SHOULD WOMEN MAKE LOVE?

Star (Christchurch), Issue 9192, 23 March 1908, Page 2

SHOULD WOMEN MAKE LOVE ?

A QUESTION OF PROPRIETY. At first blush, on the face of it, before one examines and looks all round the matter, there would, seem to be no more reason why a woman should, not tell a man that she loves him, and ask him to marry her, "than why a man should, not tell a woman he loves her arid ask her to marry him. They are both, we must, of course, presume, free individuals of sane mind. Love that is to be followed by marriage is a serious matter, and marriage is as fully fraught with happy or unhappy possibilities to the woman as it is to the man. Surely, one would say, in the question of a contract between two equial parties it cannot matter a jot which of the two makes the proposition, that the contract should be entered into^ If two business men meet and either of them thinks that a partnership would be a desirable business enterprise, it would be idiotic of him to refrain from making the proposal because he Wore a beard and the other man was cleanshaven, or from any other scruple of a similar kind, and marriage is, and most certainly should be, a partnership. There, now; let us take that illustration and work at it, and we shall get somewhere presently. One sees at once that it is not quite on all fours ' with the case of a woman who is in love with a man and who wants to marry him, because it assumes that each of the men has equal capital and business knowledge to put into the proposed undertaking. But now suppose one of them, A, had a very little capital, or no capital at all, and the other, B, had all the capital that was wanted. Then, I fancy, A, unless he were a particularly pushful and audacious fellow, would feel a, little diffident in making the proposal to B. He would feel it a bit awkward, anyhow, wouldn't he? He might know that he had plenty of ability to bring into the joint business, and he might be fully prepared to give to the business all his time and energy, and he might feel confident that he could make a good thing of it both for himself and his partner; but nevertheless that want of capital would give him pause, to say no more than that. There, now that I have altered (says _ Max Hubert in a New York paper) the illustration a little, it comes a good deal nearer to the case as it exists between men and women. All sorts of factors, of course, enter in marriage — love, sentiment, passion, the desire of progeny , and othens — but. still it is like a business partnership in this respect, that it is an economic arrangement. In the vast majority of instances t^e whole of the economic burden is borne by the man. He by his earnings, or by an income that is not earned, has entirely to support the domestic establishment that follows upon marriage as a matter of course. Sc you see, that in the vast majority of instances when a woman says to a man, " Adolphus, I love you, will you marry me?' 1 she is really saying, "Wilt. you support me at a social level proper to your income for the rest of my natural life ; in sickness or in health, whether I am able to perform the duties of a wife or whether I am not; whether I take to drink or whether I remain sober; whether I get hopelessly mad or whether I continue sane; and, further, will you make adequate provision for me in the lamentable but nevertheless-to-be-thought-of event of your death?" She might go on to add : " Should I be unfaithful to you, you will be able to divorce me, but you will have to pay all the costs of the action, mine as well as your own, and you will still have to go* on supporting me, although not at so high a rate. Should I divorce you, you will also have to pay all the oosts of the action, and you will have to support me thereafter very handsomely indeed." Now that is a proposition which a reasonably modest woman, a _ woman who was not carried away, a 6 it were, by a sense of her own value, would find it a little difficult to make. Most women are reasonably modest, and are not carried away by a sense of their own value; they do find that proposition a little difficult to make — and they do not make it. lam not at all surprised that they do not make it. But, you may reply, although the case you have just put is the common case, there are exceptions to it. Some women have property, some women are rich. Suppose the woman is richer than the man? How then? Well, then, as a matter of fact, tho same sort of thing happens — only the other way round, so to 6peak. A man with a sense of honour (and it need not he an over-delicate sense of honour), a decentish sort of man, does think twice and thrice - before he asks a woman richer than himself to be his wife. Many a rich woman has lost the man she would have liked for a husband because he could not bring himself up to the .point of proposal. There is always ascertain feeling of disapproval of a man who marries a woman richer than, himself. It may be a quite unjustifiable feeling, but it is there. A man who marries a woman richer than himself always lays himself open to the suspicion, at least, of marrying for money — that is a suspicion to which it is iiot pleasant to be subject. That is one reason, then, and a very substantial one, why women do not as a rule ask men to marry them, and why the woman who does is thought a somewhat "forward," if not a positively shameless person. Marriage is largely an economic contract, and the man is, economically, the predominant partner. Of course, there are other ways of mak-> ing a request than putting it in words, and of those other ways women do avail themselves, as everybody knows. But, then, there are lots of things you are allowed to do if only you don't talk about them. There are a good many economists and watchers of the way things are moving who hold that property is slowly passing from tbe hands of men into the hands of women, and that there will come a day when the present economic position of the sexes will be reversed, and when women will be th© chief property-owners. Should that day come, I think it likely that you will find that it will be women who will make the advance, in words as well as in looks and deeds, and men who will' glay at being coy. It may not be so, ut I think it will. So far, I have been dealing only with the love declaration which it is intended shall have legal marriage as a consequence. Now, what of the other sort of love declaration, the sort that does not necessarily involve an almost irrevocable contract, an almost irrefragable bond? Here, too, oddly enough as it would seem at first blush, pretty much the same conditions prevail, though not perhaps to quite the same etxent. I 6ay oddly enough, because ■ here the woman is not asking for more than she purposes to give; on the contrary, she is giving rather more than she purposes to ask or has any chance of getting. Love outside the marriage bond is a pretty serious thing for a woman. It always means risk; it often means wreckage. To a man that sort of love is little more than a pleasant episode. It is of his life " a thing apart," as Byron has it. Yet the woman who tells a man (where marriage is for one reason or another out of the question)

illß-111-li_-_-_-__i-___iß__^________H___M_-B-___HB-B-_l that she loves him, who makes the advance, i. held by society to be little better than a " baggage," while the man who makes love to his neighbour's wife, or to any woman whom he cannot make his own wife, incurs no sort of social penalty whatever.