The Marriage Book (22 page)

HENRY WARD BEECHER

PROVERBS FROM PLYMOUTH PULPIT
, 1887

Though the Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) became infamous when he was accused of adultery, he had already become famous for the wisdom he dispensed in sermons—and gathered for his book of proverbs.

Well-married, a man is winged—ill-matched, he is shackled.

VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE

“SEX SLAVERY,” 1890

An American anarchist and poet, Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912) was an ardent opponent of marriage, believing it to be an enslaving institution. The passage below is from a speech she gave in defense of the imprisoned feminist Moses Harman, who, she said, had “looked beneath the word and saw the fact,—a prison more horrible than that where he is sitting now, whose corridors radiate over all the earth, and with so many cells, that none may count them.”

It has often been said to me, by women with decent masters, who had no idea of the outrages practiced on their less fortunate sisters, “Why don’t the wives leave?”

Why don’t you run, when your feet are chained together? Why don’t you cry out when a gag is on your lips? Why don’t you raise your hands above your head when they are pinned fast to your sides? Why don’t you spend thousands of dollars when you haven’t a cent in your pocket? Why don’t you go to the seashore or the mountains, you fools scorching with city heat? If there is one thing more than another in this whole accursed tissue of false society, which makes me angry, it is the asinine stupidity which with the true phlegm of impenetrable dullness says, “Why don’t the women leave!” Will you tell me where they will go and what they shall do?

KATE CHOPIN

“THE STORY OF AN HOUR,” 1894

Not nearly as militant as de Cleyre (above), Kate Chopin (1850–1904) wrote stories and novels that often portrayed the hidden strength of women, especially in the context of southern society. “The Story of an Hour” was one of her best-known works: economical and vivid in its narration, and—as a feminist fable—surprising. This is the story in its entirety.

Chopin herself married at twenty, had six children, and, after a dozen years, was left a widow in debt.

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second
telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which someone was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.

There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will—as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been.

When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.

She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

There would be no one to live for during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

“Free! Body and soul free!” she kept whispering.

Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. “Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door—you will make yourself ill. What are you doing Louise? For heaven’s sake open the door.”

“Go away. I am not making myself ill.” No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

She arose at length and opened the door to her sister’s importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister’s waist, and
together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

Some one was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine’s piercing cry; at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

But Richards was too late.

When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.

FRENCH POSTCARD

“THE CHAINS OF MARRIAGE,” 1906

BETTY FRIEDAN

THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE
, 1963

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) was still living the life of suburban wife and mother when she sent out a questionnaire to fellow Smith College alumnae and was inspired by their answers to start researching the state of middle-class women in the United States.
The Feminine Mystique
was the bestselling book that resulted; the title referred to what she described as the aura of supposed fulfillment under which women in reality struggled to maintain their identities. Later a founder of the National Organization for Women, Friedan—like Simone de Beauvoir (see
Work
) and Greer (see
Expectations
)—was one of the pillars of twentieth-century feminism.

In her optimistic conclusion to
The Feminine Mystique
, Friedan wrote: “When their mothers’ fulfillment makes girls sure they want to be women . . . they can stretch and stretch until their own efforts will tell them who they are. They will not need the regard of boy or man to feel alive. And when women do not need to live through their husbands and children, men will not fear the love and strength of women, nor need another’s weakness to prove their own masculinity.”

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

For over fifteen years there was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role was to seek fulfillment as wives and mothers. Over and over women heard in voices of tradition and of Freudian sophistication that they could desire no greater destiny than to glory in their own femininity. Experts told them how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry and adolescent rebellion; how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with their own hands; how to dress, look, and act more feminine and make marriage more exciting; how to keep their husbands from dying young and their sons from growing into delinquents. They were taught to pity the neurotic, unfeminine, unhappy women who wanted to be poets or physicists or presidents. They learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights—the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for. Some women, in their forties and fifties, still remembered painfully giving up those dreams, but most of the younger women no longer even thought about them. A
thousand expert voices applauded their femininity, their adjustment, their new maturity. All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.

CLARE BOOTHE LUCE

A DOLL’S HOUSE 1970
, 1970

Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987) was a reporter, an editor, a congresswoman, a diplomat, and the wife of
Time
and
Life
cofounder Henry Luce. She is perhaps best known today as the author of the play
The Women
. Her one-act
A Doll’s House 1970
was originally printed in
Life
magazine and performed a year later with the title
Slam the Door Softly
. Generally not considered one of her best efforts, it nonetheless captured the feminist spirit of the new decade, portraying a defiant, independent, modern-day Nora (see Ibsen, above) in the act of leaving her bewildered husband.

FRIENDSHIP

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

“ON SOME VERSES OF VIRGIL,” 1588

In 1565, Montaigne (see
Freedom
) married a woman named Françoise de la Chassaigne, who was the wealthy daughter of a fellow Bordeaux parliamentarian. They had six daughters together (only one of whom survived childhood), but their marriage was preceded by a relationship of apparently far greater intensity. Montaigne was twenty-four when he met Étienne de la Boétie, another member of parliament, whom Montaigne would later immortalize in his essay “On Friendship.” Holding this love up as the pinnacle, he wrote: “If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.”