" Yet the number of marriages effected
more or less in this way must be enormous. When people say that
love should be free, their words, taken literally, may be foolish;
but they are only expressing inaccurately a very real need for the
disentanglement of sexual relations from a mass of exorbitant and
irrelevant conditions imposed on them on false pretences to enable
needy parents to get their daughters "off their hands" and to keep
those who are already married effectually enslaved by one another.
THE ECONOMIC SLAVERY OF WOMEN
One of the consequences of basing marriage on the considerations
stated with cold abhorrence by Saint Paul in the seventh chapter
of his epistle to the Corinthians, as being made necessary by the
unlikeness of most men to himself, is that the sex slavery
involved has become complicated by economic slavery; so that
whilst the man defends marriage because he is really defending his
pleasures, the woman is even more vehement on the same side
because she is defending her only means of livelihood. To a woman
without property or marketable talent a husband is more necessary
than a master to a dog. There is nothing more wounding to our
sense of human dignity than the husband hunting that begins in
every family when the daughters become marriageable; but it is
inevitable under existing circumstances; and the parents who
refuse to engage in it are bad parents, though they may be
superior individuals.
Pages:
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74