r the principle that the first purpose of
female life is marriage and maternity; and that, for their own sakes
as for the sake of each successive generation, women should be so
trained as to be attractive wives and mothers of healthy children, all
other considerations being subordinated to these. A certain small
number of ladies avail themselves of the legal equality they still
enjoy, and live in the world much as men. But we regard them as
third-rate men in petticoats, hardly as women at all. Marriage with
one of them is the last resource to which a man too idle or too
foolish to earn his own living will betake himself. Whatever their
education, our women have always found that such independence as they
could earn by hard work was less satisfactory than the dependence,
coupled with assured comfort and ease, which they enjoy as the
consorts, playthings, or slaves of the other sex; and they are only
too glad to barter their legal equality for the certainty of
protection, indolence, and permanent support."

"Then your marriages," I said, "are permanent?"

"Not by law," he replied. "Nothing like what our remote ancestors
called marriage is recognised at all. The maidens who come of age each
year sell themselves by a sort of auction, those who purchase them
arranging with the girls themselves the terms on which the latter will
enter their family. Custom has fixed the general conditions which
every girl expects, and which only the least attractive are forced to
forego. They are promised a permanent maintenance from their master's
estate, and promise in return a fixed term of marriage. After two or
three years they are free to rescind the contract; after ten or twelve
they may leave their husbands with a stipulated pension. They receive
an allowance for dress and so forth proportionate to their personal
attractions or to the fancy of the suitor; and of course the richest
men can offer the best terms, and generally secure the most agreeable
wives, in whatever number they please or think they can without
inconvenience support."

"Then," I said, "the women can divorce themselves at pleasure, but the
men cannot dismiss them! This hardly looks like equality."

"The practical result," he answered, "is that men don't care for a
release which would part them from complaisant slaves, and that women
dare not seek a divorce which can only hand them over to another
master on rather worse terms. When the longer term has expired, the