The Pittsburgh Press (June 10, 1941)
CANDIDLY SPEAKING —
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Viewpoint important in martial success
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By Maxime Garrison
Woman’s sole use is to bear children. You bore me an heir and that’s all I want or expect of you…
The marriage institution is a fraud. It is a device to shackle a man to a woman he is tired of. It is a plan to legitimize offspring and provide for their support.
No man is literally true to a woman and should not be. His nature is different. Modern women are no use to themselves or their husbands. Today’s women have a lesson to learn which means that first attention should be given to their children. They should respect their husbands and should not pry into a man’s affairs.
There, in the words of Capt. Sir Herbert Paul Latham, recently divorced, lies a good indication of why it is so often said that the trouble is not with marriage but with the people who enter into it.
If people who hold such views about marriage still insist on getting married, they’re a cinch to wind up in the divorce court, wondering what hit them.
Is wife a chattel?
Is the wife’s only function that of bearing children? By that rough-hewn primitive theory, a wife becomes chattel, devoid of personality. It denied the rights of the individual personality. And neither husband nor wife can be in the least happy if he considers her a useless creature except in the bearing of children.
Is marriage a fraud, merely a device to shackle a man to a woman of whom he has tired? The man who believes that should never marry, and has no right to complain if he does get hooked. For he resents marriage, and if he thinks it a trap, then it becomes one in truth.
Marriage is not a fraud or a trick to a husband and wife who married in the belief that life together would be better than life apart, and who have built for themselves companionship and a real home. In this instance, thinking makes it so.
Are men bound by nature to be untrue, and therefore not subject to moral laws? Well, it makes a nice, easy alibi for the boys, but that is about the best that can be said of that notion.
Just point of view
So modern women are no use to themselves or their husbands? That depends on the point of view. Women are not the vaporous, clinging creatures they once were, economic circumstances permitting. Nor are they as a rule the work-horses they used to be when housework was all laborious.
But women are better companions today than ever, in conversation, in sports, in general understanding. They are competent in business and in the home.They can take care of themselves and keep in step with their husbands.
They don’t give first attention to their children? Well, they don’t lock themselves into the nursery for keeps, if that’s what the gentleman means. They respect both their own and their children’s rights as individuals, and they are learning to teach their children how to live rather than to try to protect them from life.
The key to this whole attitude seems to lie in:
They should not pry into a man’s affairs.
The gentleman wants to go the whole hog in having his own way, wants no restrictions on the satisfying of his selfishness, wants to be the complete master. He’s not complaining about marriage or about women… he’s complaining because he has found that life itself prevents him living completely to himself and by his own rules, without admitting a certain responsibility to other people around him.