From A London Child Of The 1870s, by M.V. Hughes

On one of my bad days I refused to finish up my rice pudding, was sent from the room, and fled in angry tears to my bedroom. Soon Aunt Lizzie came up to me with the information that 'it says in the Bible that the disobedient are to burn for ever in the Lake of Fire, with idolaters and murderers and liars'.

This sounded all too likely, and without questioning the accuracy of her quotation I went back and choked down that rice pudding...

In spite of the fun that we made of Aunt Lizzie we were really fond of her, because she never gushed and would do any thing for us. And we all knew her tragedy. She had run away to be married, and her husband had turned out a drunken brute with no redeeming attraction.

He tortured her to such an extent that she was obliged to flee from lodging to lodging to avoid him, and to make a living for herself by giving music lessons. It is no wonder that she took gloomy views of life, and had such vivid ideas of Hell.

Victorian times are supposed to have been so settled and happy and care-free, but my recollections hardly tally with this rosy picture. Surely to-day no woman would endure such humiliations year after year.

If only Aunt Lizzie had listened to Leon Kass. She should have courted her beau, rather than eloping with him, the brute. Lucky she had her music teaching to fall back on, eh?

From The End of Courtship by Leon Kass

On the one side, there is a rise in female assertiveness and efforts at empowerment, with a consequent need to deny all womanly dependence and the kind of vulnerability that calls for the protection of strong and loving men, protection such men were once -- and would still be -- willing to provide...

...the economic independence of women, however welcome on other grounds, is itself not an asset for marital stability, as both the woman and the man can more readily contemplate leaving a marriage. Indeed, a woman's earning power can become her own worst enemy when the children are born.

Give the doctor his due. He fully recognizes that men are bastards. That's why Aunt Lizzie should have been more careful...

Not all the obstacles to courtship and marriage are cultural. At bottom, there is also the deeply ingrained, natural waywardness and unruliness of the human male. Sociobiologists were not the first to discover that males have a penchant for promiscuity and polygyny -- this was well known to biblical religion.

Men are also naturally more restless and ambitious than women; lacking woman's powerful and immediate link to life's generative answer to mortality, men flee from the fear of death into heroic deed, great quests, or sheer distraction after distraction. One can make a good case that biblical religion is, not least, an attempt to domesticate male sexuality and male erotic longings, and to put them in the service of transmitting a righteous and holy way of life through countless generations...

Ogden Nash had it right: "Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous; higamus hogamus, women monogamous." To make naturally polygamous men accept the conventional institution of monogamous marriage has been the work of centuries of Western civilization...

Glad that's settled. So, which century would you rather live in?