A proof that "women will not always be wives and mothers above all things else," is to be found in the story of the women who have engaged in intrigue from the days of ancient Egypt. A woman State senator-elect says: "I am a Mormon, and believe in polygamy." The organizations that are first to proclaim the so-called freedom of woman from the marriage bond, are the same that would repudiate all government, human and divine.
But man has no more set the bounds of woman's life than woman has set those of man's. It is false to say that man has "usurped the prerogative of Jehovah," in assigning her a sphere of action. He has assigned neither her sphere nor his own. Their spheres have been worked out from the conditions that made them male and female. The ideal that faith could picture was presented in the Old Testament, and when Christ said, "For the hardness of your hearts Moses commanded to write a bill of divorcement, but in the beginning it was not so," he spoke the ultimate word. Save for adultery, the family was not to be broken, and the laws of modern life, which grow freer in every other respect, are approaching nearer to this model as society progresses, and most rapidly so in the most progressive states.
There is a fine bit of unconscious humor in Miss Anthony's remark that "Woman must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all." Man is at present blinded by the belief that he must proffer marriage as woman will accept it, or not at all. Society has lodged with her what Mrs. Stanton calls "only the veto power." Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton apparently wish the women to do the proffering, the accepting, and the rejecting. With so insignificant a part assigned him, it would seem a pity that there should be a sort of necessity for man to play in the marriage role at all. When Suffrage leaders have so arranged matters that the bride retains her maiden name, she can spend her summers in Europe and her winters in Florida, while her husband works all the year round in New York to support her, without her being subjected to the mortification of seeming to desert the man whose name she bears.
You cannot teach this untruth to the girl without teaching it to the boy. The struggle of civilization has been to teach that manhood was not the great fact of man's life, and he has learned it through the chivalry and tenderness that appealed to and developed his higher nature. But if once he understands that woman does not hold herself in need of his chivalry and tenderness, the husbandhood and fatherhood that now bind him to one sacred vow of married love, and tame the savage within him, will not long prevent him from seeing his own advantage in the new order.