Woman physiologically considered as to mind, morals, marriage, matrimonial slavery, infidelity and divorce / by Alexander Walker.

  • Alexander Walker
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman physiologically considered as to mind, morals, marriage, matrimonial slavery, infidelity and divorce / by Alexander Walker. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    “We must consider that nothing is more dangerous than to unite two persons so closely in all their interests and concerns, as man and wife, without rendering the union entire and total. The least possibility of a separate interest must be 'the source of endless quarrels and suspicions. The wife, not secure of her establishment, will still be driving some separate end or project ; and the husband’s selfishness, being accompanied with more power, may be still more dangerous.” [The amount of this argu- ment is that, because a close union is the most dangerous of all things, a closer one is safe—which is altogether absurd ; for if the union and its closeness be the sole cause of the danger, the effect must increase with every degree of its cause. Mr. Hume, indeed, is pleased to consider a certain degree of union as entire and total, and to suppose that thereby the greatest degree of danger becomes no danger at all ! Hume was a sophist—not a profound metaphysician. There never was any “entire and total union” between the sexes ; and every day proves it.] In all this, Hume, no more than Shelley, notices the circumstance of progeny, without which no final conclusion can be attained on the subject. Excepting, however, the error of this great oversight, and the consequences it involves, there is much truth in the following view which Shelley gives us of indissoluble marriage. “ The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies. Persons of delicacy and virtue unhappily united to those whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to
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