The Caucasian. (Shreveport, La.) 1900-192?, 1909-10-31
THE W0MAN'S SIDE
Of an Important Question Interestingly
Discussed
By Mrs. Henry D. Jackson.
(NiHa L. IdamS.)

In WHAT way is woman's marrl-
age usually brought about? One might
give flippant answer to this question
by saying in all sorts of ways. But the
inquiry merits more serious treatment
than this. Marriage is confessedly the
most profoundly important event in al
woman's life, or at least it should be,
it is an event to which she is always
looking forward to from the days of her
very girlhood.
Volumes have been written about the
psychology of the marriage relation,
about its perplexities and its problems,
and its strain and stress, yet few inves-
tigators have appeared to see that the
really difficult question is not the one
which has to do with the marriage after
it has been consummated, but the one
which relates to the circumstances and
the conventions which precede the union.
In attempting to make my ideas clear
to you | will take the usual, rather than
the exceptional girl, the girls who belong
to the very small set whose wealth and
imported tradition make both their
training and their environments some
thing quite apart from the ordinary,
and the girls whose lives are dedicated
to toll from childhood up | will leave
out, but will take the average American
girl and from my observation will try
and tell you how she glides into nnatri-
mony. She has been we'll brought up,
in comfortable home. Her parents are
neither rich nor poor. She has recei-
we'd the usual education, she has had a
happy uneventful childhood, her friends
are those whose homelife has been pre-
cise1y like her own; and finally, when
she reaches the age of eighteen or TWEEN
ty, she is regarded as grown up and
ready to take a won1an's place in her
own small world She is just the av-
erage girl, not brilliant but with good
mind, not pretty perhaps, but termed
good looking with the attractive combin-
alton Of health, good spirits, freshness
of feeling and youth. As yet she is
absolutely superficial, nothing has ever
touched in her the chords of deep emo
ton She lives. from day to day, enjoy
ing each simple pleasure as it comes.
Her careless thoughts are all of trivial
things, her talk is the very star-dust of
conversation, of life as it really is she
knows no more than a kitten, it all
looks roseate to her, cleaning vista
full of promise, and she views it through
the golden mist of hope, In all the
world there is nothing SO exquisite,
nothing so ineffably pathetic as she.
Presently comes into her life the in
eyitable man She has been expecting
him, all girls expect him, they see him
in their day dreams as curiously u1-
defined but intensely interesting posi-
bility. Their ignorance of love, the
very mystery Of it piques them and
makes authorization keener. Courtslip
marriage, these things they hear spoken
of as the growing joy of q woman
!, life; and to the girl Of eighteen or TWEEN
ty, they are what fairy stories are to the
child Of te1l-radiant, marvellous and I'M
real. they are in the background always
and when the actual man arrives, the
man, who in some way makes her
aware that She is singled out by hin
from other girls, then what a fluttei
she is in, she bushes and dinaples with
/ innocent delight. and she holds her head
higher among her friends, and smile:
lradiantly at all the world Bat is thi,
io9e2 BY no means, nor is it anything
like love- The man may be one Wht
never could appreciate her or appea
to anything within her that lies below
4