Summary
“We transmit, must transmit, being mothers,
What we are to mankind.”
—Charlotte Stetson.Two great dangers to the race are involved in the bondage imposed upon women. The suppression of “sports” or varieties has been already treated. We now come to the injury, entailed upon men, as the sons, husbands, and brothers of bondswomen.
A man has been brought up, from earliest childhood, to regard a woman as of less importance than himself: he sees her trained to minister to his comfort, and to make herself pleasing in his eyes. He finds the respectable British matron eager to see her daughters marry well:—does she not know, poor woman, that if they do not marry well, society offers them small chance of doing well in any other way? Among the classes for whom the man of the world would feel called upon to profess respect, the voices of duty and religion mingle with that of self-interest, in counselling submission; while in the class that he would openly despise, the necessity to earn a living, and the dread of slaving at starvation wages, provides a motive for the bargain which, according to popular incoherence, disgraces beyond redemption one of the parties to it, while it leaves the other a pillar of society. Is any one so optimistic as to believe that from conditions such as these, it is possible to produce a community wherein all the worst instincts of mankind shall not run wild?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Morality of MarriageAnd Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman, pp. 212 - 220Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010First published in: 1897