MARRIAGE TO-PAY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18457, 21 July 1923, Page 6 (Supplement)

MARRIAGE TO-PAY.

In the past, when marriage was practically the only profession open to women most "girls married for money. They had to do so, maintains a writer in an exchange. They had to marry a man with a bank balance rather than a man without a bank balance, They had to give themselves to a steady, sober worker rather than to a man chosen for his natural qualities, even though the steady, sober worker might be a bad-tempered and morose and dull human being. Literally and truly, few girls could afford to marry for love.

Think how different is the position of the girl placed in a positon that she need not marry unless 3mj marries for love. Few marriages are ever - real marriages unless they are love marriages. All the ta'.k about love coming rifter marriage is of vary doubtful value. it fills me with horror to look back to pre-war days and think of the thousands of girls who were forced to get married owing to economic conditions, and were compelled to remain married even though ''-hey were terribly unhappy, simply because they had no economic freedom. It also fills ma with dismay to thick how incapable physically weak and nervous married women were of doing tho work of housekeeping and motherhood which marriage involves.

I turn from the past to a ma;?! brighter vision of the future, when married women enjoying good health and physical fitness, ■will be efficient and not inefficient, happy and not unhappy, and capable of giving their husbands and their children that real, practical, natural human love which can alone cement the marriage bond and make it not only permanent, but a chain of gold and not a yoke.