No man can afford to know a broken family.
Quarreling, discord, and connubial disagreements are catching. With
unhappiness at home, no man is safely to be trusted, no woman to be
sought in friendship. The fault may not be his or hers, but it must be
between them. A man and woman must prove that they can be a good husband
and wife before they can be admitted to have proved that they are good
citizens. Such a verdict may seem harsh, but it is necessary and just.
Young people just married can not possibly afford to know unhappy
couples; and they, in their turn, may, with mutual hypocrisy, rub on in
the world; but in the end they feel that the hypocrisy can not be played
out. They gradually withdraw from their friends and acquaintance, and
nurse their own miseries at home.
All good men feel, of course, that any distinctive separation of the
sexes, all those separate gatherings and marks which would divide woman
from man, and set her upon a separate pedestal, are as foolish as they
are really impracticable. You will find no one who believes less in what
certain philanthropists call the emancipation of women than a happy
mother and wife. She does not want to be emancipated; and she is quite
unwilling that, instead of being the friend and ally of man, she should
be his opponent. She feels truly that the woman's cause is man's.
"For woman is not undeveloped man,
But diverse. Could we make her as the man,
Sweet love were slain, whose dearest bond is this--
Not like to like, but like in difference.
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