t think that the more intelligent sort
of women, faced by a perilous shortage of men, would object seriously to
that amelioration. They must see plainly that the present system, if
it is carried much further, will begin to work powerfully against their
best interests, if only by greatly reinforcing the disinclination to
marriage that already exists among the better sort of men. The woman of
true discretion, I am convinced, would much rather marry a superior man,
even on unfavourable terms, than make John Smith her husband, serf and
prisoner at one stroke.

The law must eventually recognize this fact and make provision for it.
The average husband, perhaps, deserves little succour. The woman who
pursues and marries him, though she may be moved by selfish aims, should
be properly rewarded by the state for her service to it--a service
surely not to be lightly estimated in a military age. And that reward
may conveniently take the form, as in the United States, of statutes
giving her title to a large share of his real property and requiring
him to surrender most of his income to her, and releasing her from all
obedience to him and from all obligation to keep his house in order. But
the woman who aspires to higher game should be quite willing, it seems
to me, to resign some of these advantages in compensation for the
greater honour and satisfaction of being wife to a man of merit, and
mother to his children. All that is needed is laws allowing her, if she
will, to resign her right of dower, her right to maintenance and her
immunity from discipline, and to make any other terms that she may be
led to regard as equitable. At present women are unable to make most
of these concessions even if they would: the laws of the majority of
western nations are inflexible. If, for example, an Englishwoman should
agree, by an ante-nuptial contract, to submit herself to the discipline,
not of the current statutes, but of the elder common law, which allowed
a husband to correct his wife corporally with a stick no thicker than
his thumb, it would be competent for any sentimental neighbour to set
the agreement at naught by haling her husband before a magistrate for
carrying it out, and it is a safe wager that the magistrate would jail
him.

This plan, however novel it may seem, is actually already in operation.
Many a married woman, in order to keep her husband from revolt,
makes more or less disguised surrenders of certain of the rights and