the all-important bones of the pelvis have reached all the development of which they are capable. This may be accepted, notwithstanding the fact that, especially in men, the growth of the long bones of the limbs continues to a considerably later age. Women reach maturity sooner than men, and the pelvis reaches its full capacity at the age stated. Obstetricians know further that if motherhood be begun at a considerably later date, there is less local adaptability than when the bones and ligaments are younger. The point lies in the date of the beginning of motherhood, for this is in general a conspicuous instance of the adage that the first step is the most costly.[13]
Psychical Fitness for Marriage.—At the beginning of this chapter it was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for marriage—which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for marriage may well be later still. We should thus have a second disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women, the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago.
I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties, without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases, or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most stupendous possible kind.
Yet observe what a difficulty we are faced with. Perceiving the injurious consequences of delay in marriage—consequences which, as we have seen, if considered only as they show themselves in the most horrible department of pathology, would be sufficient to demand the most urgent consideration—we may almost feel inclined to agree with the utterly blind and deplorable doctrine too common amongst parents and schoolmistresses, who should know so much better, that it is good to see the young things falling in love, and that the sooner they are married the better. Every one whose eyes are open knows how often the consequences of such teaching and practice are disastrous; and if there is anything which we should discourage in our present study, it is that marriage in haste and repentance at leisure to which these blind guides so often lead their blind victims.
Very different, however, will the case be when the victims are no longer blind. The condemnation of their blind guides at the present time is not that they regard it as right and healthy that young people should mate in their early twenties, but it is that by every means in their power, positive and negative, these blind guides have striven to prevent the light from reaching their victim's eyes. The day is coming, however, when the principles of education for parenthood—for which, if for anything, this book is a plea—will be accepted and practised, and then the case will be very different.
Convinced though I certainly am of the vast importance of nature or heredity in the human constitution, I am not one of those eugenists who, to the grave injury of their cause, declare that there are no such things as nurture and education, in that they effect nothing; nor do I believe it in any way inherently necessary that perhaps ten years after puberty a girl should still be irresponsible in those matters which, incomparably beyond all others, demand responsibility; or incapable, with wise help or even without it, of guiding her course aright. It is we, as I repeat for the thousandth time, who are to blame, for our deliberate, systematic, and disastrous folly in scrupulously excluding from her education that for which the whole of education, of any other kind, should be regarded as the preparation.
No one can attach more than its due importance to woman's function of choosing the fathers of the future; rejecting the unworthy and selecting the worthy for this greatest of human duties. It would be a most serious difficulty for those who hold such a creed if it were that a girl's taste and judgment could be trusted, if at all, only some years after she had reached physical maturity for motherhood. It may be that in the present conditions of girls' education, such right direction of this choice as occurs, is just as likely to occur at the earlier age as at any later one, when indeed it may happen that considerations more worldly and prudential, less generally natural and eugenic, may come to have greater weight. One can, therefore, only leave it to the reader's consideration whether it is not high time that we should so seek to prepare the girl's mind, that when her body Is ready for marriage her mind may, if possible, be ready also to guide her towards a worthy choice which the whole of her future life may ratify, and the life of her descendants thereafter.
It must be insisted again that this question has many ramifications, and that not the least important of them are those which concern themselves with the kinds of disease already referred to. Some enemy of God and man once invented a phrase about the desirability of young men sowing their wild oats, and subsequent enemies of life and the good and progress, or perhaps mere fools, animated gramophones of a cheap pattern, have repeated and still propagate that doctrine. It is poisonous to its core; it never did any one any good, and has done incalculable harm. It has blinded the eyes of hundreds of thousands of babies; it has brought hundreds of thousands more rotten into the world. Hosts of dead men, women, and children are its victims. It is indeed good that a man should be a man, and not a worm on stilts; it is indeed good that women should prefer men to be men, and that as soon as possible they should cease to accept in marriage the feeble, the cowardly, the echoers, and the sheep. But this is a very different thing from asserting that it is good for young men, before marriage, to adopt a standard of morality which would be thought shameful beyond words in their sisters, and which has all the horrible consequences that have been alluded to, and many more. Now, vicious though the wild oats doctrine be in itself and in its consequences, we have to grant that there is little need of it, for young manhood needs the insertion of no doctrines from without to encourage it towards the satisfaction of what are in themselves natural and healthy tendencies. Our right procedure therefore should be—notwithstanding the unhealthy tendency of high civilization in this respect, and notwithstanding the terrible folly, traitorous to their sex, of those women who decry marriage, and seek to delay it—to prepare girlhood and public opinion, and even to modify, so far as may be necessary, economic conditions, in order that the girls who are worthy to marry at all shall do so at the right age, and shall join themselves for life with rightly chosen men.
One more point may be conveniently considered here, though it is not strictly a matter of the marriage age for girls. The point is as to the most generally desirable age relation between husband and wife. Here, again, we must remind ourselves that it is impossible to lay down the law for any case, and that that is not what we are now attempting to do.
As every one knows, there is an average disparity of some few years in the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she is as mature.
It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment.
It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence upon the sex or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many more consequences.
We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives, it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority—contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.
We therefore see that, as might have been expected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of woman in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked.