Page:The Future of Single Women.pdf/8

 towards higher organization and differentiation which exercise so great an influence in a civilized society and on the single women of to-day.

The old-fashioned tyranny which allowed to women no real life but marriage is truly passing away, and it begins to be recognized that special qualities are necessary for married life which all people do not possess.

There still exists however a very large number of persons whose intolerance of celibacy is only equalled by the religious intolerance of former days. It comes as a new and startling fact to them that there are women in England at this day who, having weighed the advantages and disadvantages of married and single life, deliberately choose the latter. The intolerance of society, on what is after all a matter of taste, is so overbearing, that if a woman frankly states her preference, she is told that celibacy being distasteful to her neighbour cannot be agreeable to herself.

As we remarked a little time ago, "If the normal condition of woman is to be a wife and a mother, as such she is heavily weighted in the industrial market, but this only applies where the woman chooses to allow herself to be thus handicapped. She may or may not prefer what is called the normal condition. There is nothing to prevent her enjoying what Mr. Higginson calls an industrial picnic in solitude. It appears to us that the proportion of women who like to enjoy their industrial picnic in solitude is increasing, and, moreover, that it is voluntarily increasing and not as of necessity. It is also very capable of contention that this applies to those of the female sex who are intellectually superior to the average man or woman."

The normal condition of wifehood and motherhood, with the multifarious domestic duties involved, is a serious drawback to industrial, public, or professional life; such employments may be, and are, successfully carried on occasionally by those who are married and have children to care for. A married woman is happier for having some congenial non-domestic pursuit, some interest which relieves her from the monotony of household cares, but these are exceptional cases. The principle of race-preservation, which is fundamental in a society, and which has hitherto been common to all women, has by differentiation now become the prime function of those women who have chosen marriage and motherhood; they carry out this aim to which, for them, all others are subservient, and to which they are especially fitted by character and taste; therefore it can only be in spite of great difficulties that outside interests are maintained by married women.

No one denies that the conditions under which