In Darkest England and The Way Out [131]
influence of religious conviction. The conditions of City life, the absence of the enforced companionship of the village and small town, the difficulty of young people finding harmless opportunities of friendly intercourse, all tends to create classes of celibates who are not chaste, and whose irregular and lawless indulgence of a universal instinct is one of the most melancholy features of the present state of society. Nay, so generally is this recognised, that one of the terms by which one of the consequences of this unnatural state of things is popularly known is "the social evil," as if all other social evils were comparatively unworthy of notice in comparison to this.
While I have been busily occupied in working out my Scheme for the registration of labour, it has occurred to me more than once, why could not something like the same plan be adopted in relation to men who want wives and women who want husbands? Marriage is with most people largely a matter or opportunity. Many a man and many a woman, who would, if they had come together, have formed a happy household, are leading at this moment miserable and solitary lives, suffering in body and in soul, in consequence of their exclusion from the natural state of matrimony. Of course, the registration of the unmarried who wish to marry would be a matter of much greater delicacy than the registration of the joiners and stone-masons who wish to obtain work. But the thing is not impossible. I have repeatedly found in my experience that many a man and many a woman would only be too glad to have a friendly hint as to where they might prosecute their attentions or from which they might receive proposals. In connection with such an agency, if it were established--for I am mot engaging to undertake this task-- I am only throwing out a possible suggestion as to the development in the direction of meeting a much needed want, there might be added training homes for matrimony. My heart bleeds for many a young couple whom I see launching out into the sea of matrimony with no housewifery experience. The young girls who leave our public elementary schools and go out into factories have never been trained to home duties, and yet, when taken to wife, are unreasonably expected to fill worthily the difficult positions of the head of a household and the mother of a family. A month spent before marriage in a training home of housewifery would conduce much more to the happiness of the married life than the honeymoon which immediately follows it.
Especially is this the case with those who marry to go abroad and settle in a distant country. I often marvel when I think of the utter helplessness of the modern woman, compared with the handiness of her grandmother. How many of our girls can even bake a loaf? The baker has killed out one of our fundamental domestic arts. But if you are in the Backwoods or in the Prairie or in the Bush, no baker's cart comes round every morning with the new-made bread, and I have often thought with sorrow of the kind of stuff which this poor wife must serve up to her hungry husband. As it is with baking, so it is with washing, with milking, with spinning, with all the arts and sciences of the household, which were formerly taught, as a matter of course, to all the daughters who were born in the world. Talk about woman's rights, one of the first of woman's rights is to be trained to her trade, to be queen of her household, and mother of her children.
Speaking of colonists leads me to the suggestion whether something could not be done to supply, on a well-organised system, the thousands of bachelor miners or the vast host of unmarried males who are struggling with the wilderness on the outskirts of civilisation, with capable wives from the overplus of marriageable females who abound in our great towns. Woman supplied in adequate quantities is the great moraliser of Society, but woman doled out as she is in the Far West and the Australian bush, in the proportion of one woman to about a dozen men, is a fertile source of vice and crime. Here
While I have been busily occupied in working out my Scheme for the registration of labour, it has occurred to me more than once, why could not something like the same plan be adopted in relation to men who want wives and women who want husbands? Marriage is with most people largely a matter or opportunity. Many a man and many a woman, who would, if they had come together, have formed a happy household, are leading at this moment miserable and solitary lives, suffering in body and in soul, in consequence of their exclusion from the natural state of matrimony. Of course, the registration of the unmarried who wish to marry would be a matter of much greater delicacy than the registration of the joiners and stone-masons who wish to obtain work. But the thing is not impossible. I have repeatedly found in my experience that many a man and many a woman would only be too glad to have a friendly hint as to where they might prosecute their attentions or from which they might receive proposals. In connection with such an agency, if it were established--for I am mot engaging to undertake this task-- I am only throwing out a possible suggestion as to the development in the direction of meeting a much needed want, there might be added training homes for matrimony. My heart bleeds for many a young couple whom I see launching out into the sea of matrimony with no housewifery experience. The young girls who leave our public elementary schools and go out into factories have never been trained to home duties, and yet, when taken to wife, are unreasonably expected to fill worthily the difficult positions of the head of a household and the mother of a family. A month spent before marriage in a training home of housewifery would conduce much more to the happiness of the married life than the honeymoon which immediately follows it.
Especially is this the case with those who marry to go abroad and settle in a distant country. I often marvel when I think of the utter helplessness of the modern woman, compared with the handiness of her grandmother. How many of our girls can even bake a loaf? The baker has killed out one of our fundamental domestic arts. But if you are in the Backwoods or in the Prairie or in the Bush, no baker's cart comes round every morning with the new-made bread, and I have often thought with sorrow of the kind of stuff which this poor wife must serve up to her hungry husband. As it is with baking, so it is with washing, with milking, with spinning, with all the arts and sciences of the household, which were formerly taught, as a matter of course, to all the daughters who were born in the world. Talk about woman's rights, one of the first of woman's rights is to be trained to her trade, to be queen of her household, and mother of her children.
Speaking of colonists leads me to the suggestion whether something could not be done to supply, on a well-organised system, the thousands of bachelor miners or the vast host of unmarried males who are struggling with the wilderness on the outskirts of civilisation, with capable wives from the overplus of marriageable females who abound in our great towns. Woman supplied in adequate quantities is the great moraliser of Society, but woman doled out as she is in the Far West and the Australian bush, in the proportion of one woman to about a dozen men, is a fertile source of vice and crime. Here