A complete balance-sheet,
with its record of children slain, would only too readily demonstrate
this.
Our right attitude toward married women's labour must depend upon a
right understanding of the social meaning of marriage. This was a
question which had to be dealt with at length in a previous volume and I
can only state here in a word, what was the conclusion come to. It was
that marriage is a device for supporting and buttressing motherhood by
fatherhood. Its mark is that it provides for _common parental care of
offspring_. A more prosaic way of stating the case would be that
marriage is a device for making the father responsible. If we go far
back in the history of the animal world, we find mating but not
marriage. The father's function is purely physiological, transient and
wholly irresponsible. The whole burden of caring for offspring, when
first there comes to be need for that care, in the history of organic
progress, falls upon the mother. But even amongst the fishes we find
that sometimes, as in the case of the stickleback, the father helps the
mother to build a sort of nest, and does "sentry-go" outside it to keep
off marauders. In this common care of the young we see what is in all
essentials marriage, though some may prefer to dignify the word by
confining it to those human associations which have been blessed by
Church and State, even though the father throws the baby at the mother,
or sends her into the streets to earn her bread and his beer.
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