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Show The Marriage Problem Ey S. HOPKINS ADAMS Autho, ol "Siete." "The Clarion.-"A Clarion.-"A Bench in Out Square," etc. Woman If ill Decide the F uture of Marriage A CENTURY forward Is a much A. longer period than a century back We are covering so much more ground per year than we used to. The Nineteenth century was an easy, logical, jog-trot progress. prog-ress. Toward the end the pace accelerated, ac-celerated, and got pretty lively In the opening years of the Twentieth. Note ice are in a race in which we are sloughing of a lot ol burdensome impedimenta in order to go the faster. Systems go into the discard where before only methods were supplanted. Whether marriage will be among the lot is one of the vital questions. I should say that the women will decide de-cide it. Woman Invented marriage. Nature Na-ture had rather unfairly wished on her all the bothersome features of the job of race perpetuation, and she naturally began to figure how to carry on with the least trouble to herself, her strategy taking form some time before the beginning of history, In a self-protective scheme for stabilizing the home. The simple process of mating became be-came systematized into the complex responsibility of marriage on that dim but profoundly historic day when the first articulate woman announced to die first surprised and disconcerted man: "This is your child as much as mine. Now you go out and hustle grub for the family and see that you get home before dark or some fine evening you'll find the rock in the cave door, the fire in the creek, the bobcat tied to the tree and me and the kid gone home to mother." Arbitrary stuff this; butthedawn-of-civilization lady made good because be-cause there were so few of her that she was In a position to dictate. By and by she got her usual formula formu-la adopted as tribal custom, and from that to the formality and au-. thority of law was an easy . step. Then religion came along and said: "This Is my affair," thereby adding the weight of its power to ban and bless. The question is: Does she want to stay fixed? Consider the fact that for all these cons she has both established and accepted her role as an exclusively child-bearing, house-cleaning house-cleaning mechanism, with, of late centuries, a certain added esthetic rating. But some time in the last century cen-tury a new feminism thrust forth its enlightened (or baleful take your pick head. It entered woman as a contestant In the economic free-for-all stakes and asked no handicap. Universities, doctorates, clans, sects and professions tried to bar her; but, having successfully achieved wifehood a million years or so before, she now made an equal claim to spinsterhood, and established estab-lished it. She now offers the cataclysmic and wholly unhistorical spectacle of the female who frankly does not regard a wedding ring as a halo or the orange blossom as the one authentic au-thentic perfume of paradise. She has other things to think about Which is not intended to mean that she does not think about marriage. mar-riage. She thinks about It Interestedly Inter-estedly and deeply, and I suspect that at the bottom of her thought I am speaking now of the typical modern-minded woman of eighteen to eighty is the surmise as to whether she needs It any longer. To cut loose from It would be a tremendous venture Indeed. To that type of mind which believes that because a thing always has been it always will be such an Innovation In-novation is unthinkable. If we that Is to say, If women-determine women-determine to alter the whole scheme and basis of matrimony between now and the Twenty-first century, they will at least he able to try It without fear of jail or damnation or ostracism. Whether we like it or not, the two sexes are rapidly reaching a common basis of existence, with common standards, though the change Is all on one side. Their daughters, granddaughters and further descendants may carry on the banner or they may revert toward the old femaleness of type One man's guess Is as good as an other's, and any woman's bettet than either. For as woman con trlved, so she can alter or destroy marriage at her will. And. unless nil signs fall, she Is likely to tie 'Me before this busy century Is done. 1 The event Is on the knees of ;he goddesses. I'ul.llc LedKur. Inc.-WNU Service. |