The freedom she covets comes with marriage, but it is a freedom threatened by a thousand accidents, and threatened, above all, by maternity. It is of little use to have bowed to slang and shoulder-straps, if it be only to tie oneself to a cradle. The nursery stands sadly in the way of the free development of woman; it clips her social enjoyment, it curtails her bonnet bills. "The slavery of nursing a child," one fair protester tells us, "only a mother knows." And so she invents a pretty theory about the damage done to modern constitutions by our port-drinking forefathers, and ceases to nurse at all. But even this is only partial independence; she pants for perfect freedom from the cares of maternity. Her tone becomes the tone of the household, and the spouse she has won growls over each new arrival. She is quite ready to welcome the growl. "Nature," a mother informs us, "turns restive after the birth of two or three children," and mothers turn restive with nature. "Whatever else you may do," she adds, "you will never persuade us into liking to have children," and, if we did, we should not greatly value the conversion. And so woman wins her liberty, and bows her emphatic reply to the world's appeal, "Give us good mothers," by declining to be a mother at all.
By the sacrifice of womanliness, by the sacrifice of modesty, by flattering her wooer's base preferences before marriage, by encouraging his baser selfishness afterwards, by hunting her husband to the club and restricting her maternal energies to a couple of infants, woman has at last bought her freedom. She is no slave to a husband as her mother was, she is not buried beneath the cares of a family like her grandmother. She has changed all that, and the old world of home and domestic tenderness and parental self-sacrifice lies in ruins at her feet. She has her liberty; what will she do with it? As yet, freedom means simply more slang, more jewelry, more selfish extravagance, less modesty. As we meet her on the stairs, as we see the profuse display of her charms, as we listen to the flippant, vapid chatter, we turn a little sickened from woman stripped of all that is womanly, and cry to Heaven, as Madame de Campan cried to the Emperor—"Give us good mothers."
UNEQUAL MARRIAGES.
Acute ladies who concern themselves much with the superficial social currents of the time are beginning to perceive, or at least to think that they perceive, a fatal and growing tendency to mésalliances on the part of men who ought to know better. They complain not merely of the doting old gentleman who has been a bachelor long enough to lose his wits, and so marries his cook or his housemaid, nor of the debauched young simpleton who takes a wife from a casino or the bar of a night-café. Actions of this sort are as common at one time as at another. Old fools and young fools maintain a pretty steady average. Their silly exploits are the issue, not of the tendencies of the age, but of their own individual and particular lack of wits. They do not affect the general direction of social feeling, nor have we any right to argue up from their preposterous connexions to the influences and conditions of the society of which they are only the abnormal and irregular growths. What people mean, when they talk of an increase in the number of men who marry beneath them, is that men otherwise sensible and respectable and sober-minded perpetrate the irregularity in something like cold blood, and with a measure of deliberation. Whether observers who have formed this opinion are right, or are only anticipating their own apprehensions and alarms, is difficult to ascertain. A good deal depends on the accidental range of the observer's own acquaintances, and still more on their candor or discreet reticence.
Besides, how are we to know how far one generation is worse than generations which have gone before it? Men are, after due time, forgiven for this defiance of social usage, and women who were barely presentable in youth become presentable enough by the time they reach middle age. People may seem to us to be very equally and justly mated who five-and-twenty years ago were the town's talk. It is practically impossible, therefore, to compare the actual number of unequal marriages in our day with those of a generation back. People may have their ideas, but verification is not to be had. All we can do is to estimate the increase in the conditions which are likely to make men find wives in a rank below their own. If we look at these, there may be a good many reasons for believing that the apprehensions of the shrewd and alarmed observers are not without justification.
When a wise man with a living or a name to make, or both, looks for a wife, he certainly does not desire a person who shall be troublesome and an impediment to him. He wants a cheerful, sensible, and decently thrifty person. He probably has no inclination for a bluestocking, nor for a lady with aggressive views on points of theology, nor for one who can beat him in political discussion. Strong intellectual power he can most heartily dispense with. But then, on the other hand, he has no fancy for sitting day after day at table with a vapid, flippant, frivolous, empty soul who can neither talk nor listen, who takes no interest in things herself, and cannot understand why other people should take interest in them, who is penetrated with feeble little egoisms. An aggressive woman with opinions about prevenient grace, or the advantages of female emigration, or the functions of the deaconess, would be far preferable to this. She would irritate, but she would not fill the soul with everlasting despair, as the pretty vapid creature does. To discuss predestination and election over dinner is not nice, but still less is it nice to have to make talk with a fool, and to be obliged to answer her according to her folly.
As the education of modern girls of fashion chiefly aims at making them either very fast or very slow, it is not to be wondered at that men find it hard to realize their ideals among their equals in position. It is not merely that so many marriageable young ladies are ignorant. They are this, but they are more. They are exacting and pretentious, and uneducated in the worst sense, for they are ignorant how ignorant they are, or even that they are ignorant at all.
Then there is a still more obvious, palpable, and impressive circumstance. A man with ordinary means looks with alarm on the too visible and too unbounded extravagance of the ladies from among whom he is expected to take a partner. The thought of the apparel, of the luxuries, of the attendants, of the restless moving about, to which they have been accustomed, fills him with deep consternation. He might perhaps deceive himself into thinking that he could get on very well with an empty-minded woman, but he cannot forget the stern facts of arithmetic, nor hoodwink himself as to what would be left out of his income after he had paid for dresses, servants, household charges, carriages, parties, opera-boxes, traveling, and all the rest.
