Marriage -- Drama; Married people -- Drama; Weddings -- Drama
away with. At present it reduces the difference between marriage and
prostitution to the difference between Trade Unionism and unorganized
casual labor: a huge difference, no doubt, as to order and comfort, but
not a difference in kind.
However, it is not by any reform of the marriage laws that this can
be dealt with. It is in the general movement for the prevention
of destitution that the means for making women independent of the
compulsory sale of their persons, in marriage or otherwise, will be
found; but meanwhile those who deal specifically with the marriage laws
should never allow themselves for a moment to forget this abomination
that "plucks the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love,
and sets a blister there," and then calmly calls itself purity, home,
motherhood, respectability, honor, decency, and any other fine name
that happens to be convenient, not to mention the foul epithets it hurls
freely at those who are ashamed of it.
UNPOPULARITY OF IMPERSONAL VIEWS
Unfortunately it is very hard to make an average citizen take impersonal
views of any sort in matters affecting personal comfort or conduct. We
may be enthusiastic Liberals or Conservatives without any hope of seats
in Parliament, knighthoods, or posts in the Government, because party
politics do not make the slightest difference in our daily lives and
therefore cost us nothing. But to take a vital process in which we are
keenly interested personal instruments, and ask us to regard it, and
feel about it, and legislate on it, wholly as if it were an impersonal
one, is to make a higher demand than most people seem capable of
responding to. We all have personal interests in marriage which we are
not prepared to sink. It is not only the women who want to get married:
the men do too, sometimes on sentimental grounds, sometimes on the
more sordid calculation that bachelor life is less comfortable and more
expensive, since a wife pays for her status with domestic service as
well as with the other services expected of her. Now that children are
avoidable, this calculation is becoming more common and conscious than
it was: a result which is regarded as "a steady improvement in general
morality."
IMPERSONALITY IS NOT PROMISCUITY
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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