The little hands-did they not clutch her heart?
The guarding arms-was she not very tired?
Was it an easy thing to walk apart,
Unresting, undesired?

She gave away her crown of woman-praise,
Her gentleness and silent girlhood grace
To be a merriment for idle days,

Scorn for the market-place:

She strove for an unvisioned, far-off good,
For one far hope she knew she would not see:
These not her daughters-crowned with mother-
hood,

And love and beauty-free.

Postponing Marriage

By Ethel Maud Colquhoun

(See page 172)

A very important question in this connection is whether, in promising fidelity to one woman, a lover is really undertaking more than he can perform. When he postpones marriage to the latest possible moment man is certainly not offering to his bride that gift of a life-long devotion which is part of the ideal of true love.

Marriage of the "Friends"

By Lucretia Mott

(One of the early leaders in the Woman Suffrage, Anti-Slavery, and other progressive movements of her time. A member of the Society of Friends a Quaker. The following is from a letter written in 1869 to Josephine Butler, of England.)

In the Marriage union, no ministerial or other official aid is required to consecrate or legalize the bond. After due care in making known their intentions, the parties, in presence of their friends, announce their covenant, with pledge of fidelity and affection, invoking Divine aid for its faithful fulfilment. There is no assumed authority or admitted inferiority, no promise of obedience. Their independence is equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal. This of course has had its influence on married life and the welfare of families. The permanence and happiness of the conjugal relation among us have ever borne a favorable comparison with those of other denominations.

The Love That Pales

By Mary Wollstonecraft

1759-1797

(See page 121)

Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment provision should be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation. But Rousseau, and most of the male writers who have followed his steps, have warmly inculcated that the whole

tendency of female education ought to be directed to one point-to render them pleasing.

Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion who have any knowledge of human nature. Do they imagine that marriage can eradicate the habitude of life? The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties? Or is it not more rational to expect that she will try to please other men, and, in the emotions raised by the expectations of new conquests, endeavor to forget the mortificaton her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover, and the time will inevitably come, her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps the most evanescent of all passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity.

When Marriage Meant Bondage
By Lucy Stone

(Probably the most brilliant and effective of the early woman suffrage orators. Is said to have possessed a beautiful speaking voice, and great personal charm. The founder, with her husband, Henry Blackwell, of "The Woman's Journal." From "Susan B. Anthony, Her Life and Work.")

The common law, which regulates the relation of husband and wife, and is modified only in a few instances by the statutes, gives the "custody" of the

wife's person to the husband, so that he has a right to her even against herself. It gives him her earnings, no matter with what weariness they have been acquired, or how greatly she may need them for herself or her children. It gives him a right to her personal property which he may will away from her, also the use of her real estate, and in some of the states, married women, insane persons and idiots are ranked together as not fit to make a will; so that she is left with only one right, which she enjoys in common with the pauper, the right of maintenance. Indeed, when she has taken the sacred marriage vows, her legal existence ceases.

A Possible Utopia

By Josephine Pitcairn Knowles

(From "The Upholstered Cage.'')

Nothing is permanent, there is going on always a continual shuffling of the cards of public opinion; trends of thought, standards of conduct come and go; and so when the day comes that women are more economically independent, then they will go on strike and sweep away all the unworthy suitors and declare that they will only mate with the physically and mentally sound, and then all considerations but love and respect will go by the board. This will appear but a distant and unrealizable Utopia to many who read this; nevertheless it will happen; all changes seem incredible from the distance, but when they crystallize themselves in fact nothing appears more natural or suitable. Every prophecy since the com

mencement of history has been scouted in its first inception, but when in time it has fulfilled itself it is seen to be the very thing awaited, natural and obvious, and a direct result of the past sequence of

events.

Marriage and the Labor Market
By M. Carey Thomas

(See page 10)

Recent investigations of the after lives of college women and of their sisters who have not been to college have shown us that only about one-half of the daughters of men of the professional business classes who do not inherit independent fortunes can look forward to marriage. Statistics seem to prove that only fifty per cent. of the women of these classes marry. What are the other fifty per cent. to do except work or starve? Most women of independent means marry because their inherited fortunes enable them to contribute to the support of the family. Women of the working classes marry because they too, can help by their labor to support the family. It is only the dowerless women who are prevented by social usage from engaging in paid work outside the home, or in manual labor inside the home, after marriage, who remain unmarried. All other women are married and at work.

Is it well for the great middle classes of our civilized nations that is, for the classes that are not very poor or very rich, to contain these ever increasing number of celibate men and women? To such a