Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/92

 , the independent class is recruited from those who are low in the scale of beauty, and hence are “rejects” from the matrimonial market. If this were the case with all, the tendency of industrial feminism would be to improve the remaining stock; but conditions are not so simple. Many self-supporting women—how many it is impossible to estimate—have opportunities to marry, but set their own standards of selection high, and are not content to accept the partners of the grade offered. As a result not only are they lost to posterity, but the declined males mate with females lower in the scale of fitness, and thus a double damage is done to the stock.

No permanent good could conceivably result from checking the growth of industrial freedom of women. In the course of time—and not probably a long time either—the disorganization of the entire family system resulting from this freedom will render imperative sweeping industrial and social changes which, if we maintain our ideals, can be such as will reestablish family life on a higher plane, and remove many of the injustices which civilization has long tolerated.

That the economic freedom of women has effects even more fundamental than the production of a nonparental class, is evident to any one who dips beneath the surface of society. The “double standard” of morals, resulting partly from ancient