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Unit 21: Harriet Martineau-On Marriage: Introduction and Detailed Study

of the greater number of women are not secure of a maintenance from the lords of the soil, any more Notes
than women are from being married. The charge of their own maintenance is thrown upon large
numbers of women, without the requisite variety of employments having been opened to them, or
the needful education imparted. A natural consequence of this is, that women are educated to
consider marriage the one object in life, and therefore to be extremely impatient to secure it. The
unfavourable influence of these results upon the happiness of domestic life may be seen at a glance.
This may be considered the sum and substance of female education in England; and the case is
scarcely better in France, though the independence and practical efficiency of women there are
greater than in any other country. The women in the United States are in a lower condition than
either, though there is less striving after marriage, from its greater frequency, and little restriction
is imposed upon the book-learning which women may obtain. But the old feudal notions about the
sex flourish there, while they are going out in the more advanced countries of Europe; and these
notions, in reality, regulate the condition of women. American women generally are treated in no
degree as equals, but with a kind of superstitious outward observance, which, as they have done
nothing to earn it, is false and hurtful. Coexisting with this, there is an extreme difficulty in a
woman’s obtaining a maintenance, except by the exercise of some rare powers. In a country where
women are brought up to be indulged wives, there is no hope, help, or prospect for such as have
not money and are not married.
In America, women can earn a maintenance only by teaching, sewing, employment in factories,
keeping boarding-houses, and domestic service. Some governesses are tolerably well paid,—
comparing their earnings with those of men. Employment in factories, and domestic service, are
well paid. Sewing is so wretched an occupation everywhere, that it is to be hoped that machinery
will soon supersede the use of human fingers in a labour so unprofitable. In Boston, Massachusetts,
a woman is paid nine pence (sixpence English) for making a shirt. In England, besides these
occupations, others are opening; and, what is of yet greater consequence, the public mind is
awakening to the necessity of enlarging the sphere of female industry. Some of the inferior branches
of the fine arts have lately offered profitable employment to many women. The commercial adversity
to which the country has been exposed from time to time, has been of service to the sex, by
throwing hundreds and thousands of them upon their own resources, and thus impelling them to
urge claims and show powers which are more respected every day. In France this is yet more
conspicuously the case. There, women are shopkeepers, merchants, professional accountants, editors
of newspapers, and employed in many other ways, unexampled elsewhere, but natural and
respectable enough on the spot.
Domestic morals are affected in two principal respects by these differences. Where feminine
occupations of a profitable nature are few, and therefore overstocked, and therefore yielding a
scanty maintenance with difficulty, there is the strongest temptation to prefer luxury with infamy
to hardship with unrecognized honour. Hence arises much of the corruption of cities,—less in the
United States than in Europe, from the prevalence of marriage,—but awful in extent everywhere.
Where vice is made to appear the interest of large classes of women, the observer may be quite
sure that domestic morals will be found impure. If he can meet with any society where the objects
of life are as various and as freely open to women as to men, there he may be sure of finding the
greatest amount of domestic purity and peace; for, if women were not helpless, men would find
it far less easy to be vicious.
The other way in which domestic morals are affected by the scope which is allowed to the powers
of women, is through the views of marriage which are induced. Marriage is debased by being
considered the one worldly object in life,—that on which maintenance, consequence, and power
depend. Where the husband marries for connexion, fortune, or an heir to his estate, and the wife
for an establishment, for consequence, or influence, there is no foundation for high domestic
morals and lasting peace; and in a country where marriage is made the single aim of all women,
there is no security against the influence of some of these motives even in the simplest and purest
cases of attachment. The sordidness is infused from the earliest years; the taint is in the mind
before the attachment begins, before the objects meet; and the evil effects upon the marriage state
are incalculable.

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