“Marriage”
Sarah Grimké
Sarah Grimke’s article “Marriage,” from Gerda Lerner’s book The Grimke sisters from South Carolina: pioneers for women’s rights and abolition (Citation: Lerner, G. (2004). The Grimké sisters from South Carolina: pioneers for women’s rights and abolition (Rev. and expanded ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.), pages 303-309
In the summer of 1855 the New York Times professing to give a history of the rise and progress of what is called ‘‘Free Love’’ identified it with the Woman’s Rights movement. The writer says, ‘‘The Woman’s Rights movement leads directly and rapidly in the same direction, viz.to Free Love, that extreme section of it we mean which claims to rest upon the absolute and indefeasible right of woman to equality in all respects with man and to a complete sovereignty over her own person and conduct.’’ This exposition of the principles of the Woman’s Rights movement I heartily accept. We do claim the absolute and indefeasible right of woman to an equality in all respects with man and to a complete sovereignty over her own person and conduct.Human rights are not based upon sex, color, capacity or condition. They are universal, inalienable and eternal, and none but despots will deny to woman that supreme sovereignty over her own person and conduct which Law concedes to man. The conclusion that this writer draws from this equality of rights, viz., that this ‘‘movement leads directly and rapidly to the principles of ‘Free Love,’’’ or that a claim for woman’s rights ‘‘nullifies the very idea of marriage as anything more than a partnership at will,’’ I utterly deny. Man is acknowledged to have rightfully supreme sovereignty over his own person and conduct, and yet, who believes that this nullifies marriage, making it in his case a mere partnership at will? Why then should it be so in the case of woman? Is she less worthy of being trusted with this right than he? Let the 20,000 prostitutes of New York whose virtue is often bought by married men answer. Is her heart more inconstant and less penetrated than his by the love of children? Even if experience had not taught us otherwise, the nature of the two beings would determine the question. . . . Is it not wonderful that woman has endured so long and so patiently the hidden wrongs which man has inflicted upon her in the marriage relation, and all because her heart so cleaves to her children and to home and to one love, that she silently buries her sorrows and immolates herself rather than surrender her heart’s dearest treasures.
Let us examine these assertions calmly, reverently, for we are treading upon holy ground: all rights are holy. Let us first look at the effect upon the marriage relation of the hitherto acknowledged principle that man had rights superior to woman. Has it not subordinated her to his passions? Has she not been continually forced into a motherhood which she abhorred, because she knew that her children were not the offspring of Love but of Lust? Has she not in unnumbered instances felt in the deepest recesses of her soul, that she was used to minister to Passion, not voluntarily to receive from her husband the chaste expression of his love? Has she not, too often, when thus compelled to receive the germ she could not welcome, refused to retain and nourish into life the babe, which she felt was not the fruit of a pure connubial love? Ponder well the effects upon woman of the assumed superiority of rights in the stronger sex, that sex too in which the constitutional element of sex has far greater strength. Look too at the effect upon children, who are the product of such one-sided rights—puny, sickly, ill-organized and unbalanced— bearing about in body and mind the marks of their unholy origin. And yet the Times is horror-struck at the idea of a woman’s claiming ‘‘A supreme sovereignty over her own person and conduct.’’ Is it not time that she should? Has not man proved himself unworthy of the power which he assumes over her person and conduct? How I ask has he protected and cherished her? Let her faded youth, her shatter’d constitution, her unharmonious offspring, her withered heart and his withered intellect answer these questions. Is it not time then that she asked for ‘‘a redress of grievances’’ and a recognition of that equality of rights which alone can save her?
Let us now look at the results of such a recognition. A right on the part of woman to decide when she shall become a mother, how often and under what circumstances. Surely as upon her alone devolves the necessity of nurturing unto the fulness of life the being within her and after it is born, of nursing and tending it thro’ helpless infancy and capricious childhood, often under the pressure of miserable health, she ought to have the right of controlling all preliminaries. If man had all these burdens to bear, would not he declare that common sense and common justice confer this right upon him. An eminent physician of Boston once remarked that if in the economy of nature, the sexes alternated giving birth to children no family would ever have more than three, the husband bearing one and the wife two. But the right to decide this matter has been almost wholly denied to woman. How often is she forced into an untimely motherhood which compels her to wean her babe, thus depriving it of that nutriment provided by nature as the most bland and fitting, during the period of dentition. Thousands of deaths from this cause, in infancy, are attributed by superstition and ignorance to the dispensations of Divine Providence. How many thousands, too, of miscarriages are forced upon woman by the fact that man lives down that law of his being which would protect her from such terrible consequences just as animal instinct protects the female among brutes.
To save woman from legalized licentiousness is then one of the reasons why we plead for equality of rights. No one can fail to see that this condition of things results from several causes:
1st Ignorance of those physical laws which every man and woman ought to know before marriage, the knowledge of which has been withheld from the young, under a false and fatal idea of delicacy. Many a man ruins his own health and that of his wife and his children too, thro’ ignorance. A diffusion of knowledge respecting these laws would greatly lessen existing evils.
2nd A false conception in man and woman of his nature and necessities. The great truth that the most concentrated fluid of the body has an office to perform in the production of great tho’ts and original ideas, as well as in the reproduction of the species is known to few and too little appreciated by all. The prodigal waste of this by legalized licentiousness has dwarfed the intellect of man. . . .
3rd The fact that many legal marriages are not love marriages. In a pure, true relation between the sexes, no difficulties can ever arise, but a willing recognition of each other’s rights and mutual wants, naturally and spontaneously resulting in voluntary motherhood, a joyful appreciation of the blessedness of parentage, the birth of healthy, comely children and a beautiful home.
But it may be asked, what is to be done in cases of uncongenial marriages. Are not such men and women to follow their attractions outside of the legal relation. I unhesitatingly answer no! Where two persons have established a false marriage relation, they are bound to abide by the consequences of the mistake they have made. Perhaps they did love each other, but a nearer intimacy has frozen this love or changed it into disgust. Or theirs may have been a marriage of convenience or one for the sake of obtaining a house, a fortune, a position in life or it may have been a mere act of obedience to parents, or of gratitude, or a means of canceling a monied obligation. Multiform are the unworthy motives which seduce men and women into this sacred relation.
In all these cases, let them abide the consequences of their own perversion of marriage in exchanging personal chastity for the pride of life, vanity in dress, position or a house to live in without that love which alone can make that house a home. In some cases, it may be duty for the parties to separate, but let both keep themselves pure, so long as both are living. Let them accept the discipline thus afforded, and spiritual strength and growth will be their reward. The Doctrine that human beings are to follow their attractions, which lies at the base of that miscalled ‘‘free love’’ system, is fraught with infinite danger. We are too low down to listen for one moment to its syren voice.... Let me then exculpate ‘‘the woman’s rights movement,’’ from the charge of ‘‘tending directly and rapidly to the Free Love system, and nullifying the very idea of Marriage as anything more than a partnership at will.’’ On the contrary your great desire is to purify and exalt the marriage relation and destroy all licentiousness. To every unhappy couple we say again, bear in quiet home seclusion, the heart withering consequences of your own mistakes. You owe this to yourselves, to your children, to society. Keep yourselves pure from that desecration of the marriage relation, which brings children into the world who have not upon their brows the seals of love and chastity. If you cannot live thus purely together and separation becomes necessary, let no temporary or permanent relation be formed by either party during the life of the other. . . .
In marriage is the origin of life. In the union of the sexes exists a creative energy which is found nowhere else. Human nature tends to the uses of all the faculties with which it is endowed, and desire is strong in proportion to the greatness of the result which flows from its exercise. Hence the creative is stronger than any other faculty, birth being the great fact of our existence here, and its legitimate exercise is the natural result of the purest and most unselfish love, the spontaneous giving away of oneself to the only loved one and the receiving of that other to ourselves in return. Marriage is a necessity of our being, because of our halfness. Every man and woman feels a profound want, which no father nor mother, no sister nor brother can fill. An indescribable longing for, and yearning after a perfect absorbing of its interests, feeling and being itself into one kindred spirit. The man feels within him a lack of the feminine element, the woman the lack of the masculine, each possessing enough of the other’s nature to appreciate it and seek its fulness[sic], each in the other. Each has a deep awareness of incompleteness without the other. . . and seek[s] that divinity in her and in him, with whom they would companion for life. This divinity is the only true basis of union, out of it alone grow these holy affinities which bind soul to soul, not only in a temporal relation but in an eternal marriage. . . . Full well do multitudes of human beings know in bitterness of soul, that the empty ceremony of a priest and connubial relations do not constitute marriage.
Many a woman (I call her not wife) loathes the unhallowed connection she has formed and would gladly welcome death as deliverer from that polluted prison house, which the world miscalls her home. A revolting experience has forced upon her the conviction that she is a legal prostitute, a chattel personal, a tool that is used, a mere convenience—and too late does she learn that those who desecrate the marriage relation sin against their own bodies and their own souls, for no crime carries with it such physical suffering or so deep a sense of self degradation.... Man seems to feel that Marriage gives him the control of Woman’s person just as the Law gives him the control of her property. Thus are her most sacred rights destroyed by that very act, which, under the laws of Nature should enlarge, establish and protect them. In marriage is the origin of Life—in it woman finds herself endowed with a creative energy she never possessed before, in it new aspirations take possession of her, and indescribable longing after motherhood as the felt climax of her being. She joyfully gives herself away, that she may receive the germ of a new being, and true to nature, would fain retire within herself and absorb and expend all her energies in the development of this precious germ. But alas! How few are permitted unmolested to pursue that end, which for the time being, has become the great object of life. How often is she compelled by various considerations to yield to the unnatural embraces of her husband, and thus to endanger the very existence of her embryo babe. How often is it sacrificed to the ungoverned passion of its own father and the health of the mother seriously impaired.
Every unnatural process is deleterious, hence abortions are destructive to the constitution and many women are broken down in the prime of life by the malone, and their haggard countenances too plainly reveal their secret sorrows. A lady once said to me I have but one child, but I have had 12 miscarriages—another had 4 children and 15 abortions. And why I would ask this untimely casting of her fruit? Do the beasts of the field miscarry? Why not? They are governed by instinct. Are the brutes safe during the period of gestation whilst woman is not? . . . Again—look at the burdens imposed upon her by the care of many children following in quick succession. How can any mother do her duty to her family, if in 8 years she have 6 children. Look at the unnatural tax upon her constitution, her night watches, her sore vexations and trials and causes nameless and numberless that wear away her life. If men had to alternate with their wives, the duties of the nursery, fewer and further between would be its inmates.... O! how many women who have entered the marriage relation in all purity and innocence, expecting to realize in it the completion of their own halfness, the rounding out of their own being, the blending of their holiest instincts with those of a kindred spirit, have too soon discovered that they were unpaid housekeepers and nurses, and still worse, chattels personal to be used and abused at the will of a master, and all in a cold matter of course way. O! the agony of realizing that personal and pecuniary independence are annihilated by that ‘‘Law which makes the husband and wife one and that one is the husband.’’ How many so called wives, rise in the morning oppressed with a sense of degradation from the fact that their chastity has been violated, their holiest instincts disregarded, and themselves humbled under an oppressive sense of their own pollution, and that, too, a thousand times harder to bear, because so called husband has been the perpetrator of the unnatural crime....
Who does not see that Men must grow out of that nondevelopment in which they now are, before they will have ears to hear or hearts to love the truth on this subject, and that to Woman must be conceded an equality of rights thro’out the circle of human relations, before she can be emancipated from that worst of all slaveries—slavery to the passions of Man. And this equality cannot—will not be conceded until she too grows out of that stratum of development in which she now is. Her imperfect education unfits her for acquiring that pecuniary independence which would lift her above the temptation to marry for a home. Dependence subjects her too often to be duped in the marriage relation as well as out of it. And the great work to be done now for woman by woman, is to impress her with the necessity of pecuniary independence, each working out that independence according to her taste and ability. Now they work under great disadvantages and can obtain a mere pittance. But be not discouraged sisters— Is not a dinner of herbs and simple apparel such as you can provide infinitely better than sumptuous fare, costly attire, elegant furniture and equipage received in exchange for freedom and personal purity. They must yearn to be women rather than fine statues to be draped in satins and lawns—elegant automatons grac[ing] a drawing room, or pretty play things to be toyed with by respectable rakes or heartless dandies under the guise of lovers and husbands....
In all great changes thro’ which Society passes in her upward progress, there seem to be periods of interregnum, when the old usage has died out before the new one was ready to be inaugurated in its place. . . . Let the old contract system remain, until that new and divine form of spirit union, shall have gently undermined its hold upon society, pushing it gradually off and taking its place in the hearts and lives of all who are prepared to welcome it in purity and love...