MAKING OVER MARRIAGE
Only for the man in khaki to come home again it waits. Then with the new woman, together at last, they can build the new world aright. For never again shall we permit any such skewed and twisted and one-sided job as that of the past. “Dear,” she will say, “you did it as well as you could, probably, that old world. But the trouble was, that you did it alone.”
And with a little whimsical smile, she’ll quote for him the old proverb that “two heads are better than one.” Then perhaps they will walk in the garden in the evening. And with her hand in his arm, she will speak as she never could speak before—as a free woman who has found her soul! There were things, I think, that God forgot when he talked to Moses and to St. Paul. But now he’s told them to her.
Listen: “Marriage,” she will say, “marriage, dear, we must make over so that it shall be something very sweet and very sacred.”
Oh, it wasn’t always that yesterday. There are women who know it wasn’t. When a man could say to the woman the law gave to him, “Come unto me to-night, or I shall not give you money with which to buy shoes for the children to-morrow.” Or he may have said, “the slippers for your pretty feet”—when marriage was that way, everything in it divine just died! It shall never be so again.
Hear the new woman. “We shall have more love about marriage and less law,” she will say. “And we shall never let them lock us in. Love always laughed even yesterday at the clumsy locksmiths who thought they had bolted and barred the Doll’s House with ordinance and ritual. For how love cometh, we may not say, who are mute before so much as the mystery of the tint of the rose or the perfume of the lilies in June. Nor how love goeth, dare we define. Presumptuous mortals who have thought to hold back love with law and enactment, have made of marriage an empty form, echoing with the mockery of the happiness that fled.”
Well, we will say that she is talking like this under the stars. The next morning at breakfast she will come right to the point. And I know where she will begin. “That old doctrine of coverture,” she will say, “take it away!” There is a place for the relics of an antiquated civilisation. In the museum of the Tower of London they have in a glass case the little model of the rack and thumb screw. The executioner’s block and the headsman’s axe is an important and impressive exhibit. And there are the coats of mail of early warriors. It is customary, I believe, to put there all things that are passing into desuetude: a hansom cab went in the other day. Now let them take also this ancient doctrine of coverture, and put it in a glass case for future generations to wonder at its barbarity. Then may the marriage contract be rewritten with a really free hand.
How it will be done all over the world, we even at present may prophesy. See already Scandinavia. The northern sky was alight with the forecast of woman’s freedom, even before this war broke. Contemporaneously with the enfranchisement of women up there, completed in Denmark only in 1915, almost the first act of governments in which all of the people were for the first time represented, was to appoint a marriage commission. On it are both men and women from the three lands, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. It is still at work revising the marriage laws. The task is not completed. But there are important sections of the new code ready: they have taken the “obey” out of the marriage service; they have stipulated for divorce by mutual consent, that is by request of the parties interested, who are to be let out of wedlock as simply and as easily as they were let in. Further personal rights and property rights are all being defined and arranged on the new basis of equality of morality and duty and responsibility and on the assumption that the wife is a separate personality from her husband.
The nearby country of Finland, where the woman movement has always kept step with Scandinavia, has also taken similar action. The Law Committee of the Finnish Parliament had in 1917 appealed to local authorities and other qualified bodies for suggestions on the subject of the reform of the marriage laws. Seven women’s associations united in formulating the pronouncement which was returned. There is no paragraph about divorce for the reason that Finland has already accomplished divorce by mutual consent. For the rest, it is probably the most complete presentment available of the new woman’s point of view. This is what she asks:—
1. That the guardianship of the husband shall cease, and the married woman have an equal right of action in all legal matters, even against her husband; that she shall have the right to plead in courts of law and to carry on business independently.