The Marriage Age for Girls : Part 5

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

(Page 18 of 26)

It must be insisted again that this question has many ramifications, and that not the least important of them are those which concern themselves with the kinds of disease already referred to. Some enemy of God and man once invented a phrase about the desirability of young men sowing their wild oats, and subsequent enemies of life and the good and progress, or perhaps mere fools, animated gramophones of a cheap pattern, have repeated and still propagate that doctrine. It is poisonous to its core; it never did any one any good, and has done incalculable harm. It has blinded the eyes of hundreds of thousands of babies; it has brought hundreds of thousands more rotten into the world. Hosts of dead men, women, and children are its victims. It is indeed good that a man should be a man, and not a worm on stilts; it is indeed good that women should prefer men to be men, and that as soon as possible they should cease to accept in marriage the feeble, the cowardly, the echoers, and the sheep.

But this is a very different thing from asserting that it is good for young men, before marriage, to adopt a standard of morality which would be thought shameful beyond words in their sisters, and which has all the horrible consequences that have been alluded to, and many more. Now, vicious though the wild oats doctrine be in itself and in its consequences, we have to grant that there is little need of it, for young manhood needs the insertion of no doctrines from without to encourage it towards the satisfaction of what are in themselves natural and healthy tendencies. Our right procedure therefore should be - notwithstanding the unhealthy tendency of high civilization in this respect, and notwithstanding the terrible folly, traitorous to their gender, of those women who decry marriage, and seek to delay it - to prepare girlhood and public opinion, and even to modify, so far as may be necessary, economic conditions, in order that the girls who are worthy to marry at all should do so at the right age, and should join themselves for life with rightly chosen men.

One more point may be conveniently considered here, though it is not strictly a matter of the marriage age for girls. The point is as to the most generally desirable age relation between husband and wife. Here, again, we must remind ourselves that it is impossible to lay down the law for any case, and that that is not what we are now attempting to do.

As every one knows, there is an average disparity of some few years in the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more precocious. Therefore though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she is as mature.

It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment.

It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence upon the gender or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many more consequences.

We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives, it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his seniority - contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.

We therefore see that, as might have been expected, this question of the age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First, for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic position of woman in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked.

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