According to the author of the _Théorie des Quatre-Mouvements_,[7] this was almost the critical age (_Problems of the Sexes_, transl. Jean Finot 1913). [6] Balzac: _Physiologie du Mariage_. [7] Charles Fourier, Leipzig, 1808. The relative ages of husband and wife also have their influence, but should, to some extent, depend more on their _physiological_ age than on their actual years. They should, however, not be widely different. As Saleeby says:-- The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man’s age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority--contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation. We, therefore, see that, as might have been expected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband’s seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of women in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked (_Woman and Womanhood_, 1912). I have observed many girls, who were in every true sense of the word girls (that is unconscious of personal sex feeling, still growing in bodily stature and still developing in internal organization) until they were nearly thirty years of age. In my opinion, the girl who is thoroughly well-balanced, with an active brain, a well-developed normally sexed body, natural artistic and social instincts is not more than a child at seventeen, and to marry her at that age or anything like it is to force her artificially, and to wither off her potentialities.