On Choosing a Husband : Part 4

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

(Page 19 of 27)

There is another class of cases to which convenient reference may here be made. The solution to be found in childless marriage, for many cases, does not apply to those in which there is present disease due to living organisms, microbes or protozoa which, by the mere act of drinking from an infected cup, by kissing and so forth, may be passed from the sick to the sound. So far as these modes of infection are concerned, such a supposed case as that of the nurse and the consumptive patient who fall in love with each other comes into this category.

But infection of that kind is preventable. In the case, however, of the terrible diseases to which reference has been made in a previous chapter, we must clearly understand that it is not only the future which is in danger, and that therefore the solution of childless marriage does not apply. Here the danger is irremovable from the physical essentia of the marriage itself, and in such a case, no matter how high the personal qualities of the man who may, for instance, have been infected by accident in the course of his duty as a doctor, even childless marriage other than the marriage blanc must be, at any rate, postponed until the disease has been cured.

It is to be hoped that the reader will not regard these last two points, which have had to be dealt with at some length, as irrelevant. They are not strictly part of the general proposition that a girl should marry a man for his personal qualities, but they are surely necessary as practical comments upon that proposition as it will work out in real life. We may now return to our main contention.

In our quotation from Herbert Spencer we may notice the significant assertion that amongst intellectual attractions it is natural faculty, quickness, wit and insight, rather than acquired knowledge, that a man admires in a woman. In considering that point the somewhat hazardous assertion was ventured upon that the woman rates intellectual attractions in the man higher than he does in her. One has indeed heard it stated that a man marries for beauty and a woman for brains. A statement so brief cannot be accurate in such a case. But we may insist upon the contrast between acquired knowledge and natural faculty. Spencer was no doubt right in believing that man values the natural faculty rather than the acquired knowledge. A woman no doubt does so too. If she admires a man for being an encyclopedia, it is only, one hopes, because she admires the natural qualities of studiousness, perseverance and memory which his knowledge involves. Nor would she be long in finding out whether his knowledge is digested, and the capacity to digest it, remember, is a natural faculty.

The reader who remembers our principle that the individual exists for the future will not fail to see what we are driving at. Directly we study in any critical way the causes of attraction among the genders, we see that under healthy conditions, unvitiated by convention or money, it is always the inborn rather than the acquired that counts. If Spencer had cared to pursue his point half a century ago, he had the key to it in his hands. Youth prefers the natural to the acquired qualities.

Nature, greatest of match-makers, has so constructed youth because she is a eugenicist, and because she knows that it is the natural qualities and not the acquired ones which are transmitted to offspring.

And now it may be shown that this fact wholly consorts with our contention that there is no antinomy between the happiness of the individual and the happiness of the race in the marriage choice. For the race it is only the natural qualities of its future parents that matter, for only these are transmissible. From the strictly eugenic point of view, therefore, the girl should be counseled to choose her mate, not merely on the ground of his personal qualities but, more strictly still, on the ground of those personal qualities which are natural and not acquired. And my last point is that these qualities, which are alone of lasting consequence to the race, alone will be of lasting consequence to her during her married life.

Veneers, acquirements, technical facilities, knowledge of languages, encyclopedic information, elegance of speech and even of conventional manners - all the things which, in our rough classification, we may call acquired, may attract or please or impress her for a time, but when the ultimate reckoning is made she will find that they are less than the dust in the balance. I do not know how and where to find for my words the emphasis with which it would be so easy to endow them if, instead of addressing an unseen and strange audience, one were counseling one's own daughter. I should say to her, for instance, "My dear, be not deceived. He dresses elegantly, I know, and makes himself quite nice to look at. Yet it is not his clothes that you will have to live with, but himself; and the question is what do his clothes mean? It is his nature that you will have to live with.

What fact of his nature do they stand for? Is it that he is vain and selfish, preferring to spend his money upon himself and upon the exterior of his person rather than upon others and upon the adornment of his mind; or is it that he has fine natural taste, a sense of beauty and harmony and quiet dignity in external things?" The answer to these questions involves his wife's happiness. How strange that though no girl will marry a man because she is attracted by the elegance of his false teeth, yet she will often be deceived into admiring other things which are just as much acquired and just as little likely to afford her permanent satisfaction as the products of his dentist's work-room! If only she realized that these other things, though nice to look at, are no more himself than a well-fitting dental plate.

Or again: "You like his talk; he strikes you as well versed in human affairs; his knowledge of men and things impresses you; he has traveled and can talk easily of what he has seen, and his voice is elegant and can be heard in many tongues. But if he is going to say bitter things to you, will the facility of his diction make them less bitter? If he is a fool in his heart - and indeed the heart alone is the residence of folly or wisdom - do you think that he will be a fool the less for venting his folly in seven languages rather than in one? I quite understand your admiring his cleverness; people who study the subject tell us, you know, that a woman admires in a man things which are more characteristic of men than of women, and that men's admiration of women is based upon the same good principle.

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