The gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the last
century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly
delivered from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the
oppressions of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made
enormous progress—perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand years
preceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne so
harshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakable
benefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make
marriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken down
that large classes of women are now almost free agents, and quite
independent of the favour of men. Most of these women, responding to
ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by
marriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the fact
remains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire
necessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn’t marry if
they don’t want to; it is possible to get their bread by their own
labour in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in a far
more difficult position. Failing marriage, they not only suffered a
cruel ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual
starvation. There was simply no respectable place in the economy of
those times for the free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or
accept a disdainful patronage that was as galling as charity.
Nothing could be plainer than the effect that the increasing economic
security of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind.
The diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing
birth rates show which way the wind is blowing. It is common for male
statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in
the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This
growing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no
considerable body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that
marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that large
numbers of them now approach the business with far greater
fastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited.
They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often. The woman of a
century ago could imagine nothing more favourable to her than marriage;
even marriage with a fifth rate man was better than no marriage at all.
This notion is gradually feeling the opposition of a contrary notion.
Women in general may still prefer marriage to work, but there is an
increasing minority which begins to realize that work may offer the
greater contentment, particularly if it be mellowed by a certain amount
of philandering.
There already appears in the world, indeed, a class of women, who,
while still not genuinely averse to marriage, are yet free from any
theory that it is necessary, or even invariably desirable. Among these
women are a good many somewhat vociferous propagandists, almost male in
their violent earnestness; they range from the man-eating suffragettes
to such preachers of free motherhood as Ellen Key and such professional
shockers of the bourgeoisie as the American prophetess of
birth-control, Margaret Sanger. But among them are many more who wake
the world with no such noisy eloquence, but content themselves with
carrying out their ideas in a quiet and respectable manner. The number
of such women is much larger than is generally imagined, and that
number tends to increase steadily. They are women who, with their
economic independence assured, either by inheritance or by their own
efforts, chiefly in the arts and professions, do exactly as they
please, and make no pother about it. Naturally enough, their
superiority to convention and the common frenzy makes them extremely
attractive to the better sort of men, and so it is not uncommon for one
of them to find herself voluntarily sought in marriage, without any
preliminary scheming by herself—surely an experience that very few
ordinary women ever enjoy, save perhaps in dreams or delirium.
The old order changeth and giveth place to the new. Among the women’s
clubs and in the women’s colleges, I have no doubt, there is still much
debate of the old and silly question: Are platonic relations possible
between the sexes? In other words, is friendship possible without sex?
Many a woman of the new order dismisses the problem with another
question: Why without sex? With the decay of the ancient concept of
women as property there must come inevitably a reconsideration of the
whole sex question, and out of that reconsideration there must come a
revision of the mediaeval penalties which now punish the slightest
frivolity in the female. The notion that honour in women is exclusively
a physical matter, that a single aberrance may convert a woman of the
highest merits into a woman of none at all, that the sole valuable
thing a woman can bring to marriage is virginity—this notion is so
preposterous that no intelligent person, male or female, actually
cherishes it. It survives as one of the hollow conventions of
Christianity; nay, of the levantine barbarism that preceded
Christianity. As women throw off the other conventions which now bind
them they will throw off this one, too, and so their virtue, grounded
upon fastidiousness and self-respect instead of upon mere fear and
conformity, will become afar more laudable thing than it ever can be
under the present system. And for its absence, if they see fit to
dispose of it, they will no more apologize than a man apologizes today.