God knows I am no advocate for loveless, and least of all for mercenary marriages, but I think we want some viâ media between the French mariage de convenance and our English and American method of leaving so grave a question as marriage entirely to the whimsies and romantic fancies of young girls. We need not go back to the old fallacy that marriage is the aim and end of a woman's existence, and absolutely necessary for her happiness. Some women are doubtless called to be mothers of the race, and to do the social work which is so necessary to our complex civilization. Some women may feel themselves called to some literary or artistic pursuit, or some other profession, for which they require the freedom of unmarried life. But I think I shall carry most women with me in saying that for the ordinary woman marriage is the happiest state, and that she rarely realizes the deepest and highest in her nature except in wifehood and motherhood. Rarely, indeed, can any public work that she can do for the world equal the value of that priceless work of building up, stone by stone, the temple of a good man's character which falls to the lot of his mother. Truly is she called the wife, the weaver, since day and night, without hasting and without resting, she is weaving the temple hangings, wrought about with pomegranates and lilies, of the very shrine of his being. And if our girls could be led to see this, at least it would overcome that adverseness to marriage which many are now so curiously showing, and which inevitably makes them more fastidious and fanciful in their choice, And, on the other hand, without falling back into the old match-making mamma, exposing her wares in the marriage market to be knocked down to the highest bidder, might not parents recognize a little more than they do how incumbent on them it is to make every effort to give their daughters that free and healthy intercourse with young men which would yield them a wider choice, and which forms the best method for insuring a happy marriage?
At least, let us open our eyes to the fact that we are face to face with some terrible problems with regard to the future of our girls. With safe investments yielding less and less interest, it must become more and more difficult to make a provision for the unmarried daughters; and if the money is spent instead on training them to earn their own bread, we are still met by the problem of the early superannuation of women's labor, which rests on physical causes, and cannot therefore be removed. This at least is no time to despise marriage, or for women of strong and independent character to adopt an attitude which deprives the nation of many of its noblest mothers.
But if we are to facilitate marriage, which must form, at any rate, the main solution of the problems of the near future to which I have alluded, if we are to prevent, or even lessen, the degradation of women, if we are to extinguish this pit of destruction in our midst, into which so many a fair and promising young life disappears, and which perpetually threatens the moral and physical welfare of our own sons, if we are to stay the seeds of moral decay in our own nation, we must be content to revolutionize much in the order of our own life, and adopt a lower and simpler standard of living. It is we, and not men, who set the standard; it is we who have been guilty of the vulgar ambition of following the last social fashion, and doing as our richer neighbors do, until in England we have made our girls such expensive articles that many young men simply dare not indulge in them, and are led to seek in their luxurious clubs the comfort which they should find in a home of their own, with all that relaxation of moral fibre which comes from club life. Do we seriously think that we are likely successfully to contend against the degradation of women by our Rescue Societies and our Refuges when we are deliberately bringing about a social condition that ministers to it? "Oh, of course," said a near relative of my own, "no girl can marry comfortably and live in London with less than a thousand a year." All I can answer is that if this be so, it means the degradation of women writ large.
And have we even secured the happiness of our own daughters by this high standard of living which prevents so many of them from marrying at all? These unmarried girls, with no worthy object in life to call out the noble energies that lie dormant within them, "lasting" rather than "living,"—are they really happy? Is not Robert Louis Stevenson right when he says that "the ideal of the stalled ox is the one ideal that will never satisfy either man or woman"? Were not the hardships of a smaller income and a larger life—a life that would at least satisfy a woman's worst foe, heart hunger,—more adapted to their true nature, their true happiness?
And to what further admirable results have we attained by this high standard of comfort and luxury? Nature has carefully provided for the equality of the sexes by sending rather more boys than girls into the world, since fewer boys are reared; but we have managed to derange this order. We have sent our boys out into the world, but we have kept our girls at home, refusing to allow them to rough it with husbands and brothers or to endure the least hardness. The consequence is that we have nearly a million of surplus women in the old country, while in America, and in our own colonies, we have a corresponding surplus of men, with all the evil moral consequences that belong to a disproportion between the sexes. Truly we may congratulate ourselves!
I would therefore urge that if we are really to grapple with these moral evils, we should simplify our standard of living, and educate our girls very differently to what, at least in England, we are doing. Culture is good, and the more we have of it the better; it gives a woman a wider sphere of influence, as well as more enlightened methods of using that influence. But if dead languages are to take the place of living service; if high mathematics are to work out a low plane of cooking and household management; if a first class in moral science is to involve third class performance of the moral duties involved in family life, then I deliberately say it were better that, like Tennyson's mother, we should be
"Not learned save in gracious household ways."
I protest with the uttermost earnestness against the care of human life, of human health, and of human comfort being considered a lower thing and of less importance than good scholarship; or that, when we recognize that months and even years will have to be devoted to the attainment of the one, the arts by which we can fulfil those great human trusts which devolve more or less upon every woman can be practised without ever having been learnt at all.
Do not misunderstand me. Do not think I am decrying a classical education; and, as the daughter of a great mathematician, it is not likely that I should underrate mathematics as a mental discipline. I am only urging that they should be subordinated to higher and more practical issues.
I am thankfully aware that these remarks do not apply to American women to the same degree in which they apply to our English girls. The paucity of domestic servants, and the consequent pressure of necessity, have saved you from the fine lady ideal which we have adopted for our girls and the exclusively book education into which we have almost unconsciously drifted. You have been constrained to choose some nobler type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail. Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not having incurred "this Nemesis of disproportion," and therefore to their combining intellectual culture with practical efficiency.