Upton Sinclair

(Deals with the practical side of the life partnership of matrimony.)

So far we have discussed marriage as if it consisted only of love. But it is manifest that this is not the case. Marriage is every-day companionship, and also it is partnership in a complicated business. In our school of marriage therefore we shall teach the rights and duties of both partners to the contract, and shall face frankly the money side of the enterprise.

One of the first facts we must get clear is that the economics of marriage are in most parts of the world still based upon the subjection of woman, and are therefore incompatible with the claims of woman as a partner and comrade. They will never be right until the social revolution has abolished privilege, and the state has granted to every woman a maternity endowment, with a mother's pension for every child during the entire period of the rearing and education of that child. Until this is done, the average woman must look to some man for the support of her child, and that, by the automatic operation of economic force, makes her subject to the whims of the man. What women have to do is to agitate for a revision of the property laws of marriage; and meantime to see that in every marriage there is an extra-legal understanding, which grants to the woman the equality which laws and conventions deny her.

When I was a boy my mother had a woman friend who, if she wanted to go downtown, would borrow a quarter from my mother. This woman's husband was earning a generous salary, enough to enable him to buy the best cigars by the box, and to keep a supply of liquors always on hand; but he gave his wife no allowance, and if she wanted pocket money she had to ask him for it, each time a separate favor. Yet this woman was keeping a home, she was doing just as hard work and just as necessary work as the man. Manifestly, this was a preposterous arrangement. If a woman is going to be a home-maker for a husband, it is a simple, common-sense proposition that the salary of the husband shall be divided into three parts—first, the part which goes to the home, the benefit of which is shared in common; second, the part which the husband has for his own use; and third, the part which the wife has for hers. The second and third parts should be equal, and the wife should have hers, not as a favor, but as a right. If the two are making a homestead, or running a farm, or building up a business, then half the proceeds should be the woman's; and it should be legally in her name, and this as a matter of course, as any other business contract. If the woman does not make a home, but merely displays fine clothes at tea parties, that is of course another matter. Just what she is to do is something that had better be determined before marriage; and if a man wants a life-partner, to take an interest in his work, or to have a useful work of her own, he had better choose that kind of woman, and not merely one that has a pretty face and a trim ankle.

The business side of marriage is something that has to be talked out from time to time; there have to be meetings of the board of directors, and at these meetings there ought to be courtesy and kindness, but also plain facts and common sense, and no shirking of issues. Love is such a very precious thing that any man or woman ought to be willing to make money sacrifices to preserve it. But on the other hand, it is a fact that there are some people with whom you cannot be generous; the more you give them, the more they take, and with such people the only safe rule is exact justice. Let married couples decide exactly what contribution each makes to the family life, and what share of money and authority each is entitled to.

I might spend several chapters discussing the various rocks on which I have seen marriages go to wreck. For example, extravagance and worldly show; clothes for women. In Paris is a "demi-monde," a world of brutal lust combined with riotous luxury. The women of this "half-world" are in touch with the world of art and fashion, and when the rich costumers and woman-decorators want what they call ideas, it is to these lust-women they go. The fashions they design are always depraved, of course; always for the flaunting of sex, never for the suggestion of dignity and grave intelligence. At several seasons of the year these lust-women are decked out and paraded at the race-courses and other gathering places of the rich, and their pictures are published in the papers and spread over all the world. So forthwith it becomes necessary for your wife in Oshkosh or Kalamazoo to throw away all the perfectly good clothes she owns, and get a complete new outfit—because "they" are wearing something different. Of course the costume-makers have seen that it is extremely different, so as to make it impossible for your wife and children to be happy in their last season's clothes. I have a winter overcoat which I bought fourteen years ago, and as it is still as good as new I expect to use it another fourteen years, which will mean that it has cost me a dollar and a half per year. But think what it would have cost me if I had considered it necessary each year to have an overcoat cut as the keepers of French mistresses were cutting theirs!

But then, suppose you put it up to your wife and daughters to wear sensible clothes, and they do so, and then they observe that on the street your eyes turn to follow the ladies in the latest disappearing skirt? The point is, you perceive, that you yourself are partly to blame for the fashions. They appeal to a dirty little imp you have in your own heart, and when the decent women discover that, it makes them blazing hot, and that is one of the ways you may wreck your domestic happiness if you want to. Unless I am greatly mistaken, when the class war is all over we are going to see in our world a sex war; but it is not going to be between the men and the women, it is going to be between the mother women and the mistress women, and the mistress women are going to have their hides stripped off.

Men wreck marriage because they are promiscuous; and women wreck it because they are parasites. Woman has been for long centuries an economic inferior, and she has the vices of the subject peoples and tribes. Now there are some who want to keep these vices, while at the same time claiming the new privileges which go with equality. Such a woman picks out a man who is sensitive and chivalrous; who knows that women suffer handicaps, pains of childbirth, physical weakness, and who therefore feels impelled to bear more than his share of the burdens. She makes him her slave; and by and by she gets a child, and then she has him, because he is bowed down with awe and worship, he thinks that such a miracle has never happened in the world before, and he spends the rest of his life waiting on her whims and nursing her vanities. I note that at the recent convention of the Woman's Party they demanded their rights and agreed to surrender their privileges. There you have the final test by which you may know that women really want to be free, and are prepared to take the responsibilities of freedom.