Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/557

Rh know her only as a stenographer, a teacher or a journalist. Our last census returns show how widespread this condition is, for except in New England, there is no excess of men in the cities. But in the countryside the excess of men is great, for they have been left behind in the struggle towards larger intellectual and economic independence which has swept the young women into the towns.

These women, possessing a fairly large intellectual and professional life, often move in a pitifully narrow social circle. The home, as a center for social activity, has been sadly squeezed in our emigration from the country into the city. Friends and acquaintances come less often than in the past to spend a few days with the family. Calls are more formal and brief. Acquaintances less often drop in for a meal; and meantime the older social conditions that limit a woman's initiative in making acquaintances still hold and are broken by young women only at considerable risk.

Even public meeting places are apt to be restricted to one sex. If the girl joins a club, it is a girl's club; if she joins the Y.W.C.A., the young men are a half mile away in the Y.M.C.A. When shall we be wise enough to turn both these institutions into Young People's Christian Associations? And meantime, while the hunting field is narrow, the difficulty of selection has increased. A generation ago, as we have pointed out, a girl might hope to find a desirable mate among a dozen acquaintances. Now she needs to look over a hundred young men to find her own.

In the light of this analysis the wonder is not that we have so many unmarried women in America, but that we have so few. Nature has loaded the dice in favor of marriage and she generally has her own way. Many of these young women, however, will never marry. Nuns will continue to vow their virginity to the Celestial Bridegroom; reformers will spend their lives in securing social justice for their sisters and for their sisters' children; professional women will continue to seek fame and service; teachers will fight off the wars of the future, not with submarines and aeroplanes, but with ideas and ideals planted and nourished in young minds. Many other women, with no particular devotion to sustain them, will be held by the charm of pay envelopes and independent latch keys until it is too late; while the accidents of fate will leave many stranded in their struggle towards a complete life.

Meantime there can be no doubt that the most complete life a woman can live, at least between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, is found in a marriage based on a deep and lasting love; and the same is no less true for a man. What, then, has our modern life to offer to celibate women as compensation for the life they do not attain?

There are at least certain negative values which come to them.