The Law is for All

Chapter I A Verse 41 43 reason why she should not be the ideal hausfrau, if that chance to be her will. But society has no right to insist upon that standard. It was, for practical reasons, almost necessary to set up such tabus in small communities, savage tribes, where the wife was nothing but a general servant, where the safety of the people depended upon a high birth-rate. But today woman is economically inde­ pendent, becomes more so every year. The result is that she instantly asserts her right to have as many or as few men or babies as she wants or can get; and she defies the world to interfere with her. More power to her—elbow! The War has seen this emancipation flower in four years. Primitive people, the Australian troops for example, are saying that they will not marry English girls, because English girls like a dozen men a week. Well, who wants them to marry? Russia has already formally abrogated marriage. Germany and France have tried to “save their faces” in a thoroughly Chinese manner, by “marrying” pregnant spinsters to dead soldiers! England has been too deeply hypocritical, of course, to do more than “hush things up”; and is pretending “business as usual,” though every pulpit is aquake with the clamour of bat- eyed bishops, squeaking of the awful immorality of everybody but themselves and their choristers. Englishwomen over 30 have the vote; when the young ’uns get it, good-bye to the old marriage system. America has made marriage a farce by the multiplication and confusion of the Divorce Laws. A friend of mine who had divorced her husband was actually, three years later, sued by him for divorce!!! But America never waits for laws; her people go ahead. The emancipated, self-supporting American woman already acts exactly like the “bachelor-boy.” Sometimes she loses her head, and stumbles into marriage, and stubs her toe. She will soon get tired of the folly. She will perceive how imbecile it is to hamstring herself in order to please her parents, or to legitimatize her children, or to silence her neighbours. She will take the men she wants as simply as she buys a newspaper; and if she doesn’t like the Editorials, or the Comic Supplement, it’s only two cents gone, and she can get another.