Connie’s Reviews > The Lost Steps > Status Update

“I ask her, finally, in a wavering voice, if she wants us to marry, if she thinks there's any point in it. I imagine she will grab this opportunity to make me a character in a Sunday school illustration, but she replies, as though dumbfounded, that matrimony is of absolutely no interest to her. Now my surprise transforms to vindictive jealousy. I turn, wounded, to ask her for explanations, and am outraged when she repeats to me an argument I presume she's heard from her sisters, who must have heard it from their mother in turn, and that is, perhaps, the source of that baffling pride of those women, who seem to fear nothing: that a legally binding marriage strips a woman of any opportunity to defend herself from her husband. That the one weapon a woman has against a man who strays is her ability to abandon him at any moment, to leave him bereft of any claim on her person. For Rosario, a lawfully wedded wife is a woman the police can track down when she escapes a home where adultery, enslavement, or drunkenness reign. To marry is to be crushed under the burden of laws created by men, not women. Whereas in a free union—Rosario affirms in a grave tone—"the man knows he must behave if he wishes to hold on to the woman who gives him pleasure and care." I confess, the peasant logic in this left me unable to reply. Your woman's notions, customs, and principles regarding life are evidently not my own. And I feel humiliated, vexingly inferior, because now I am trying to convince her to marry…”