YOUNG GIRLS AND THE MARRIAGE AGE.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3134, 11 September 1922, Page 8

YOUNG GIRLS AND THE MARRIAGE AGE.

(By Helena Normaiiton.)

It is legally possible in this country for a boy of fourteen to marry a girl of twelve. A registrar recently informed the Daily Express that there was an "extraordinary increase" in the number of marriage* taking place between minors, and an eminent psychologist attributed the fact to the continuation of the emotional and exciting effects of the war. Sufficient public attention lias centred upon the phenomenon for an announcement to have been made recently in the Commons that the Government was considering whether the marriage age should not be raised for girls. Approval thereat was expressed in some of the women's papers. As any change l of any description is a reform iu tlve eyes of many people. there is nothing to he surprised about in this. So possibly the marriage age will be raised for girls to fourteen or sixteen. We may then awa;H the situation where some girl of thirteen is expecting motherhood by some boy criminal who, a.s in a recent case, has to be executed in a fortnight, and who is willing to undergo the ceremony which will make the child to be born a legitimate one. It will then be discovered that the new law forbid* this, and that such children- indeed, all children —conceived before the legal marriage age must necessarily be born out of wedlock. Affiliation orders' will multiply and magistrates wax indignant. Heated agitation will again ensue, and probably the reforming souls who are now agitating for the raising of the marriage age for girls will become just as busy to get it lowered once more. Parliament can be. and is, rushed into doing many foolish things, but 1 hope it will not be stampeded into perpetrating anything so monstrously tyrannical and unnatural as rendering illegal marriage at an age when nature makes marriage possible. Nor is it a settled thing, as many people appear to take for granted, that early marriages are necessarily undesirable. Tliev mav be or they may not be Kvervthing turns upon the individual circumstances of particular cases. Sarah Bernhardt has informed us in her memoirs that she was born when her mother was just fifteen. Who are any of us to bar the right ol a Sarah Bernhardt to be born:-' In some oI the most virile and hardy races ot the world early marriages are the general rule. Nor has the connection of late marriages with prostitution escaped the attention of the most eminent students of that hideous subject. It seems to be a most dangerous step to take to make legal marriage air impossibility for girls in their early teens when we are well aware that many girls of this age consider themselves old enough to ply the oldest calling in the world. We mav freely grant that many early marriages are imprudent and improvident. So, too, are a good many later marriages. The most imprudent marriage of all is the one where the contracting parties have waited so long that all the diviner purposes of marriage are frustrated and dulled by long delav. Nature has a Aviso old way of flouting legislation with attempts to flv in the face of her own laws: 'I he '..blie opinion which is the criterion for the suitable marriage age for the majority is a far more sensible and elastic ' guide than some cold and cramping enactment on the Statute Book. But how the i'ussers love propaganda for new laws!