(And be surprised to see that word used in the C18th when ‘everybody knows’ that teenagers were only invented after WWII)
But the C18th psychology seems only too applicable today
Wedlock was presumably pretty soon followed by motherhood, the price you pay, perhaps the price worth paying, compensation or even a gift
If even those awe-ful words, “Til death do part” were not enough to deter her, what hope can we have that “sex & relationship education” will deter her modern counterpart from dreams of motherhood, when school & life seem to have so few other satisfactions to offer
These days she can dispense with the lock since the state will always provide for the child
Early Thoughts on Marriage
Those awful words “Til death do part”
May well alarm the youthful heart:
No after-thought when once a wife;
The die is cast, and cast for life;
Yet thousands venture every day
As some base passion leads the way.
Pert Sylvia talks of wedlock-scenes,
Though hardly entered on her teens;
Smiles on her whining spark, and hears
The sugared speech with raptured ears;
Impatient of a parent’s rule,
She leaves her sire, and weds a fool;
Want enters at the guardless door,
And Love is fled, to come no more.
Attend, my fair, to wisdom’s voice,
A better fate shall crown thy choice.
A married life, to speak the best,
Is all a lottery contest:
Yet if my fair-one will be wise,
I will ensure my girl a prize;
Though not a prize to match thy worth,
Perhaps thy equal’s not on earth.
‘Tis an important point to know,
There’s no perfection here below.
Man’s an odd compound after all,
And ever has been since the Fall.
Say, that he loves you from his soul,
Still man is proud, nor brooks control.
And though a slave in love’s soft school,
In wedlock claims his right to rule.
The best, in short, has faults about him,
If few those faults, you must not flout him.
Nathaniel Cotton (1705-1788)
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Teenage pregnancy
Teenage pregnancy
