WOMEN AND MARRIAGE.

Feilding Star, Volume XXV, Issue 283, 20 May 1904, Page 2

WOMEN AND MARRIAGE.

In a treatise devoted to the decline in the birth-rate in New South Wales the general manager of the Australian Mutual Provident Society (Mr T. Bees) states that the most marked fall followed the financial crisis of 1893, and accompanied the long drought which ended recently. This fact may be contrasted with the truism mentioned by Mr Teece, that an increasing marriage rate is the accompaniment of increasing prosperity. The statistician's figures show that the proportion of young married men has decreased, while that of the older ones has increased, and for this result he is inclined to blame the women. "Young women of the present day are not content to begin where their mothers began ; on the contrary,they wish to begin where their mothers left off. The tendency to extravagance, the passion for ostentation, the ambition to make a figure in society, which are such distinctive features of present-day existence among women, make"young men hesitate before assuming the responsibilities which married life imposes on them. In the old days mothers and daughters both looked to marriage as ihegoalof iheir existence, and the old maid shared with the mother-in-law the stigma of reproach. In latter times, women have become wage earners, and the consciouness of the power to earn, with its attendant sense of freedom, has tended to make them impatient of the marriage yoke and the inconvenience of child-bear-ing. . The grant of the suffrage will probably intensify this condition, and the world will no longer be ruled by the hand which rocks the cradle."