The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons / A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis

by Ellice Hopkins

"That is always the way; each man imagines the matter is still for his deciding, and he can no more decide it than he can tamper with the fact that fire burns or water drowns. All these centuries the human animal has fought with the human soul. And step by step the soul has registered her victories. She has won them only by feeling for the law and finding it—uncovering, bringing into light the firm rocks beneath her feet. And on these rocks she rears her landmarks—marriage, the family, the State, the Church. Neglect them and you sink into the quagmire from which the soul of the race has been for generations struggling to save you."[35]

Fall on this rock, stumble into unhappiness and discontent, as so many do in marriage, and you will be broken. But be faithful to it and to the high traditions which generations of suffering men and women have worked out for you, and you will be broken as the bud is broken into the blossom, as the acorn is broken into the oak—broken into a higher and stronger life. On the other hand rebel against it, attempt to drag it down or cast it from its place, and it will crush you, and grind some part of your higher nature to powder. How strangely and sadly is this shown in the case of one of our greatest writers, who thought that the influence of her writings would far outweigh the influence of her example, but whose name and example are now constantly used by bad men to overcome the virtue of young educated girls struggling alone in London, and often half starving on the miserable pittance which is all they can earn. But still more is it shown in the life of the nation which tampers with the laws of marriage and admits freedom of divorce. Either such suits must be heard in camera without the shame of exposure, when divorce is so facilitated that the family and the State rest rather on a superstructure of rickety boards than on a rock; or they must be heard in public court and form a moral sewer laid on to the whole nation, poisoning the deepest springs of its life, and through that polluted life producing far more individual misery than it endeavors to remedy in dissolving an unhappy marriage. God only knows what I suffered when a cause célèbre came on, and I felt that the whole nation was being provided with something worse and more vitally mischievous than the most corrupt French novel.

Deeply do I regret—and in this I think most thoughtful minds will agree with me—that the Reformers in their inevitable rebound from the superstitions of Rome, rejected her teaching of the sacramental nature of marriage, which has made so many Protestant nations tend to that freedom of divorce which is carried to so great an extent in some parts of America, and is spreading, alas! to many of our own colonies—a laxity fatally undermining the sanctity and stability of the family. If marriage be not a sacrament, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual life and grace, I ask what is?

I would therefore earnestly beseech you to oppose your direct teaching to the whole tendency of modern life, and to much of the direct teaching of modern fiction —even of so great a novelist as George Meredith—which inculcates the subordination of the marriage bond to what is called the higher law of love, or rather, passion. In teaching your sons, and especially your girls, who are far more likely to be led astray by this specious doctrine, base marriage not on emotion, not on sentiment, but on duty. To build upon emotion, with the unruly wills and affections of sinful men, is to build, not upon the sand, but upon the wind. There is but one immovable rock on which steadfast character, steadfast relations, steadfast subordination of the lower and personal desires, to the higher and immutable obligations and trusts and responsibilities of life can be built—duty. When this rock has been faithfully clung to, when in the midst of disillusionment and shattered ideals the noble resolution has been clung to never to base personal happiness on a broken trust or another's pain, I have over and over again known the, most imperfect marriage prove in the end to be happy and contented. Here again I quote some words of Mrs.

Humphry Ward, which she puts into the mouth of her hero: "No," he said with deep emphasis—"No; I have come to think the most disappointing and hopeless marriage, nobly borne, to be better worth having than what people call an 'ideal passion'—if the ideal passion must be enjoyed at the expense of one of those fundamental rules which poor human nature has worked out, with such infinite difficulty and pain, for the protection and help of its own weakness,"[36] I am aware that neither Mr. Grant Allen with his "hill-top" novels, nor Mrs. Mona Caird need be taken too seriously, but when the latter says, "There is something pathetically absurd in this sacrifice to their children of generation after generation of grown people,"[37] I would suggest that it would be still more pathetically absurd to see the whole upward-striving past, the whole noble future of the human race, sacrificed to their unruly wills and affections, their passions and desires. If as Goldwin Smith says in his rough, incisive way, "There is not much union of heart in marriage, I do not see that there would be any more union of heart in adultery."

I have dwelt thus earnestly upon this point because the sooner we realize for ourselves and our girls that any relaxation of the marriage bond will in its disastrous consequences fall upon us, and not upon men, the better. It is the woman who first grows old and loses her personal attractions, while a man often preserves his beauty into extreme old age. It is the burdened mother of a family who cannot compete in companionship with the highly cultured young unmarried lady, with the leisure to post herself up in the last interesting book or the newest political movement. It is the man who is the more variable in his affections than the woman; more constant as she is by nature, as well as firmly anchored down by the strength of her maternal love. It is therefore on the woman that any loosening of the permanence of the marriage tie will chiefly fall in untold suffering. "Le mariage c'est la justice," say the French, who have had experience enough of "les unions libres"—justice to the wife and mother, securing her the stability of her right to her husband's affections, the stability to her right of maintenance after she has given up her means of support, above all, the stability of her right to the care of her own children. If we want to study the innate misery to women arising from the relaxation of the married tie, or transient unions, we had better read Professor Dowden's Life of Shelley—misery not the result of public stigma, for there was no such stigma in the circle in which Shelley moved, but misery brought about by the facts themselves, and producing state of things which Matthew Arnold could only characterize by the untranslatable French word "sale." But nearer home, one of your most brilliant writers, Mr. Henry James, has given us an equally profitable study in his novelette, What Maisie Knew, which I presume is intended as a satire on freedom of divorce, but which again can only be characterized by the French word "sale."

I confess it does fill me with sardonic laughter to find this oldest and stalest of all experiments, this oldest and flattest of failures, paraded as a brand new and original panacea for all the woes of our family life,—woes which, if nobly borne, at least make "perfect through suffering."

There is but one great rock-hewn dam successfully reared against the lawless passions of men and women, and that is Christian marriage. It has at least given us the Christian home, and pure family life. And sometimes it fills me with despair to see enlightened nations, like America and Australia, whittling away and slowly undermining this great bulwark against the devastating sea of human passion. If only I could feel that any poor words of mine could in any faint measure rouse American women to set themselves against what must in the end affect the depth and steadfastness of those family affections on which the beauty and solidity of the national character mainly rest, I should feel indeed I had not lived in vain.

At least I can claim that one of your greatest women, Frances Willard, was heart and soul with me on this point.

And now to descend to lower levels. Could we not do a little more to save our young girls from sacrificing their happiness to false ideals by opportunely obtruding a little mature common-sense into their day visions and their inexperienced way of looking at things? It is all very well in the heyday of life, when existence is full of delight and home affection, to refuse a man who could make them happy, because they don't quite like the shape of his nose, or because he is a little untidy in his dress, or simply because they are waiting for some impossible demigod to whom alone they could surrender their independence. But could we not mildly point out that darker days must come, when life will not be all enjoyment, and that a lonely old age, with only too possible penury to be encountered, must be taken into consideration?