n be to each other in all God's earth.

No grown-up human being ought to rush blindly into this most
intimate, most important, most enduring of human relations; and
will you let a young man, at the age of fourteen, contract
marriage, or a young maiden either? If the law undertakes to
regulate the matter at all, let it regulate it upon principles of
common-sense. But this is a matter which must be very much
regulated by public opinion, by our teachers. What do you, the
guides of our youth, say? You say to the young girl, "You ought
to expect to be married before you are twenty, or about that
time; you should intend to be; and from the time you are fifteen,
it should be made your one life purpose; and in all human
probability, you may expect to spend the next ten or twenty years
in the nursery, and at forty or fifty, you will be an old woman,
your life will be well-nigh worn out." I stand here to say that
this is all false. Let the young girl be instructed that, above
her personal interests, her home, and social life, she is to have
a great life purpose, as broad as the rights and interests of
humanity. I say, let every young girl feel this, as much as every
young man does. We have no right, we, who expect to live forever,
to play about here as if we were mere flies, enjoying ourselves
in the sunshine. We ought to have an earnest purpose outside of
home, outside of our family relations. Then let the young girl
fit herself for this. Let her be taught that she ought not to be
married in her teens. Let her wait, as a young man does, if he is
sensible, until she is twenty-five or thirty. (Applause). She
will then know how to choose properly, and probably she will not
be deceived in her estimate of character; she will have had a
certain life-discipline, which will enable her to control her
household matters with wise judgment, so that, while she is
looking after her family, she may still keep her great life
purpose, for which she was educated, and to which she has given
her best energies, steadily in view. She need not absorb herself
in her home, and God never intended that she should; and then, if
she has lived according to the laws of physiology, and according
to the laws of common-sense, she ought to be, at the age of fifty
years, just where man i