Here is, in a nutshell, the problem of the mother of a daughter. If you marry your daughter at seventeen to a lad of her own age, you have a very good chance of marrying her to a person who is chaste. If you marry her to a man of twenty-five, you have perhaps one chance in a hundred. If you marry her to a man of thirty-five, you have perhaps one chance in ten thousand. You may not like these facts; I do not like them myself; but I have learned that facts are none the less facts on that account.
You know the average society bud of eighteen, and her attitude to a boy of the same age. She regards him as a child; and you think, perhaps, that it is natural for a girl to be interested in men of thirty-five and even forty-five. But I tell you that it is not natural, it is simply one of the perversions of pecuniary sex. The girl is interested in such men, because all her young life she has been carefully coached for the marriage market; because she is dressed for it, and solemnly brought out, and introduced to other players of this exciting game of marriage for money, with its incredible prizes of automobiles and jewels and palaces full of servants, and magic check-books that never grow empty. But suppose that, instead of regarding her as a prize in a lottery, you let her grow up naturally, and taught her the truth about herself, both body and mind; suppose that, instead of dressing her in ways deliberately contrived to emphasize her sex, you put her in a simple uniform, and taught her to be honest and straightforward, instead of mincing and coy; suppose she played athletic games with boys of her own age, and invited them to her home, not for "jazz" dancing and stuffing cake and candy, but for the sharing of good music and literature and art—don't you think that maybe this girl might become interested in a lad of her own age, and choose him with some understanding of his real self?
You take it for granted that young people should not marry until they can "afford it." But stop and consider, is not this a relic of old days? Always it takes time, and deliberate effort of the reason, to adjust our conventions to new facts; so face this fact—marriage today does not necessarily mean children, it may just mean love. It involves little more expense, because the young people need cost no more together than they cost in the separate homes of their parents. If they are children of the poor, they are already taking care of themselves. If they are children of the moderately well off, their parents expect to support them while they are getting an education; and why can they not just as well live together, and the parents of each contribute their share? Let the parents of the boy give him, not merely what it costs to keep him at home, but also the sums which otherwise the boy would pay to the brothels. By this argument I do not mean that I favor keeping young people financially dependent upon their parents. My own son is working his own way through college, and I should be glad to see every young man doing the same. All that I am saying is that if parents are going to support their children while they are getting an education, they might just as well support them married as single, instead of penalizing matrimony by making all allowances cease at that point.
I know a certain ardent feminist, who is all for late marriage for women, and abhors my ideas on this subject. She wants women to get a chance to develop their personalities; whereas I want to sacrifice them to the frantic exigencies of the male animal! Young things of seventeen and eighteen have no idea what they are, or what they want from life; the mating impulse is a blind frenzy in them, and they must be taught to control it, just as they are taught not to kill when they are angry!
In the first place, I point out that young ladies in colleges and in ballrooms give a lot of time and thought to sex, even though they do not call it by that inelegant term. I very much question whether, if we should apply our wisdom to the task of getting our young people happily mated before we sent them off to college, we should not get a lot more serious study out of them than we now do, with all their "fussing" and flirting and dancing.
Second, I am willing to make heroic moral efforts, where I see any chance of adequate results, but I have examined the facts, and definitely made up my mind that it is not worth while, in our present stage of culture, to preach to the mass of men the doctrine that they should abstain from sex experience until they are twenty-five or thirty years of age. You may storm at them, but they only laugh at you; you may pass laws, and try to put them in jail, but you only provide a harvest for blackmailers and grafters. As to sacrificing the girl, my answer is simply that I believe in love; and in this I think the girl will agree with me, if you will let her! I have never heard any qualified person maintain that it hurts a girl to respond to love at the age of seventeen or eighteen; nor do I think that it hurts a boy, provided that he is taught the virtues of moderation and self-restraint. Without these, it will hurt him to eat; but that is no argument for starving him. As for the question of his maturity and power to judge, we are able at present to keep him from marrying anybody, so I think we might reasonably hope to keep him from marrying a wanton or a slut. Certainly we might find somebody better than the peroxide blonde he now picks up in front of the moving picture palace.
The question, at what ages we shall advise our young couple to have children, is a separate one, depending upon many circumstances. First, of course, they should not have any until they are able financially to maintain them. As to the age at which it is physically advisable, that is a question to be settled by physicians and physiologists. I myself had the idea that the proper age would be when the woman had attained her full stature; but my friend Dr. William J. Robinson sends me some statistics from the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, which startle me. This publication for January, 1922, gives the results in five hundred childbirths, in which the mother's age was from twelve to sixteen years inclusive. It appears that pregnancy and labor at these ages are no more dangerous than in older women; but on the other hand, the duration of the labor is actually shorter, and the size of the children is not inferior. These facts are so contrary to the general impression that I content myself with calling attention to them, and leave the commenting to be done by feminists and others who oppose themselves to the idea of early marriage.
CHAPTER XLI
THE MARRIAGE CLUB
(Discusses how parents and elders may help the young to avoid unhappy marriages.)
I will make the assumption that you would like to have a trial of my cure for prostitution. You would like to do something right here and now, without waiting for the social revolution. Very well: I propose that you shall find a few other parents of boys and girls who are in revolt against our system of hidden vice, and that you will meet and form a modern marriage club. Only you won't call it that, of course; you will tactfully describe it as a literary society, or a social circle, or an Epworth League. The parents who run it will know what it is for, just as they do today; the only difference being that it will exist to promote love matches instead of money matches. It happens that I am myself a tactless sort of a person, not skillful at avoiding saying what I mean. So, in this chapter, I shall content myself with setting forth exactly what this marriage club will do, and leaving it to more clever people to supply the necessary camouflage.