With such
safeguards and under such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard
dependence for a woman, and she may live, teaching and rearing and free,
almost as though the co-operative commonwealth had come.
But in many cases, since great numbers of women marry so young and so
ignorantly that their thinking about realities begins only after
marriage, a woman will find herself already married to a man before she
realizes the significance of these things. She may be already the mother
of children. Her husband's ideas may not be her ideas. He may dominate,
he may prohibit, he may intervene, he may default. He may, if he sees
fit, burthen the family income with the charges of his illegitimate
offspring.
We live in the world as it is and not in the world as it should be. That
sentence becomes the refrain of this discussion.
The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position,
to do her best under the old conditions, to live as though she was under
the new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies as
far as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs.
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