Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/261

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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE
253

reverse of cheap; and that point appears to have been reached in a good many existing homes.

There is, it seems to me, another respect in which man, as well as woman, would eventually be the gainer by the recognition of woman's right to humanity on her own account. The custom of regarding one half of the race as sent into the world to excite desire in the other half does not appear to be of real advantage to either moiety, in that it has produced the over-sexed man and the over-sexed woman, the attitude of mind which sneers at self-control. Such an attitude the establishment of marriage for woman upon a purely voluntary basis ought to go far to correct; since it is hardly conceivable that women, who have other careers open to them and by whom ignorance is no longer esteemed as a merit, will consent to run quite unnecessary risks from which their unmarried sisters are exempt. When the intending wife and mother no longer considers it her duty to be innocent and complacent, the intending husband and father will learn, from sheer necessity, to see more virtue in self-restraint. With results beneficial to the race—and incidentally to himself. Humanity would