Page:Marriage as a Trade.djvu/144

from man, a soul to be saved apart from man. It was a flat defiance of the theory that she came into the world only to marry and reproduce her kind; it acknowledged and admitted the importance of her individual life and conduct; in short, it recognized her as something besides a wife and a mother, and gave her other claims to respect than that capacity for reproduction which she shared with the lower animals. Further, by making celibacy an honourable instead of a despised estate, it must have achieved an important result from an economic point of view; it must have lessened the congestion in the marriage market by lessening the number of women who regarded spinsterhood as the last word in failure. It enhanced the value of the wife and mother by making it not only possible, but easy, for her to become something else. It opened up a career to an ambitious woman; since, in the heyday of the Church, the head of a great community of nuns was something more than a recluse—a power in the land, an administrator of estates. None of these things, of course, were in the minds of those who instituted the celibate, conventual life as