The
strong-minded ladies who are resolved to be mistresses in their
own houses would not be the only ones to take advantage of the new
law. Even women to whom a home without a man in it would be no
home at all, and who fully intended, if the man turned out to be
the right one, to live with him exactly as married couples live,
would, if they were possessed of independent means, have every
inducement to adopt the new conditions instead of the old ones.
Only the women whose sole means of livelihood was wifehood would
insist on marriage: hence a tendency would set in to make marriage
more and more one of the customs imposed by necessity on the poor,
whilst the freer form of union, regulated, no doubt, by
settlements and private contracts of various kinds, would become
the practice of the rich: that is, would become the fashion. At
which point nothing but the achievement of economic independence
by women, which is already seen clearly ahead of us, would be
needed to make marriage disappear altogether, not by formal
abolition, but by simple disuse. The private contract stage of
this process was reached in ancient Rome. The only practicable
alternative to it seems to be such an extension of divorce as will
reduce the risks and obligations of marriage to a degree at which
they will be no worse than those of the alternatives to marriage.
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