Modern marriage and how to bear it

by Maud Churton Braby

To give another instance: a woman once asked me why men fell in love. ‘I wonder if you can tell me what it is about women that makes men propose to them,’ she said. ‘I’ve known numbers of plain women married and numbers of penniless ones, and some quite horrid ones without a single quality likely to make a man happy, yet there must have been something about them that attracted—some reason for it.’

She went on to tell me in such a pathetic way how she longed to have a home and a ‘nice, kind man,’ to care for her, and yet no man had ever asked her; no man had ever desired her or looked on her with love; she had never known the clasp of a man’s passionate arms, nor the ecstasy of a lover’s kiss. It seemed very strange to me, strangely painful and horribly humiliating. I could scarcely bear to look at her while she told me these things.

‘I would make a man so happy,’ she said, and her mournful dark eyes filled with tears; she had rather fine eyes, and was quite a nice-looking woman with a most sweet and gentle manner. ‘I would be so good to him,’ she went on; ‘I’d simply live for him. I try to put it out of my mind, but as I grow older, and it’s more hopeless, I think of it more and more and sometimes I feel I shall go mad with the misery of it. The future is so utterly grey and it’s all so unjust. I’m so fitted for love, and now my life’s going and I’ve had nothing, nothing!’

She wept bitterly and I wept too in sympathy with her. Curiously enough, this woman was not only attractive, as I have said, and anxious to please, and thoroughly feminine, but she had had ample opportunities of meeting men. I suppose she lacked what the Scotch peasant-woman called the ‘come hither in the ’ee’—some subtle sex-magnetism which had been possessed by those ‘plain, penniless, and horrid women’ whom she talked about. Or perhaps it was that the ‘will to live’ was absent and therefore no mate came to the woman.

There are thousands of women who feel the same, though in most cases they would scorn to own it. We hear a good deal of man’s right to live; what about woman’s right to love? Women are so constituted that the need for loving and being loved is the strongest factor of their being, the essential of their existence. All over the country there are lonely women of every class, leisured and working women, pretty and plain, good and bad, who are hungering and thirsting for love, for a man to take care of them, for the right to wifehood and the thrice blessed right to motherhood. In the Press the parrot cry of men echoes ceaselessly: ‘Women shouldn’t meddle in politics; women shouldn’t do this or that—let them mind their homes and their children.’ But the restless women who do these things have generally no homes or children to mind; what is the use of preaching the sacredness of motherhood when you will not allow them to be mothers? To what end prate of the duties of wifehood when you do not ask them to be wives?

It is a well-known physiological fact that numbers of women become insane in middle life who would not have done so if they had enjoyed the ordinary duties, pleasures and preoccupations of matrimony—if their women’s natures had not been starved by an unnatural celibacy. This is not a suitable subject to go into here, but I recommend it to the attention of my more thoughtful readers and those who concern themselves with the amelioration of the wretched social conditions of our glorious twentieth-century civilisation.

Hardest of all is the case of the woman who longs not merely for wifehood and ‘a kind man,’ but more especially for motherhood, the bitter-sweet crown of the sex that celibate priests preach ceaselessly as woman’s first duty and highest good, but which thousands of women in this country are debarred from fulfilling! Surely no bitterness must be so poignant as the bitterness of the woman who longs for motherhood—ceaselessly in her ears the Life Force is calling, and deep in her heart the dream children are stirring, crying, ‘Give us life! give us life!’ becoming more importunate every year, as each year finds the divine possibilities unrealised.

I often think how everything combines to torment a generous-hearted, full-blooded, mother-woman whose nature is starved thus. She has, of course, to suppress all emotion on the subject, to hold her head high, and endure with a smile the ‘experienced’ airs of girls, much younger than herself, who happen to wear that magical golden ring that changes all life for a woman; to pretend generally that she has no wish to marry, never had, and could have if she chose, to laugh at this page if she should happen to read it, and call the writer a morbid idiot—in short, she always has to act a part before a world which professes to find exquisitely humorous the fact of a woman being cheated out of the birthright of her sex. Every paper and book she picks up nowadays contains some reference to the glories of motherhood, the joys of love. Music, pictures, novels and plays, all speak of sex fulfilled and triumphant, not starved and denied like hers. The same principle is everywhere in Nature—the sky, the sea, the flowers, the green trees, the sound of summer rain—all beautiful sights and sounds have the same meaning, the same burden, the same sharp sting for her. If she is inclined to be morbid, every child’s face seen in the street turns the knife in the wound; every sweet baby’s cooing is another pang. ‘Not for me—not for me!’ must be the perpetual refrain in her mind. Her arms are empty, her heart is cold; she belongs to the vast, sad army of the undesired.

Do you wonder the madhouses are full of single women?

Note.—A clever and delightful friend of mine, a spinster by choice, takes exception to my views on the single estate. I should be deeply grieved if any words of mine were to cause pain to other women. I have said before that some of the best women are spinsters, which is sad to a believer in marriage like myself. Two of the sweetest and noblest women I know are unmarried; one of them especially seems absolutely without a thought of self, and has worked hard for others all her life, giving her powers of brain and body to their utmost limit, and the treasures of her beautiful heart generously and without stint. I beg my readers to note that I have tried to differentiate between those spinsters who do not want to marry and those who do; between the rich spinster who can command all the amenities of life, and the poor one compelled to a relentless and unceasing round of uncongenial toil. Still more do I wish to distinguish between the placid contented woman who can adapt herself to circumstances and find a quiet sort of happiness in any life—and the less well-balanced, more passionate natures, with deeper desires and an imperious need of loving. It is this need of loving stifled, crushed and fought against that awakens my profound compassion—a compassion which my friend informs me is wasted and misplaced. My readers must judge.