MR. F. NEWMAN ON THE NEW SOCIAL DANGER.
IF Professor Newman is well informed, which is by no means invariably the case, the cause so long advocated under the name of " Women's Rights " is about to receive a new and an unexpected impetus. Women are about to make men consider their claims. Hitherto the immense majority of men have been enabled to refuse to deal with or even to consider the social arrange- ments denounced as " women's wrongs," on the plea that women themselves allow them to be in great part imaginary. A few men of the enthusiast type, and a few women, too often of the type least attractive to men, and, therefore, least influential with them, have denounced the legal inequality everywhere maintained between the sexes, but the great majority of women have appeared either careless, or acquiescent, or in favour of the existing scheme. They may wish for personal control of their property, but they hand it over with little murmuring to any male relative who wishes to take charge of it; may desire greater liberty, but enforce restrictive etiquettes stronger than any laws legislators would venture to pass ; may wish for a more self-sustaining independence in marriage, but hunger for " proposals " based on a law which denies them a legal individuality. Even the one law they all con- demn, that which gives the father absolute authority over children above seven, a law no woman at heart approves, is never openly attacked, never resisted as, for example, the law authorizing mar- riage with a deceased wife's sister has bean resisted. Women constantly ask at elections whether the candidate believes that the Crystal Palace ought to be opened on Sunday, and are, we have heard, in some places fanatic supporters of the Permissive Bill, but they never ask whether the candidate will give them their share of family power. They in fact, to use an Americanism, let the whole matter " slide " till a proposal like Mr. Mill's for giving them votes is treated more as a jest than a grave assertion of the rights of the most numerous section of the British population. Mr. New- man says all this is to be henceforward altered. Women, he says, if not in England, at least in America, are beginning to act, and that in a way which will very speedily compel statesmen to look into their claims as carefully as if they were men, with actual votes and possible rifles. They threaten in fact if the marriage laws are not relaxed to give up the custom of marriage altogether, as men did once in Rome. The Roman patricians, annoyed by the independence with which the law invested their wives, took to subwives instead, till it became difficult to find legitimate families competent by birth to fill the great pontifical offices. Very severe penalties failed to coerce the rebellious bachelors, until marriage as we understand it became in the Roman world almost an extinct institution. In America, Mr. Newman says, the process is about to be reversed. "From the private informa- tion of Americans, who declare that they state what they know, and that they have in vain tried to convince and dissuade ladies, who have adopted the theory of free love, we are constrained to believe that already in some cities in the North, nay, in accom- plished and pure-hearted circles, free from any perturbations of religious fanaticism, the essential injustice of the marriage laws is driving women to a defiance of them ; and this, though our law of divorce is already beneficially relaxed in many, perhaps most, of the States. A high-minded lady is pleased at the advances of a lover, and consents to become his, provided the marriage be wholly illegal ! because (says she) I have no idea of any union but that of equality. If you love me you cannot wish to make me your inferior, or to exact a promise of obedience, or to get exclusive rights over children ; and much less, to take my pro- perty as yours, except in the same sense in which I take your property as mine ; or to make me essentially independent, and unable to protect myself. The rights given to unmarried women by the law are few enough : it is indeed very unjust to them also: but such as my rights now are, I mean to keep them. I will have nothing to do with a marriage which sacrifices them. Our union must be between our two selves and God ; and we shall love one another all the better, because we do not leteany one else inter- pose.' When we learn from the last census that the United States contain nearly 730,000 more men than women, it is pretty clear that women who are worth having- are sure to be able to prescribe to lovers the conditions on which they will accept them; and if this state of sentiment spread, the marriage law will go out of use in precisely the most spirited and most intellectual part of American society. Nor can anything be reasonably expected to secure us from the evil but a decisive change of the marriage law." Of course, continues Mr. Newman, the moment the better class of women adopt an idea or rather a practice of this kind, the social penalties cease to operate, and they ceasing, an inferior class instantly feels itself free from all restraint. Working women will imitate their more highly placed sisters, the clergy will be powerless, as they usually are against social movements —witness the failure of the Irish priesthood to resist secular education—and in a few years we may find that a great Christian society has given up a fundamental usage. A danger would be upon us to which democracy is a trifle, one which would make the marriage laws the most prominent of political questions. Oddly enough, the danger in the United States is increased by an unexpected revolt among the emancipated slaves, who have never known marriage. The men, it is said, are willing to marry, but the women are not, declaring that they might as well be slaves again ; that they have to obey orders, and give up their wages, and surrender their hold over their children, and they prefer marrying without ceremonials which involve those results. They want, they say, husbands, not masters, precisely the defence made by great numbers of emigrant women at the Cape for marrying Mohammedans. They were "less oppressed," they said, to the intense wrath of the white men, who, we believe, actually petitioned the local Parliament about it. Keen observers have noticed a lurking taint of the same feeling in English villages, where the lot of labourers' wives, who have to do all household work, all nursery work, and a share of field work beside, is some- times cruelly hard, and those who best know the people are often most afraid of touching the Poor Laws, which now undoubtedly support the institution of marriage, with so much as a finger, lest they should suddenly find some bulwark of civilization removed.
It is a formidable account this, and one which, even if exagger- ated, deserves a good deal of attention. It is quite certain that a system of ideas by no means favourable to the existing relation of the sexes is rising up in America, and that it may possibly spread to Great Britain. That is shown by the alterations gradually making in the laws of the separate States, which all tend either to relax the obligation of marriage, as in Illinois, where divorce is as free as in Suabia ; or to diminish the inequality of the husband and wife, as in New York, where every woman stands in the position of an English Queen Consort, is, in fact, as to her property, as independent as her husband. It is also shown by the increasing opinion in favour of female voting, now established in Kansas ; and by the tolerance granted to the " free-love " movement, which, though repudiated by the immense majority of Americans, is not abhorred as it would be in Great Britain. Those ideas, all of which tend to a grand re- modelling of the marriage law, may spread as Mr. Newman i'ma- gines—for American influence in England is considerable, and in Ireland almost incalculable, every family receiving emigrants' let- ters—and may take the forms he fears, till we are face to face with a most dangerous movement. But we cannot see the force of his corrective suggestion. He wants an Act passed declaring that hence- forth no woman shall by marriage lose her legal status or any part of her rights over property. Well, suppose that concession made, to what would it amount ? In the immense majority of cases, to a right to do nothing with nothing, as she pleased. Mr. Newman forgets, as every advocate of women's rights seems to us to forget, the facts with which he has to deal. The immense majority of English women, and men too, have no realized property at all except their clothes, and live on the earnings of the husband or other male head of the family. The abolition of the existing law would not make their position either better or worse, would not in fact alter it any degree for the mass of the people. No doubt such a law would tend to induce women to save and to earn, but how would that relieve their condition ? The devotion of their savings and their earnings to their household and children is obligatory on them, as on men, and their savings and earnings if so devoted would diminish the husbands', not the wives' burden in life. The women would receive less of the men's wages, and would have to toil just as hard, or harder. So far as equality of rights is an idea or even a pride among educated women, the satisfaction of that idea or that pride may tend to increase the readiness to marry, but it would not seriously touch the case of, say, the negro women. Suppose them absolutely free of all laws, and they would still have to feed their children, and obey their partners or quit them—the one privilege which Mr. Newman and almost all Christian moralists distinctly refuse.. What rights would they have against the men which they have not now ? They can punish for assault, sue for maintenance, do in fact more than they could under a system of " freedom," for no lawgiver would compel the man to maintain the woman, yet release the woman from any obligation to maintain the man. What Mr. Newman is really pointing to is a suspension of female labour, the establishment universally of the system- prevalent among English professionals, who with one voice maintain that the out-door labour of life ought to fall upon the husband alone. That might be a most valuable reform, we are inclined to believe it an almost essential one, hope to advance slowly and tentatively towards the legal release of married womerr from out-door labour of any kind, but it is a very different one- from that which Mr. Newman is urging. Even among the edu- cated classes his counsel, though it would relieve many individual miseries, could have little broad effect. If the woman is really mistress of her own she will give it to her husband, and if this is forbidden her, it must be forbidden on his side as well, and the as a whole would lose infinitely more than it gained. The• control of her own person, for which Mr. Newman also, though vaguely, pleads, can be conceded only by conceding right of re- moval from the homestead, which we understand him to refuse ; and as to the children, how can they be cut in two ? The right of con- trolling them must belong to somebody, and if given to the mother alone, the father would have as just ground of complaint as the mother now has. Mr. Newman should not forget, after quoting his Roman example, that it is as possible to disgust men with the- tyranny of marriage as to disgust women, and that the main- tenance difficulty does not stand in their way.
We most cordially admit with Mr. Newman that the condition of labouring women in almost all countries is most unjustly hard, so hard that it ought to be remedied, if need be, by revolutionary- legislation, and we may also admit that our whole system of law- as regards the succession to property is cruelly unfair. Smith has a thousand acres, and two children, John and Jane. Smith breaks his neck, and John is rich, while Jane is a pauper, dependent on his bounty ; where is the defence for that incident, which occurs every day ? Our law of intestacy seems meant expressly to create a class of educated pauper women, and succeeds to a frightful extent in realizing its intention. So, too, it may be doubtful whether the widow gets anything like fair treatment, whether the family ought not to be so far joint that mother and father must both be dead before the children are independent—as in Prussia —but none of these innovations touch the great grievances of those on whose behalf Mr. Newman appeals to the world. It is not any property law, but the existence of a barbarous opinion, which permits wives to labour outside as well as inside the house,. gives them, in fact, with half the strength of men, double their- work, which presses upon the millions of the poor, and cries aloud for abolition. The Trades' Unions are considered fearfully unjust in refusing single women and widows permission to main- tain themselves lest they should reduce wages, but if they would confine their rule to the married, they would do more to lighten the marriage laws than all the American advocates of equality will succeed in accomplishing. We have no objection to remove any grievances in the law of property, if women feel them to be grievances, but it is not by any such change that the lot of the million mothers of Great Britain can be sensibly lightened.
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