Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

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.