Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/188

176 In the second place, a certain real lack of men to marry, here and now, in certain classes of society, and those the classes that lead thought, has made an exceptional number of able women at present husbandless, and thus has added strength to the feeling that women must and ought to earn their own living. How small and local this cause is I shall hereafter try to show: but there can be no doubt that it has much to do with the present discontents among women. There is a feeling abroad that many women can't get married; and this feeling, bolstered up by erroneous statistics and misunderstood facts, has greatly induced women to erect into an ideal for all what is really a pis-aller for a small fraction of their body self-support in competition with men.

But are there not seven hundred thousand more women than men in the United Kingdom? And must not these seven hundred thousand be enabled to earn their own living? That is the one solid fact which the "advanced" women are always flinging at our heads; and that is the one fallacious bit of statistics which seems at first sight to give some color of reasonableness to the arguments in favor of the defeminization of women.

As a matter of fact, the statistics are not true. There are not seven hundred thousand more women than men, but seven hundred thousand more females than males in the United Kingdom. The people who say "seven hundred thousand women," picture to themselves that vast body of marriageable girls, massed in a hollow square, and looking about them in vain, across wide leagues of country, for non-existent husbands. But figures are things that always require to be explained, and, above all, to be regarded in their true proportions to one another. These seven hundred thousand females include infants in arms, lunatics, sisters of charity, unfortunates, and ladies of eighty. A large part of the excess is due to the greater longevity of women; and the number comprises the great mass of widows, who have once in their lives possessed a husband of their own, and have outlived him, partly because they are, as a rule, younger, and partly by dint of their stronger constitutions. Moreover, this total disparity of seven hundred thousand, including babies, lunatics, and widows, is a disparity on a gross population of something more than thirty-five millions. Looking these figures straight in the face, we find the actual proportion of the sexes to be as 172 males to 179 females. Speaking very roughly, this makes about four females in every hundred, including babies, widows, and so forth, who have not a complementary male found for them. This in itself is surely no very terrible disproportion. It does not more than cover the relative number of women who are naturally debarred from marriage, or who under no circumstances would ever submit to be married. Out of every hundred women, roughly speaking, ninety-six have