The Marriage Age for Girls : Part 4

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 17 of 26)

It is also the case that large numbers of infants lose their lives during, or shortly after, birth, owing to causes inherent in the conditions of birth, and practically beyond any but the most expert control. In many cases no skill will save the child. A considerable preponderance of the victims are of the male gender, so that there i. Therefore early begun that process of higher male mortality, which is the chief cause of the female preponderance that is so injurious to womanhood and to society. Therefore many and weighty reasons, individual and social - reasons in the present generation and in the next - which conduce to the importance of discovering the best age for marriage from the physical point of view.

We may probably accept the long-standing figures of Dr. Matthews Duncan, one of Edinburgh's many famous obstetricians, who found that the mortality rate in childbirth, or as a consequence of it, was lowest among women from twenty to twenty-four years of age. Therefore it may safely be said that, on the average, and looking at the question, for the present, solely from this point of view, a girl of twenty-one to twenty-two is by no means too young to marry. Of course it would be monstrously absurd to take such a statement as this and regard it as conclusive, even had it been communicated from on high, for any particular case; but as an average statement it may be confidently put forward.

At this age, the all-important bones of the pelvis have reached all the development of which they are capable. This may be accepted, notwithstanding the fact that, especially in men, the growth of the long bones of the limbs continues to a considerably later age. Women reach maturity sooner than men, and the pelvis reaches its full capacity at the age stated. Obstetricians know further that if motherhood be begun at a considerably later date, there is less local adaptability than when the bones and ligaments are younger. The point lies in the date of the beginning of motherhood, for this is in general a conspicuous instance of the adage that the first step is the most costly.

Psychical Fitness for Marriage. - At the beginning of this chapter it was insisted that we must carefully distinguish between physical or physiological fitness for mating and complete fitness for marriage - which, though it includes mating, is vastly more. Few will question the proposition that physical fitness for marriage is reached only some years after puberty; so complete psychical fitness for marriage may well be later still. We should. Therefore have a second disharmony superposed upon the first. But, instead, when we look round us, we may often be inclined to ask whether, for many girls and women, the age of psychical fitness for marriage is ever reached at all; and we have to ask ourselves how far this delay or indefinite postponement of such fitness is due to natural conditions, or how far it is due to the fact that we bring up our girls to be, for instance, sideboard ornaments, as Ruskin said a generation ago.

I believe that this disparity between the age of physical fitness for marriage and the attainment of that outlook upon life and its duties, without which marriage must be so perilous, is one of the most important practical problems of our time, and that its solution is to be found in the principle of education for parenthood, which we have already considered at such length. It is a most serious matter that marriage should be delayed as it is beyond the best age for the commencement of motherhood; it is injurious to the individual and her motherhood, and whether delay occurs, as it does, disproportionately in different cases, or disproportionately within a nation, in the different classes of which it is composed, the consequences, as we have seen, are of the most stupendous possible kind.

Yet observe what a difficulty we are faced with. Perceiving the injurious consequences of delay in marriage - consequences which, as we have seen, if considered only as they show themselves in the most horrible department of pathology, would be sufficient to demand the most urgent consideration - we may almost feel inclined to agree with the utterly blind and deplorable doctrine too common amongst parents and schoolmistresses, who should know so much better, that it is good to see the young things falling in love, and that the sooner they are married the better. Every one whose eyes are open knows how often the consequences of such teaching and practice are disastrous; and if there is anything which we should discourage in our present study, it is that marriage in haste and repentance at leisure to which these blind guides so often lead their blind victims.

Very different, however, will the case be when the victims are no longer blind. The condemnation of their blind guides at the present time is not that they regard it as right and healthy that young people should mate in their early twenties, but it is that by every means in their power, positive and negative, these blind guides have striven to prevent the light from reaching their victim's eyes. The day is coming, however, when the principles of education for parenthood - for which, if for anything, this book is a plea - will be accepted and practiced, and then the case will be very different.

Convinced though I certainly am of the vast importance of nature or heredity in the human constitution, I am not one of those eugenicists who, to the grave injury of their cause, declare that there are no such things as nurture and education, in that they effect nothing; nor do I believe it in any way inherently necessary that perhaps ten years after puberty a girl should still be irresponsible in those matters which, incomparably beyond all others, demand responsibility; or incapable, with wise help or even without it, of guiding her course aright. It is we, as I repeat for the thousandth time, who are to blame, for our deliberate, systematic, and disastrous folly in scrupulously excluding from her education that for which the whole of education, of any other kind, should be regarded as the preparation.

No one can attach more than its due importance to woman's function of choosing the fathers of the future; rejecting the unworthy and selecting the worthy for this greatest of human duties. It would be a most serious difficulty for those who hold such a creed if it were that a girl's taste and judgment could be trusted, if at all, only some years after she had reached physical maturity for motherhood. It may be that in the present conditions of girls' education, such right direction of this choice as occurs, is just as likely to occur at the earlier age as at any later one, when indeed it may happen that considerations more worldly and prudential, less generally natural and eugenic, may come to have greater weight. One can, therefore, only leave it to the reader's consideration whether it is not high time that we should so seek to prepare the girl's mind, that when her body Is ready for marriage her mind may, if possible, be ready also to guide her towards a worthy choice which the whole of her future life may ratify, and the life of her descendants thereafter.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.