Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/172

 theories, that marriage is the one aim and object of women's existence, Mary Wollstonecraft, with her habitual reference to the religious sanction, pertinently asks how women are to exist in that state where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. "Man," she adds, "is always being told to prepare for a future state, but women are enjoined to prepare only for this." She also shows how wretchedly the sacredness of marriage and the charities of domestic life are violated by making marriage the only honourable career for women. As long as this is the case, and so far as it is the case, women are apt to marry "to better themselves," as the housemaids say, or "for a support, as men accept of places under Government," and not because they are heartily and honestly in love, or because they have any real vocation for married life. Mary Wollstonecraft had had abundant experience, in her own circle, of domestic wretchedness, brought about partly by this cause, and partly by the bestial vices of domestic tyrants invested with the irresponsible power associated with "the divine right of husbands."

On the second of these false theories, i.e., that women must never openly acknowledge that they wish to marry, while secretly making marriage the one object of their existence, she has no difficulty in showing how antagonism between the real and avowed objects of life breeds dissimulation and cuts at the root of all openness and spontaneity of character. The authors she quotes as maintaining this absurd view of female delicacy seem to leave the