Democracy in America: The Young Woman in the Character of Wife 11-4-2010

 Chapter X, THE YOUNG WOMAN IN THE CHARACTER OF A WIFE, is another chapter would be thin has meat worth savoring.

Think closely over this paragraph those of you who think the divorce rate is too high in this country. I had twenty-two years of divorce cases, one marriage of my own, and have long thought the critics looked at the wrong end of the problem.

But no American woman falls into the toils of matrimony as into a snare held out to her simplicity and ignorance. She has been taught beforehand what is expected of her and voluntarily and freely enters upon this engagement. She supports her new condition with courage because she chose it. As in America paternal discipline is very relaxed and the conjugal tie very strict, a young woman does not contract the latter without considerable circumspection and apprehension. Precocious marriages are rare. American women do not marry until their understandings are exercised and ripened, whereas in other countries most women generally begin to exercise and ripen their understandings only after marriage.

Combining harsh divorce laws with the modern mentality will make marriage more unpalatable. Removing the idiocy behind the idea that marriage is both expected and easy will go far to making marriage more durable. I had a fiancée walk away from me because I did not buy her a ring as quickly as she liked, and my wife demanded marriage by a certain date. We would have all been better served with more patience, more thought. 

...When the time for choosing a husband arrives, that cold and stern reasoning power
which has been educated and invigorated by the free observation of the world teaches an American woman that a spirit of levity and independence in the bonds of marriage is a constant subject of annoyance, not of pleasure; it tells her that the amusements of the girl cannot become the recreations of the wife, and that the sources of a married woman's happiness are in the home of her husband....

The conservatives blame the feminists and the feminists fire upon the conservatives. The conservatives' claims for the divorce rate all are faddish when the problems have long existed in every sort of country. Reading Lawrence Friedman's History of American Law will show how little new there is to what shocks the conservatives. But the feminists need to ask themselves if marriage is to work, how do they get both parties beyond the amusements to the business of marriage?

Can we truly sustain the idea of anything goes on a mass scale?

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