Is Marriage a Failure?

(By MONA CAIRD, in the Westminster Review.)

It is not difficult to find people mild and easygoing about religion, and even politics may be regarded with wide-minded tolerance; but broach social subjects, and English men and women at once become alarmed and talk about the foundations of society and the sacredness of the home. Yet the particular form of social life or of marriage, to which they are so deeply attached, has by no means existed from time immemorial ; in fact, modern marriage, with its satellite ideas, only dates as far back as the age of Luther. Of course the institution existed long before, but our particular mode of regarding it can be traced to the era of the Reformation when commerce, competition, the great bourgeois class, and that remarkable thing called "respectability," also began to arise.
Before entering upon the history of marriage, it is necessary to clear the ground for thought upon this subject by a protest against the careless use of the words " human nature," and especially "woman's nature." History will show us, if anything will, that human nature has an apparently limitless adaptability, and that, therefore, no conclusion can be built upon special manifestations which may at any time be developed. Such development must be referred to certain conditions; and not be mistaken for the eternal law of being. With regard to "woman's nature," concerning which innumerable contradictory dogmas are held, there is so little really known about it and its power of development, that all social philosophies are more or less falsified by this universal though sublimely unconscious ignorance.
The difficulties of friendly intercourse between men and women are so great, and the false sentiments induced by our present system so many and so subtle, that it is the hardest thing in the world for either sex to learn the truth concerning the real thoughts and feelings of the other. If they find out what they mutually think about the weather it is as much as can be expected — consistently, that is, with genuine submission to present ordinances. Thinkers, therefore, perforce take no count of the many half-known and less understood ideas and emotions of women, even as these actually exist at the moment, and they make still smaller allowance for potential developments which at the present crisis are almost incalculable. Current phrases of the most shallow kind are taken as if they expressed the whole that is knowable on the subject.
There is, in fact, no social philosophy, how ever logical and farseeing on other points, which does not lapse into incoherence as soon as it touches the subject of women. The thinker abandons the thought-laws which he has obeyed until that fatal moment ; he forgets every principle of science previously present to his mind, and he suddenly goes back centuries in knowledge and in the consciousness of possibilities, making schoolboy statements, and babbling of green fields in a manner that takes away the breath of those who have listened to his former reasoning, and admired his previous delicacies of thought-distinction. Has he been overtaken by some afflicting mental disease? Or does he merely allow himself to hold one subject apart from the circulating currents of his brain, judging it on different principles from those on which he judges every other subject?
Whatever be the fact, the results appear to be identical. A sudden loss of intellectual power would have exactly this effect upon the opinions which the sufferer might hold on any question afterwards presented to him. Suddenly fallen from his high mental estate , our philosopher takes the same view of women as certain Indian women theologians took of the staple food of their country.* "The Great Spirit," they said, "made all things except the wild rice, but the wild rice came by chance." The muse of history, guided by that of science, eloquently protests against treating any part of the universe as "wild rice;" she protests against the exclusion of the ideas of evolution, of natural selection, of the well-known influence upon organs and aptitudes of continued use or disuse, influence which has exemplified in his own life, which every profession proves, and which is freely acknowledged in the discussion of all questions except those in which woman forms an important element. "As she was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be —— !"
There is a strange irony in this binding of women to the evil results in their own natures of the restrictions and injustice which they have suffered for generations. We chain up a dog to keep watch over our home ; we deny him freedom and in some cases, alas ! even sufficient exercise to keep his limbs supple and his body in health. He becomes dull and spiritless, he is miserable and ill-looking, and if by any chance he is let loose, he gets into mischief and runs away. He has not been used to liberty or happiness, and he cannot stand it.
Humane people ask his master, " Why do you keep that dog always chained up ?"
" Oh ! he is accustomed to it ; he is suited for the chain ; when we let him loose he runs wild."
So the dog is punished by chaining for the misfortune of having been chained, till death releases him. In the same way we have subjected women for centuries to a restricted life which called forth one or two forms of domestic activity; we have rigorously excluded (even punished) every other development of power; and we have then insisted that the consequent adaptations of structure, and the violent instincts created by this distorting process are, by a sort of compound interest, to go on adding to the distortions themselves, and at the same time to go on forming a more and more solid ground for upholding the established system of restriction and the ideas that accompany it. We chain because we have chained. The dog must not be released because his nature has adapted itself to the misfortunes of captivity.
He has no revenge in his power ; he must live and die, and no one knows his wretchedness. But the woman takes her unconscious vengeance, for the enters into the inmost life of society. She can pay back the injury with interest. And so she does, item by item. Through her, in a great measure, marriage becomes what Milton call "a drooping and disconsolate household captivity," and through her influence over children she is able to keep going much physical weakness and disease which might, with a little knowledge, be readily stamped out ; she is able to oppose new ideas by the early implanting of prejudice ; and, in short, she can hold back the wheels of progress, and send into the world human beings likely to wreck every attempt at social reorganisation that may be made, whether it be made by men or by gods. +
Seeing then, that the nature of women is the result of their circumstances, and that they are not a sort of human " wild rice," come by chance or special creation, no protest can be too strong against the unthinking use of the term " woman's nature." An unmanageable host of begged questions, crude assertions and unsound habits of thought are packed into those two hackneyed words.
Having made this protest, we propose to take a brief glance at the history of marriage, then to consider marriage at the present day, and finally to discuss the marriage of the future. We begin with it time when there was no such thing as monogamy, but it is not necessary for our purpose to dwell upon that age. The first era that bears closely upon our subject is the matriarchal age, to which myths and folk-lore in almost all countries definitely point. The mother was the head of the family, priestess, and instructress in the arts of husbandry. She was the first agriculturist, the first herbalist, the initiator (says Karl Pierson) of all civilisation. Of this age many discoveries have lately been made in Germany. The cave in which the mother took shelter and brought up her family was the germ of our "home.'' The family knew only one parent, the mother ; her name was transmitted, and property— when that began to exist—was inherited through her, and her only. A woman's indefeasible right to her own child of course remained unquestioned, and it was not until many centuries later that men resorted to all kinds of curious devices with a view of claiming authority over children, which was finally established by force, entirely irrespective of moral right.
The idea of right always attaches itself in course of time to an established custom which is well backed up by force ; and at the present day even persons of high moral feeling see no absurdity in the legal power of a man to dispose of his children contrary to the will of their mother. Not only does the man now claim a right to interfere, but he actually claims sole authority in cases of dispute. This would be incredible were it not a fact.
During the mother-age some men of the tribe became wandering hunters, while others remained at home to till the soil. The hunters, being unable to procure wives in the woods and solitudes, used to make raids on the settlements and carry off some of the women. This was the origin of our modern idea of possession in marriage. The woman became the property of the man, his own by right of conquest. Now the wife is his own by right of law.
It is John Stuart Mill, we believe, who says that woman was the first being who was enslaved. A captured wife probably lost her liberty even before animals were pressed into man's service. In Germany, in early times, women were in the habit of dragging the plough. This and many similar facts, we may remark in passing, show that there is no inherent difference in physical strength between the two sexes, and that the present great difference is probably induced by difference of occupation extending backward over many generations.
The transition period from the mother age to the father age was long and painful. It took centuries to deprive the woman of her powerful position as head of the family, and of all the superstitious reverence which her knowledge of primitive arts and of certain properties of herbs, besides her influence as priestess secured her. Of this long struggle we find many traces in old legends, in folk-lore, and in the survival of customs older than history. Much later, in the witch persecutions of the Middle Ages, we come upon the remnants of belief in the woman's superior power and knowledge, and the determination of man to extinguish it.* The awe remained in the form of superstition, but the old reverence was changed to antagonism. We can note in early literature the feeling that women were evil creatures eager to obtain power, and that the man was nothing less than a coward who permitted this low and contemptible influence to make way against him.
During the transition period capture-marriage, of course, met with strenuous opposition from the mother of the bride, not only as regarded the high-handed act itself, but also in respect to the changes relating to property which the establishment of father rule brought about. Thus we find a hereditary basis for the (no doubt) divinely-instilled and profoundly natural repugnance of a man for his mother-in-law ! This sentiment can claim the authority of centuries and almost equal rank us a primitive and sacred impulse of out nature with the maternal instinct itself. Almost might we speak of it tenderly and mellifluously as "beautiful."
On the spread of Christianity and the ascetic doctrines of its later teachers, feminine influence received another check. " Woman," exclaims Tertullian, with startling frankness, "thou art the gate of hell !" This is the key-note of the monastic age. Woman was an ally of Satan, seeking to lead men away from the paths of righteousness. She appears to have succeeded very brilliantly. We have a century of almost universal corruption, ushering in the period of the Minnesingers and the troubadours, or what is called the age of chivalry. In spite of a licentious society, this age has given us the precious germ of a new idea with regard to sex relationship, for art and poetry now began to soften and beautify the cruder passion, and we have the first hint of a distinction which can be quite clearly felt between love as represented by classical authors and what may be called modern, or romantic love — as a recent writer named it. This nobler sentiment, when developed and still further inwoven with ideas of modern growth, forms the basis of the ideal marriage, which is founded upon a full attraction and expression of the whole nature.
But this development was checked, though the idea was not destroyed by the Reformation. It is to Luther and his followers that we can immediately trace nearly all the notions that now govern the world with regard to marriage. Luther was essentially coarse and irreverent towards the oppressed sex. He placed marriage on the lowest possible platform, and, as one need scarcely add, he did not take women into counsel in a matter so deeply concerning them. In the age of chivalry the marriage-tie was not at all strict, and our present ideas of virtue and honour were practically non-existent. Society was in what is called a chaotic state ; there was extreme license on all sides, and although the standard of morality was far severer for the woman than for the man, still she had more or less liberty to give herself as passion dictated, and society tacitly accorded her a right of choice in matters of love. But Luther ignored all the claims of passion in a woman ; in fact, she had no recognised claims whatever; she was not permitted to object to any part in life that might be assigned her ; the notion of resistance to his decision never occurred to him — her role was one of duty and of service ; she figured as the legal property of a man, the safeguard against sin, and the victim of that vampire, "respectability," which thenceforth was to fasten upon and took the life-blood of womanhood.
The change from the open license of the age of chivalry to the decorum of the Philistine regime, was merely a change in the mode of licentiousness, not a move from evil to good. Hypocrisy became a household god; true passion was dethroned and with it poetry and romance; the commercial spirit, staid and open eyed, entered upon its long career, and began to regulate the relations of the sexes. We find, a peculiar medley of sensuality and decorum ; the mercenary spirit entering into the idea of marriage, women were bought and sold as if they were cattle and were educated, at the same time, to strict ideas of "purity" and duty, to Griselda-like patience under the severest provocation. Carried off by the highest bidder, they were gravely exhorted to be moral, to be chaste, and faithful and God-fearing, serving their lords in life and in death. To drive a hard bargain, and to sermonise one's victims at the same time is a feat distinctly of the Philistine order. With the growth of the commercial system, of the rich burgher class, and of all the ideas that thrive under the influence of wealth when divorced from mental cultivation, the status of women gradually established itself upon this degrading basis, and became fixed more and more firmly as the bourgeois increased in power and prosperity.
Bebel speaks of Luther as the interpreter of the "healthy sensualism" of the middle ages.+ Any ''healthy sensualism," however, which did not make itself legitimate by appeal to the church and the law was rigorously punished under his system. Women offenders were subject to hideous and awful forms of punishment. Thus we may say that Luther established, in the interests of sensuality and respectability, a strict marriage system. He also preached the devastating doctrine which makes it a duty to have an unlimited number of children. Of course he did not for a moment consider the woman in this matter. Why should a thick-skinned, coarse-fibred monk of the 16th century consider sufferings which are overlooked by tender-hearted divines of the 19th century ? The gentle Melancthon, on this subject, says : " If a woman becomes weary of bearing children, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there to do it." This doctrine is not obsolete at the present day. It is the rule of life among the mass of our most highly respectable classes, those who hold the scale of public morality in their hands, and whose prerogative appears to be to judge in order that they be not judged.
As an instance of the way in which an exceptionally good man can regard this subject— his goodness notwithstanding — we may turn to the introduction, by Charles Kingsley, to Brooks's " Fool of Quality," which Kingsley edited. A short account is given of the life of Brook, who flourished (in a very literal sense)in the time of the restoration, and who was saved, as his biographer points out in joy and thankfulness, from the vices of that corrupt age, by an early marriage. Kingsley goes on to describe the home where all that is commendable and domestic reigned and prospered. He dwells lovingly on that pleasant picture of simple joys and happy cares, upon the swarms of beautiful children who cluster round their father's knee and rescue him from the dangers of a licentious age. Kingsley mentions, just in passing, that the young wife watches the happy scene from a sofa, having become a confirmed invalid from the number of children she has borne during the few years of her married life. But what of that? What of the anguish and weariness, what of the thousand painful disabilities which that young woman suffered before her nature yielded to the strain-— disabilities which she will have to bear to her life's end ? Has not the valuable Brook been saved from an immoral life. (Of course Brook could not be expected to save himself !— we are not unreasonable.) Have not propriety and respectability been propitiated ? And the price of all this? Merely the suffering and life-long injury of one young woman in a thoroughly established and "natural" manner ; nothing more. Kingsley feels that it is cheap at the price. Brook is saved ! Hallelujah !
(To be continued.)

Telegraph (Brisbane, Qld. : 1872 - 1947), Thursday 18 October 1888, page 3