The assumption that justice to motherhood and childhood will undermine the institution of marriage implies that marriage as an institution is based on injustice; which is to assume that it is fundamentally unsound. That it does, under present economic conditions, involve serious injustice to both sexes I have shown in the preceding chapter. But this notion implies something more: it implies that marriage is acceptable to women only or chiefly because it offers them a position of privilege--the privilege of exemption from the social and economic consequences of illegitimate motherhood. There is some show of reason in this; for the disabilities which marriage puts on women are in most communities humiliating and onerous, more particularly since the unmarried woman has so generally succeeded in establishing her right to be treated as a free agent. The abolition of illegitimacy may conceivably undermine institutional marriage; yet hardly before women are economically free. For her need of society’s protection against itself in the discharge of her maternal function has certainly had less to do with woman’s long acquiescence in the disabilities which marriage involves than the fact that marriage offered the only career which society approved for her or gave her much opportunity to pursue. She was under enormous economic and social pressure to accept those disabilities, and she yielded, precisely as thousands of men who have been under analogous pressure to get their living under humiliating conditions, have yielded, rather than not get it at all.