Page:Meta Stern Lilienthal - Women of the Future - 1916.pdf/25

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joy themselves and live with an amount of youthful energy and enthusiasm that is rarely met with in our present enfeebled, over-worked, poverty-stricken world. The haggard faces, anaemic complexions and drooping shoulders that are so prevalent among the working girls of to-day that the average city dweller fails to notice them, will disappear like the white plague and other preventable curses of humanity. Bright eyes, ruddy complexions, and straight, strong bodies will be the inalienable right of youth. We know that health and strength and vigor are not only possible but natural to youth. Young savage women, untouched by the evils of civilization, show it, and the athletic daughters of the propertied classes, spared from the evils of civilization, show it also. The maidens of the future, strong, healthy, active and educated, will be physically and mentally fit for wifehood and motherhood as not one in a hundred is to-day. Eventually every Jill will find her Jack, sooner or later, according to individual needs and circumstances; but economic causes will not retard marriages or prevent those who love one another from joining their lives. Jill will not ask, "Can Jack support me," because she will be fully able to support herself, and Jack will not inquire whether Jill can make good pies—unless pie-making be her trade—because he will be able to get all the pies he wants, even better than "mother used to make." Instead, they will ask themselves seriously, intelligently, questions such as these: "Do we love deeply and truly?" "Are we well mated?" "Is our union likely to endure?" With economic obstacles removed, and with a general diffusion of the health that comes with knowledge and right living, it is very likely that the marriage rate will rise under Socialism, and that people will marry somewhat younger than they do at present. It would be natural and desirable that people should marry as birds mate, in spring time; that is, in the spring time of their lives. What laws will regulate marriage relations, what ceremonies, if any, will initiate them, cannot be foretold and is quite immaterial. The general tendency during modern times has been to simplify laws and to diminish ceremonies, and this tendency is likely to be carried still fur-

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