Page:University Education for Women.djvu/11

 further all agree, I think, that for most women marriage, provided it is marriage to the right man, offers the best prospect of carrying out our ideal in the most satisfactory manner. But here the difficulties begin. We cannot choose marriage as we choose a profession, and we know that as a matter of fact a great many women, especially in the upper or professional classes, do not marry. It would be beyond the scope of the present paper to enquire why this is so, and any complete answer would involve a somewhat difficult statistical investigation. It is sometimes attributed simply to the surplus female population which, we know from the census, exists. But this will not I think fully account for the number of women who do not marry, and I suspect, though it could only be proved by investigation, that the high standard of living compared with the smallness of many professional incomes, leads men to abstain from marriage. I do not think that disinclination to marriage in the abstract exists to any large extent among women; nor am I inclined to attribute to them any undue reluctance to marry on small incomes.

In any case, whatever the cause, the fact is certain that there is for most young women of the more educated classes, a dual and entirely uncertain outlook—life with marriage on the one hand, and without it on the other—with only a limited power of choice in the matter. It is true that even for those who do marry there is usually an interval of grown-up life to be filled up before marriage, while there is also the possibility of an early and childless widowhood, so that some portion of unmarried life may be looked forward to in almost all cases, but a few years before marriage is of course a very different thing from lifelong spinsterhood. We have to consider then to what extent the same preparation is suitable for both women who marry and those who do not, and this partly depends on what we think women ought to do if they do not marry.

It would now, I think, be generally admitted that parents who cannot leave their daughters a sufficient fortune to secure them comfortable independence would be