MISS COBBE ON HUSBANDS AND WIVES.
THE Women are turning the tables on us with a vengeance. It is scarcely a month since legislators were quoting with approval Mr. Lowe's argument that to punish a woman for becoming a wife with the confiscation of her property was incon- sistent and absurd, and now we are actually compelled to employ the same reasoning for the protection of men who become hus- bands. Among the hundreds of women who are now fighting with their pens for the " rights " of the sex, pecuniary and other, Miss Cobbe has always proved herself one of the most sensible and moderate, and therefore most influential. She does not assert, with most American writers on the subject, that all men are bad and all women good, though she asserts very truly that women are superior in the negative virtues. She expresses in her latest essay very great doubts about the intellectual equality of the sexes, and though she is very contemptuous of rich men for marrying dancers and singers, and leaving painters, novelists, and sculptors unsought, she would probably not propose a law compelling men to be wise. Yet she is so carried away by her enthusiasm against tyranny, that in the very essay in the July number of the Theological Review in which she makes these admissions, which will be considered so treacherous by her " advanced " friends, she proposes that the offence of being a husband shall be punished by confiscation of property. She cannot see, she says, why there should be a law making the husband ruler in his own house. There is no such law when brother and sister keep house together, or two friends, who may, moreover, have the joint charge of children, and why should a law be needful to regulate the relations
of husband and wife?
"Many matrimonial principles are very mysterious to the celibate mind, but none of them more puzzling than this : What is the force of this common-place about the necessity of a ruler in a house where two people happen to live as man and wife? We are poor outsiders, but we have always fondly believed that wedded love' was a sort of glorified friendship. We read in our Prayer-Books with awe, if not with envy, of ' Holy' Matrimony, and of all the pretty things which M. and N. promise to do and be to one another. Judging from the mere old- bachelor or old-maid point of view, we should at least have taken it for granted that the aforesaid 31. and N. would find it at least as easy to live in unity and godly love ' as Mr. A. and his sister Miss B., or the two sisters C., or the two friends D. and E., or the two heads of that flourishing firm Messrs. F. and G. None of those good people, male or female, are in the habit of calling on Jupiter to get their wheels out of the mud when they happen to stick in it. The law settles none of their terms of agreement ; but somehow they manage to rub on, and their houses do not tumble down in the apocalyptic manner threatened to married couples in consequence of being divided against themselves. Nothing is more common in such cases than for the partnership to be complicated by the joint charge of children. But even then, we do not hear of those fearful wars and disasters always prophesied in similar cases for married people unless the husband be invested with absolute authority. Can the truth be—we tremble to write it, but we must expose the depth of our difficulty—can it be that after all, marriage is not so very—well, not such entirely and perfectly delightful a yoke as we have been always in formed ? "
A funnier example of the difficulty women are said to find in being logical we never remember to have seen. Brother and sister or two friends can live together without law, because the social system does not require them to live together at all, because they can part at discretion, which is just what hus- band and wife cannot do. If they could, then, indeed, no law would be necessary, for in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, or rather in all but a few cases, the husband, being the bread-win- ner, would have absolute power, would in the event of disobedience be able to dismiss his wife as he would dismiss a servant,—a power very much greater than any he now possesses. The object for which the law is maintained,—we admit that originally it grew up partly out of a religious idea, and partly out of that source of most laws, the right of the strouger,—is not to oppress the woman ; but to prevent quarrels from being settled by physical force, by deciding beforehand which of the two is to have the casting-vote. One must have it, and there exist two reasons at least, of the kind which weigh with statesmen, for settling that it should not be the wife. One is, that if it were not so settled men would give up marriage, as they did in the Roman Empire, to the indefinite injury of civilization. It may be said that Christianity has prevented such a possibility, and that is true of the class with whom Christianity truly weighs ; but statesmen have to think of the mass of mankind, and with the mass of man- kind Christianity has, upon this point, exercised but very little appreciable weight, certainly not sufficient to make them consent to an inversion of the natural rule of the stronger. All women very naturally say that rule is a bad one, and so it may be ; but then clearly Providence is of a different opinion, and when the laws of nature were made, neither weak nor strong had votes. The second reason is the one to which we at first referred, that a man, even if he is a husband, has a right to his own. It is a very brutal argument, perhaps, but still most truths have their brutal side ; and brutal or not, it is true that if the husband supports the house, he has a right to control the house, a right which exists quite as fully in the case of a sister or a friend as of a wife, and is much more easily enforced. Miss Cobbe says the wife should rule inside, and the husband outside, and that the neglect of this rule is the cause of that aggressiveness in women of which weak men complain. " Now that a woman," she says, " has no independent 'sphere,' not even her larder or linen closet, in which her spouse may not poke his nose, what can be expected of her but to retaliate by meddling in her hus- band's departments?" Why shouldn't he "poke his nose" into his own larder? He has to fill it, and surely that is some justifica- tion for his impudence in venturing to inquire whether it is full or well managed. As a matter of fact, the man who does inquire, except through his wife, is usually a finicking fool, who does not understand the value of perspective in the business of life ; but that is no reason for depriving him of his rights, which we beg to assure Miss Cobbe are not law-made, but nature-made, insomuch that without them the inducement to toil would cease. Take any conceivable view of property, and still the right of the man who creates it is better than the right of any individual who didn't. The crop may not belong more to Smith, who grew it, than to the State, which enables him to grow it, but it belongs more to Smith than to any individual Brown. Miss Cobbe says :—" If the husband have a crotchet about baby's pinafores, the wife has no right to say, Mind your own affairs !' " Yes, she has the right, only the pinafore, for which the husband pays, and which is to be worn by the child, who is half, at all events, his, happens to be one of his own affairs, and one of the . affairs, moreover, which it is his absolute duty to look after. Did it ever occur to Miss Cobbe that a man who did not look after his children's needs, say in the way of pinafores, if the pinafores seem to him insufficient or too tight, would be guilty of a very grave dereliction of duty ? Miss Cobbe seems to think that if a father knew that his children were, for example, in- judiciously fed, it would be his duty to leave his wife " a field for her independent will," and let the little ones take the conse- quences of his neglect. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that is the best thing he can do for his babies, but then it is just by the one unusual case that duty and law must be tested. Oddly enough, the great grievance of the American advocates of women's rights is that the fathers won't interfere enough about their babies, and one of them last year encountered much ridicule in Eng- land for saying that fathers were cruelly selfish in avoiding the annoyance caused by " the obviousness of their children." Even the extreme case which Miss Cobbe quotes tells mainly against herself :—" A wiseacre we have heard of (a wealthy gentleman), ordained that his children till two years old should wear no clothes whatever, and should sleep at night, like so many chrysalises, in boxes filled with bran. The poor wife remonstrated in vain, as her infants pined and shivered out of the bran into their graves. The sublime law of England left the question of their little shirts to be decided beyond appeal by the sage to whom they exclusively belonged." He was a fool, very likely, though his view has been held by men of much eminence ; but surely there is a possi- bility of a woman having some similar crotchet about her children, and in that case what is the man to do ? Leave the children to shiver, says Miss Cobbe, or, at all events, that is the deduction from her teaching. That is a conceivable course, but why is it any more just than the present arrangement, under which the mother leaves them to shiver instead ? The underlying thought in her mind, of course, is that the mother will never make a mistake about her children, or, at all events, that the balance of chances is immeasurably in her favour ; and if women and men were all equally educated,we should agree with her ; but that is absolutely untrue of the masses, and very often untrue of the well-to-do. A few years ago there was a perfect mania among mothers in very good position for forcing their babies to " tub" in ice-cold water, under the notion that it " hardened " them, and their husbands, who, if they knew nothing of babies, knew something of hygiene, had constantly to interfere. We have ourselves heard that notion earnestly pressed with as much faith as if the panacea had been revealed from Heaven, in cases where the advice, if taken, would have involved certain death. Would not the husbands of those enthusiasts have had not only a right, but an obligation, to remonstrate ?
But Miss Cobbe will reply, even admitting that fathers have some duties, and ought, therefore, to have corresponding powers, —a duty involving a power, or ceasing to be a duty,—the mother has duties too, and ought therefore to have powers. Why should not the ownership in children be held in common? Just because it cannot be, because Providence did not make children divisible property. The Legislature might give the girls to the mother and the boys to the father,—as the Catholic Church, in its in- tervals of tolerance for mixed marriages, always has done,—or it might make a division by age, as our own law in some cases does, —the custody of children under two years old being assigned to the mother,—but it is impossible to make a real division of power. The mother might have all, but in that case she must also take the sole obligation of maintenance, — that is, add enormously to her legal burdens ; or the father may take power and responsibility together, as he now does, but there is no medium course. If he orders his children to sleep in bran, and the mother orders them to sleep in beds, one of the two must give way. The children can't be sold, and the money divided, nor can one little leg be put into bran and the other into a down bed. As regards property, no doubt division is possible—the law, for example, might give the furniture to the wife absolutely ; but then that is just the very fine on a man for becoming a husband which women justly resent when it is enforced on a woman for be- coming a wife. Granting the inferiority of the man to the full, he surely must have some rights over his own which the woman is bound to respect, if it be only the right of bequeathal. We quite admit that under our present law the wife may have provided the pinafores, and yet have no power to snub her husband if he has an opinion about them ; but then that is just the injustice which
Englishmen are striving to correct, which has been abolished by the Representatives of the people, and which still exists solely because there is a House of Lords, with power to forbid the nation to do any act of justice it pleases. The Lords, not the men, are in this matter the women's foes, and as they will find next year, very dangerous ones. That the ideal relation of husband and wife is agreement in equality, and not the " absorption of the wife in her husband, and the absorption of the husband in himself," as Miss Cobbe epigrammatically puts it, is no doubt true ; but then it is not the terms of agreement which are settled by law,—law leaves .them alone entirely,—but the terms of disagreement.
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