Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/189

Rh husbands provided for them by nature, and only four need go into a nunnery or take to teaching the higher mathematics. And if the marriageable men and women only are reckoned in the account, as far as I can gather from existing statistics, the disproportion sinks to a quite insignificant fraction.

Nevertheless, it is a fact, that both in England and America the marriageable men of the middle and upper classes are not to the fore, and that accordingly in these classes the—discussing, thinking, agitating classes—an undue proportion of women remains unmarried. The causes of this class disparity are not far to seek. In America the young man has gone West. In England he is in the army, in the navy, in the Indian Civil Service, in the Cape Mounted Rifles. He is sheep-farming in New Zealand, ranching in Colorado, growing tea in Assam, planting coffee in Ceylon; he is a cowboy in Montana, or a wheat-farmer in Manitoba, or a diamond-digger at Kimberley, or a merchant at Melbourne: in short, he is anywhere and everywhere except where he ought to be, making love to the pretty girls in England. For, being a man, I, of course, take it for granted that the first business of a girl is to be pretty.

Owing to these causes, it has unfortunately happened that a period of great upheaval in the female mind has coincided with a period when the number of unmarried women in the cultivated classes was abnormally large. The upheaval would undoubtedly have taken place in our time, even without the co-operation of this last exacerbating cause. The position of women was not a position which could bear the test of nineteenth-century scrutiny. Their education was inadequate; their social status was humiliating; their political power was nil; their practical and personal grievances were innumerable: above all, their relation to the family—to their husbands, their children, their friends, their property—was simply insupportable. A real Woman Question there was, and is, and must be. The pity of it is that the coincidence of its recognition with the dearth of marriageable men in the middle and upper classes has largely deflected the consequent movement into wrong and essentially impracticable channels.

For the result has been that, instead of subordinating the claims of the unmarried women to the claims of the wives and mothers, the movement has subordinated the claims of the wives and mothers to the claims of the unmarried women. Almost all the Woman's Rights women have constantly spoken, thought, and written as though it were possible and desirable for the mass of women to support themselves, and to remain unmarried forever. The point of view they all tacitly take is the point of view of the self-supporting spinster. Now, the self-supporting spinster