He lost
money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.
Our young engineering friend, John, when HE looked forward to HIS
future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it
at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very
little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to
"give" Mary a home.
Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages
of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of
things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the
other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his
marriage except just Mary.
The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous
toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of
result:
Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701
to 1745, there were
Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;
Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;
Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.
Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age.
It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains
unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial
college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with
such details as:
"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children.
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