MARRIAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 March 1939, Page 8

MARRIAGE

VIEWS ON MODERN PROBLEMS. ECONOMIC UNDERSTANDING. Lady Rhondda has something interesting to say about the modern problem of marriage in “Time and Tide.” She rightly points out that it is the economic aspect of marriage with which at the moment women are most concerned. This is not surprising, she says. “The surprising thing is that so impossibly anomalous' an economic arrangement as the English marriage. of the twentieth century has gone on so long as it has without something being done about it. But the fact is partly that it is uncommonly difficult to tackle —partly that marriage does work, in spite of it, so amazingly well, on the whole, that we hesitate to touch it.

“Marriage really is of all human institutions the one which most encourages one to believe in the future of humanity. It asks standards that one would suppose angels would be hard put to it to achieve. It puts each partner defenceless at the other’s mercy, and yet—it works. Not always, of course. “Many a husband grinds out a life which might have contained freedom and beauty in providing for the greedy needs of a cruelly unimaginative partner. Many a Sensitive, kindly man, tied to a selfish, spoilt wife,'has his career irretrievably damaged, and his chances of usefulness impaired by her callously unreasonable claims on his money, his time, his attentions. “Many a wife has to watch her children as well as herself going short, because she is dependent on the whims of an extravagant and selfish man for their feeding, or has to do violence to every feeling of pride and decency to battle for the money she so desperately needs’ before it shoots down the drain, and yet,” says Lady Rhondda, “some 30 per cent of marriages are not merely successful. . . . they create

a relationship whose beauty is as great as anything which two' human beings can together create. . . . I have seen it —we all have —in its fullness after 40 years of married life. So that when one partner went, onlookers were not merely saddened to know that the other was left to a grey and lonely life, but felt as if some tangible beauty had been shattered before their eyes, a lovely vase smashed by the stroke of a hammer.” ECONOMIC ARRANGEMENTS. We agree with Lady Rhondda in her contention that the economic arrangements of marriage and in particular the economic position of the married woman really are quite unnecessarily anomalous—and that in such a way as to hurt both husband and wife—that the married woman is both the most protected and the least protected person in the country—that a wife so long as she lives with her husband hasn't the right to one halfpenny that she can call her own, and so on, says a writer in “Dawn.”

We agree that love is not translatable into cash terms; but there are things that are; housework, cooking, nursing and housekeeping, for example, have a considerable cash value when they are performed by anyone else, but are not in themselves valued at one penny when they are perform- ■ ed by a woman in her capacity as wife, although in some, other respects the law makes her position as wife even unfairly secure. WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? Lady Rhondda offers as a solution an Act empowering any wife who wishes to do so to go to the Courts while still living with her husband, and directing the magistrate that if (but only if) she can prove that she does the whole of the house management or housework she is entitled to have allottee! to her as of right a proportion of hei’ hus-' band’s income to spend on the house,, and a proportion for her own private use in lieu of payment for the work sne does. In answer to the contention that the wife still living with her husband would go to the Courts, or such a small percentage might do as not to count, and what is the use of that? Lady Rhondda says: “All the use in the world —it would seep into the brain of every wife that ‘if’ she did the wife’s usual job she had a right to be paid for it (and that if she didn’t she hadn’t) and it would seep into the brain of every well-meaning husband that his wife, if she did the housekeeping, etc., had a right to a proportion of his income for such purposes and for hen own private use.” That such a law although not often invoked would act as a tremendous protection both to the wife and ■ the husband of a bad partner, and thus silently, inevitably, it would make public opinion—which is exactly what needs doing, states Lady Rhondda.