Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/458

442 probably become aware that liberty of divorce must be reciprocal, that marriage is preëminently a restraint placed on the passions of the man in the interest of the woman, that a woman loses her charms more easily than she loses her need of a protector, and that to the children divorce is moral and social ruin. Mr. Mill demands for the "slave" the privilege of changing her master; he forgets that he would, at the same time, give the master the privilege of changing his slave.

The question, of which more is heard here, as to the right of women to the control of their own property, was one the importance of which was not likely to be fully perceived while comparatively few women earned their own bread. However, now that it is perceived, the British Legislature has at least gone so far in removing anomalies that it need not despair of seeing itself do complete justice. In the United States, male Legislatures, so far from being unwilling, display almost an exaggerated propensity to sever the interest of the wife from that of the husband. An eminent American jurist told the writer that he knew a case in which a woman was compelling her husband to work for her as a hired laborer, and another in which a woman had accomplished a divorce by simply shutting the door of the house, which was her own property, in her husband's face. After all, it must be remembered that the man remains responsible for the maintenance of the woman and her children, and that the analogy of a commercial partnership, which is in vogue with the champions of woman's right in the United States, is very far from holding good: commercial justice between themselves and their husbands is not what the women really want. It must be remembered, too, that the male has, by nature, certain advantages over the female which no legislature on earth can annul; and that it is necessary in the interest of both sexes, but especially in the interest of woman, to render the restraint of marriage acceptable, not only to persons of cultivated sensibility, but to ordinary men. If the ideal of marriage which floats in the pages of Mr. Mill were actually embodied in legislation, and the husband were stripped of all conjugal rights, and left with nothing but the responsibility of maintaining the family, it is at least possible that the result among the coarser masses of mankind might be the increase of license and the consequent degradation of women.

It is commonly said in the United States, by the Woman's Right party, that women are underpaid for their labor, and a vague hope is held out that this might be set right by female legislation. In most fields of industry women are new-comers, and on all new-comers old custom is apt at first to bear hard. Female singers, piano-forte players, novelists, painters, milliners, are not underpaid. If female clerks and school-mistresses are paid less than male clerks and school-masters, this may be partly because continuance in the calling is an element of value, and women are taken off by marriage. That a New Yorker will persist, out of regard for the aristocracy of sex, in paying