We come now to one of the most important questions of all; that of the marriage contract. One fair rough criterion of any civilization is the clearness and sanctity of its contracts. And, in this particular matter, the woman has far more interest than the man; for, as the physically weaker party, and the less able to stand up by herself against economic competition, she suffers far more through the break-up of a household and the care of the derelict children; nor can we imagine any state of society—unless, perhaps, we ever arrived at mechanical incubation, as with poultry—in which she would not be the party more interested in stability of marriage than her mate.

From Adam and Eve onwards, the woman's duty had always been to spin; thus spinster became a natural designation for an unmarried girl. In early European civilization (e.g. under Charlemagne) there were great spinning-chambers, gynaecea, for the girls. “The great emperor was so anxious that womankind should be employed in productive labour, that he made his own daughters work in the domestic gynaeceum as diligently as the other females.” Though these seem to have died out gradually, until economic progress revived the system again in fifteenth-century England, and much earlier in Italy and the Low Countries, yet there was always a tendency, natural in medieval circumstances, to deal with the younger female population in the mass. In 1285, a French lord manumitted by will, “for the health of my soul, one hundred girls from my two estates”.