The Women of Tomorrow Part 3

Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it squares with the present character of the s.e.xes. The s.e.x which originated as a s.e.x-thing remains the more actively s.e.xed.

There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While on his "Inland Voyage" he observed in this matter that "it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being."

The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this time have demolished the ethical code.

Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.

In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at that last age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say, Providence, R.I., in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five, twenty out of every hundred women are still single.

In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional s.e.x life, venal, furtive, ign.o.ble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for poisoning the blood of life.

Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.

Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for the ma.s.s of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any great cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.

Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated quarters--women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.

On the one side--intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side--inferior women blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of youth!

The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts sleep, we rouse them and fight them we can make a better race.

The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the Pasteur Inst.i.tute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that "among highly civilized peoples marriage and _regular_ unions are impossible at the _right time_."

And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the committee of fifteen on the social evil, notes the parallel increase of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of vice."

He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts of the case.

"As a rule," he says, "the income which a young man earns, while sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not suffice for founding a family."

He cannot found a family at the _right_ time. He goes unmarried through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at their keenest and when the other s.e.x, in its most vividly idealized perfection, is most poignantly desired.

Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson says, "his standard of personal comfort rises." Romance has been succeeded by calculation. "Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether."

Celibacy through the age of romance! It's emotionally wrong.

s.e.xlessness for a score of years after s.e.x has awakened! It's biologically wrong. It's a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social ills.

"But what of all that?" thought Mary. "Those things are just observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John."

At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.

_She became a woman of the future._

"Look here," she said to John, "I'm working. You're working. We're single. Very well. We'll change it. I'm working. You're working.

We're married. Have we lost anything? And we've gained each other."

They were married and Mary kept on working.

Two years later she stopped working.

In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn't operate soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs and spinning wheels for him. But she brought him an equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1,000 a year.

Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him pursue success.

"I wouldn't give up the memory of those two years," Mary used to say, as she sat and st.i.tched for her children, "for anything. I shared at least a part of my husband's youth."

By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable.

They had come to know each other and to help form each other's character and to share each other's difficulties in the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in comfort and they could look back like Browning's middle-aged estranged lovers to say:

"We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."

"It used to take two to start a home in colonial days," Mary would say. "I am really an old-fas.h.i.+oned woman. I helped to make this home.

We had twelve hundred dollars in the bank when I stopped working, and John was pretty well established.

"I don't regret it," she went on, still speaking as a woman of the future, "even for the children. Of course I do wish we had started earlier. But I would have wanted to wait a while for the children in any case. People risk too much when they start a family before they become sufficiently used to marriage and to each other to know that they can keep on loving each other and to know that they have in them through their mutual, continued happiness the power to make a happy home, a n.o.ble home, for children to live in."

As for the number of children she will have--we reserve that subject for future discussion. We call attention here only to this:

That the facts which were cited from the Smith College records are harmonious with many other facts and records tending to show that the fertility of the modern wife has been considerably underrated, just as the fertility of the colonial wife has been considerably exaggerated.

And this:

That Mary got to her childbearing period sooner than she would have if she hadn't insisted on marrying John before he was ready to support her. Those two years would have been childless years in any case. But they would probably, if it hadn't been for Mary's money, have been lengthened into four or five.

Of course, later marriages in themselves tend to reduce the number of children. As to quality, however, the evidence is not clear. There is even some reason to think that a moderate postponement is conducive to an improvement in quality.

Did you ever read Havelock Ellis's book called "A Study of British Genius"?

He made a list of the most distinguished of eminent British persons and studied everything about them, from their religious opinions to the color of their hair.

In the matter of the age of their parents, he finds that the average age of the father at the birth of the person of genius was thirty-seven years, while the average of the mother was thirty-one.

His conclusion is: "On the whole it would appear, so far as the evidence goes, that the fathers of our eminent persons have been predominantly middle-aged and to a marked extent elderly at the time of the distinguished son's birth; while the mothers have been predominantly at the period of greatest vigor and maturity and to a somewhat unusual extent elderly. There has been a notable deficiency of young fathers and, still more notably, of young mothers."

And did you ever see the study which Mr. R. S. Holway made for the Department of Education of Leland Stanford University on "The Age of Parents: Its Effects upon Children"? His conclusions are:

"In most physical qualities the children of mature parents tend to come out best.

"In mental ability the children of young parents show best at an early age but rapidly lose their precocity.

"The elder children who show best tend to be the children of mature and old parents.

"The children of elderly mothers show a tendency to superiority throughout."

Mary did not know about all this, but she had a very strong opinion to the effect that, in so far as the quality of her children could be affected by their home training, she was glad she had spent at least a few years earning her living.

"Every woman," said Mary, "ought to have some little time for developing into an individual. Home won't do it altogether. Not nowadays. The colonial home did, being part of the working world. But what is the modern home? It is a nest, an eddy, a shelf, a nook. It's something apart from the world. If a woman is going to prepare her son for a knowledge of the real world, if she's going to be able to give him a training which has in it an understanding and an appreciation of the real world, if she's going to be able to educate him into real living, she must nowadays and increasingly in the future have some experience of her own on her own account in the real world before she becomes a mother. There's no getting away from that. A reasonable postponement of motherhood till the future mother becomes a competent individual will hereafter be urged, not opposed."

"The trouble about that," said John, "is that it makes you too independent of me. Your proposition is to start in and earn your living till you're pretty good at it. That is, you wouldn't marry me till you were sure you could chuck me. How about that?"

Well, it has that side. But it has its other side, too.