By Dorothy Dix
Do we own those whom we love? Does the mere fact that we entertain an affection for a certain individual make him or her our bond slave?
Somehow the idea seems to prevail that those whom we love belong to us, body and soul—that they are our chattels just as much as any slave that was ever sold on the auction block.
The great majority of parents regard their children as their personal property, and feel that they have as much right to do as they please with them as they would with a horse or any other animal that they own.
In the lower ranks of life this feeling takes the form of exploiting their children for money, and the reason that it is necessary to enact child labor laws is because so many fathers and mothers sell t heir little children into slavery so that they may live in idleness on the labor of the toiling little e hands.
Of course, people of the better sort do not consider that they own their children bodily, and do not regard their children as slaves who must work to support them, but there are very few fathers and mothers who do not feel that they own their children’s souls.
They honestly believe that they have the right to decide their children’s lives for them. Nine times out of 10, when you hear parents speak of their children having been a great disappointment to them, or of their children having given them a great deal of trouble, or of their children being ungrateful, it merely means that the children have insisted on doing the things they wanted to do in the world, instead of the things that their fathers and mothers wanted them to do.
A mother who is fond of society, for instance, considers that she has a right to make her daughter to parties instead of to college, as the girl wants to do. An ambitious mother considers herself extremely ill-used if she cannot induce her daughter to marry a rich suitor instead of the poor man she happens to love.
How many men we know of are failures because their fathers forced them into being business men when nature made them lawyers or doctors, or who are unsuccessful lawyers or doctors, when they were designed for trade or mechanics.
Yet these fathers love their sons, they desire them to prosper and be happy, but they feel that their affection makes their boys their property, and gives them the right to do with them as they please and dispose of them as they see fit.
It is because parents feel that their children belong to them, and that they have no right to live their own lives in their own way, that young people become anxious to get away from home, because that is the only way they can break their shackles. For no son or daughter, as long as they live at home, ever have one single moment of freedom, or one vestige of personal liberty, even if they are 60 years old.
It is to get away from mother’s petty tyranny that girls marry the first man who asks them. It is to get away from having to furnish an alibi for every single minute they are out of the house that makes sons hut work away from home. It is because old people feel that they have a right to run their children’s houses, and their husbands, and their wives, and their grandchildren, and because they continually object, and advise, and supervise everything about them, that make father and mother a burden to their children, and a nightmare to their in-laws when the old people have to be taken into their children’s homes.
The idea that matrimony is a slave market wherein you acquire the person and soul of another individual is responsible for nine-tenths of the divorces that clutter up society. Too many men believe that their wives belong to them, and that they have a right to their services without pay, and to dictate to them exactly what they shall think and do, and how they shall spend their time.
There are plenty of women who never have a dollar of their own after they are married; who never even have the right to a thought of their own, or an hour’s freedom, and who have to ask their husbands’ permission even to join a club, or to go see their mothers.
And there are women who believe that they got a quit claim deed to their husbands when they married, and that they have a right to take all that their poor slave can earn, and to supervise every act of his life. They would simply be horrified at the idea of the man whom they are married thinking he had any right to the money he makes, or to take any pleasure in his own way, or exercise any of the privileges of a free man.
It is because we think those we love belong to us, instead of realizing that every human being belongs to himself or herself, and that what he or she gives us is a free gift, and not our right, that makes most of the unhappiness in life. Because it enslaves us by the terrible tyranny of live, against which we are helpless.
It is this tyranny of love, against which we are so helpless, that kills love; that drives husbands and wives to the divorce court, that alienates friends, that makes children leave home, and that is the curse of domesticity.
None of us can escape it. We can only pray those who love us to be merciful to us.
(Copyright, 1923, by Public Ledger Company)
From the Society page of the Durham Morning Herald, Sept. 28, 1923. Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer (1861-1951) wrote under the pen name of Dorothy Dix. She was forerunner of today’s popular advice columnists and was America’s highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death.
