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Why Women Are So: Chapter XV: Family Perplexities

Why Women Are So
Chapter XV: Family Perplexities
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table of contents
  1. Title Page
  2. The Hypothesis
  3. Section I: The Domestic Traditions
    1. Chapter I: The Conventions of Girlhood
    2. Chapter II: The Great Adventure
    3. Chapter III: The Career of Motherhood
    4. Chapter IV: Domesticity as a Vocation
  4. Section II: The Effect Upon Women
    1. Chapter V: The Feminine Temperament
    2. Chapter VI: Beauty and Weakness
    3. Chapter VII: The Pursuit of Dress
    4. Chapter VIII: Clothes and Character
    5. Chapter IX: The Virtues of Subservience
  5. Section III: Some Exceptions
    1. Chapter X: The Elect Among Women
    2. Chapter XI: The Phantom of the Learned Lady
    3. Chapter XII: Women Insurgents
    4. Chapter XIII: Literary Amateurs
  6. Section IV: From Femininity to Womanhood
    1. Chapter XIV: The Significance of Femininity
    2. Chapter XV: Family Perplexities
    3. Chapter XVI: The Larger Life and Citizenship

Section IV: From Femininity to Womanhood

Chapter XV: Family Perplexities

"Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But now the wife, and particularly the loving, childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete association, and the husband exacts unthought-of delicacies of understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands. . . .

"No contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to recognize any claim a man can make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devotion to him. She wants the reality of choice, and she means 'family,' while a man too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family relations fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and, incidentally, child-producing, chattel. . . ."

—From A New Machiavelli—H. G. Wells, 1910.

The Twentieth-Century woman is in process of transition from hyper-femininity to balanced womanhood. This movement, represented in the middle of the last century by sporadic, exceptional types; and since then by larger groups, such as the college alumnae on the one hand, and women in industry on the other, is steadily gathering momentum. Of all the vocations listed in the current census, there is not one which women have not attempted. At the same time, household management is rapidly becoming an applied science; and motherhood and the rearing of children are taken with infinitely greater seriousness and are measured by a rising standard of devotion and intelligence.

While social conservatives point out—what cannot be denied—that women grow less and less domesticated and feminine in habit; and, while the prophets of the feminists reply that they are, nevertheless, more womanly and humane; plain, thoughtful men and women are puzzled and apprehensive in the face of the problems raised by the change. The proud father who, at some sacrifice, sends his clever daughter to college, is surprised to find that when she returns home she is not satisfied to be merely the ornament of the house and the comfort of her parents until she marries. He is troubled by her critical attitude toward her suitors, her disdain of protection, and her reserve toward marriage. The sweet, domestic mother, whose whole life has been absorbed in domestic detail and in childbearing, grieves that her daughter, just out of school, insists on going to a business college, or to a training-school for nurses, to learn to earn her living "when it is quite unnecessary."

At the other extreme are the "emancipated" parents who, because of their own limitations and mistakes, have an intense desire to plant their girls in a larger life than the old conventional domesticity. They are often astonished and disappointed to find their daughters relapsing into traditional femininity under the fundamental impulses of maternity. All the advantages of education seem to have been thrown away; for the higher culture seems to bear no essential relation to the inevitable duties of the domestic woman.

After all, the confusion and doubts of parents are of less account than the perplexities of the marriageable young woman of this transitional day. She sees that older women accepted as right—if not satisfactory—the peculiar status which was half-domestic, half-dependent; but she has somehow acquired an instinctive sense, from the social atmosphere, from the newspapers, from the example of women who have "done things," that she ought not to accept unquestioningly such a plane for herself. She wants to marry, but does not dare to say so, and must, therefore, practise the ancient arts of concealment and coquetry; or, scorning to do so, is likely to remain unmarried.

If she marries under the impetus of natural passion and maternal instinct—nothing having been said to her of the real meaning of marriage or the nature of men—she invariably begins with a romantic and unpractical idea of what she ought to give and receive. The women of former generations had to marry or fail utterly in life, from the standpoint of their world. They took, consequently, any kind of man, the best that offered, blindly accepting whatever fate the alliance brought them. They considered themselves fortunate if the master of their destiny was a good provider and a kind father to their children. However mis-mated, they could not face the horror of divorce; nor could they support themselves and their children in an industrial world which was not yet in need of untrained women. Duty to their husbands and religious sanction made child-bearing—regardless of the quality of the child or the need of population—inevitable and involuntary. Although purely instinctive parenthood produced large numbers of under-vitalized, defective human beings that ought never to have been born, the belief that these were providentially sent and were useful to the state relieved the parents from all responsibility for their uncertain quality.

The intelligent young parents of to-day, however, after a child or two has arrived—if not before—begin to calculate the cost and, perhaps, the inconvenience of children under the more exacting standards of modern life. Professor Amos G. Warner once calculated roughly that even in a laboring man's family a baby two months old cost not less than one hundred dollars; while in fairly well-to-do families the expense of extra service while the mother was incapacitated, of nursing, of doctor's attendance, of the layette, and of petty incidentals, amounted to five hundred and sometimes to a thousand dollars. With an ever-increasing emphasis on the hygienic care of children, modern parents cannot but count the cost of them in personal sacrifices as well as in money. The more intelligent the population becomes, the more will married people comprehend that society is not so much in need of mere human beings as of well-born, well-nurtured, competent, moralized citizens. Some people may develop a larger paternity, like that of Leland and Jane Stanford, who, when they had lost their delicate only son, founded a university with the motto: "The children of California shall be my children."

Perhaps there is nothing which the thoughtful married woman of the younger generation resents more than the assumption on the part of theorists that the decline in the birth-rate is due chiefly to her selfishness and failure in maternity. She knows, but cannot publicly explain, that in not a few cases husbands are unwilling to subordinate their careers to unregulated instinct; preferring few or no children, with a care-free, comely partner and a quiet household. Some modern men value their wives for companionship more than for child-bearing, and it sometimes happens that the wife is only allowed to have her baby as a sort of concession to what the husband regards as an overdeveloped maternal craving. And other men have a conscience toward the unborn child and toward society, wishing to bring into the world only those that are fit and that can be properly brought up.

If husbands of these exceptional types were men of dissolute habits and extreme selfishness, or unintelligent, they might be set down as merely abnormal; but they are, in fact, as a class, the physically and morally fit, who would make good parents. That they hesitate or decline to be fathers of large families points not to the deficiencies of women, but to a racial change which is going on toward the whole problem of population. By far the larger part of mankind are fathers, not because they are consciously paternal, but because they wish a home and a woman, and must take its consequences. Even among these families the onus of the childless household or the single-child family no longer rests upon women alone. Within a decade scientific medical research has transferred it largely to men. The revelation of the direct causal relation between venereal diseases among men and sterility and physical degeneration among married women has only just begun to take effect. In time it must afford that new "sanction for pre-marital chastity" in men which a modern German scientist urges as the absolute essential of a self-renewing and healthy population.

All this recent agitation against "the conspiracy of silence," this criticism of the childless married woman, this modern emphasis on childcare, this expose of the unchastity of the average young man, cannot but reach in some form the girl who thinks of marriage and children, however carefully she may be guarded. The girls of leisure, who fill up the interval between schooldays and marriage with friendly visiting, hospital and charity labors, church and settlement work among the poor, must come upon the tragic origin of defective children; and cannot fail to see how many children are undesired and neglected. Unlike the secluded and ignorant young creatures of former times, who became wives before they were physically grown, the modern young woman sees and fears and questions the facts of sex; and by so much as she does so, will wish to know more and to exact more of any man who offers himself to be the father of her children. Herein will lie many tragedies both for the man and the woman.

Under the influence of contradictory impulses many girls now go into wage-earning. The ranks of school teaching and office workers are filled up with young women of the comfortable middle-class, who, in a former day, would have remained at home waiting to be married. Since these workers are likely to have more self-respect and more initiative than those who accept dependence without question, they are a strong and selected class; and by that fact, therefore, they are more fit to be mothers. The office women, in the course of their work, are likely to meet men of similar tastes and aims, and to marry with every chance of happiness. But the school teachers are, by the very conditions of their trade, an isolated class; and thus it comes about that thousands of young women of exceptional education and capacity find an outlet for their maternal instincts in the task of doing for children what their parents cannot do.

Nature, indeed, may have no use for childless people; and a society that is under the necessity to breed vast numbers of soldiers abhors them. But in the American world, where militarism plays small part in the lives of ordinary citizens, and where there is an increasing effort to preserve child-life, there is an immense need of those who have strong childward instincts, and who can be satisfied with vicarious parenthood. The tenderly maternal, patient women who carry on the kindergartens, the orphan asylums, the hospitals for crippled children, and the homes for defectives; or who spend their lives among the poor in settlements, have compensations for their childlessness such as many unthinking parents who take their children impatiently, in the course of nature, never knew. And if there are still some who cannot be fully satisfied to hold in their arms any child except one of their own fulfilled love, even such enforced denial is not so great a tragedy as the mother who brings into the world infants she cannot wish for and perhaps finds it difficult to love.

Historians have pointed out that the Christian celibacy of the Middle Ages prevented the reproduction of the most refined and the most intellectual class in Europe; yet it was the monks and nuns who kept alight the shrines of Faith, who trimmed the lamp of learning, who preserved the gentleness of unselfish, humane religion. While the whole Continent of Europe was drenched in blood and devastated by religious wars, while plague and ignorance mowed down the helpless people, the scholar and the devotee cherished the seeds of civilization. So in our day the childless, whether single or married, may find a larger duty to their kind than the easy gratification of instinct; and may make as great contributions to society as those who follow nature without question.

Undoubtedly the higher ideal of love as well as of parental duty in our day prevents the marriage of some of the best individuals, because "it differs wholly from localized passion in being selective." Although, in the readjustment of higher ideals, there are now some women unmarried who would make superior mothers, and many others, undeveloped and uneducated, who make very poor ones, there are a few—prophetic of the many soon to come—who deliberately and joyously choose motherhood. At the time when the women's colleges were founded and the coeducational method was established in the state universities, two main objections were made by the conservatives. It was said that girls who were to marry did not need such an education; and that, if they took it, they would not wish to marry. But in the forty years since then, thousands of college women have disproved both of these contentions, and have, besides, borne as many and as vigorous children as the women of the same social class who were educated in the traditional feminine ways. Although they found it extremely difficult to apply a classical training—devised by men for men of a special class—to domestic needs, their mental culture has been by no means wasted. They could, at any rate, grasp the problems of their children's education. To their experience and their effort is due, in great measure, the demand for domestic training for girls in schools as well as colleges; and also the growing emphasis upon sanitation, hygiene, physiology, and physical training, to the neglect of piano-playing, fancy needlework, and the purely ornamental requirements for girls.

There is an increasing number of young women who, in spite of a purely masculine culture, have survived to be exceptionally happy and fortunate mothers of strong, clever children. I have in mind one who, after attaining the Phi Beta Kappa, and making a brilliant record as a teacher, married a college man, and is now the mother of six fine children. When the third of these was born within fifteen months of the second, a friend suggested that this was rather too precipitate. The mother smilingly and contentedly replied: "But I married so late—if I am to have a family I must be quick about it." Yet she had been a rich girl, had married a poor man, and has never had more than eighteen hundred a year to spend for the family. As the expense of higher education for the children comes on, she is returning to tutoring as a means of fulfilling her parental ambitions. When they shall have been launched in life, she will yet have many years in which to recoup herself for all her sacrifices, by personal culture and in public service.

If it be thought that such a woman is exceptional, let it here be set down as a fact that there is a daily growing roster of voluntary mothers. Out of the confusions of domestic readjustment there is emerging a new and higher ideal of motherhood and family life. As the delicate, prudish, ignorant girl of a former time is replaced by those more robust, more sensibly dressed, and more practically educated, more and more of them will choose to marry poor young men, not at all to be supported, nor solely under the glamor of romantic love, but for the sake of equal comradeship and for the sacrificial joys of motherhood. They are neither afraid nor victimized, but choosers of their fate and adequate to meet it.

The most hopeful signs of our times are, on the one hand, the increase of voluntary, conscious, intelligent parenthood in the middle stratum of society; and, on the other, the tendency to limit degenerate procreation both by public sentiment and by law. The marital tragedies of our time are, to a considerable extent, due to the fact that men are as yet lagging behind women in their racial conscience. The more refined nature and the intimate personal relation of women to posterity give them a clearer vision of the consequences of indiscriminate and unregulated sexuality. Men still associate sex-vigor with manliness, and, having been brought up in the conventional theory that the sex appetite is beyond control, and its gratification essential to health, they have, as a class, no adequate motive for chastity before marriage, nor for self-restraint afterwards.

Since even engaged persons rarely have any understanding on this fundamental matter, they begin their married life in entire ignorance of each other's views, and often with widely differing standards. The specious terms of the divorce court, in a very large number of cases, cover the tragic incompatibility on this primary relation, which both partners have too much decency to confess. The very innocence in which girls are still enshrouded makes them, as wives, unjust to their more primitive partners; and the atmosphere of vulgarity in which the average boy grows up makes it impossible for the man to understand the shocks that the commonplaces of sex experience bring to the idealistic woman. Formerly, the woman had no future but marriage, and no recourse after marriage but endurance; but the modern woman who goes into social work or wage-earning, senses dimly, if she does not fully know, the animality of certain types of men, whom she will not marry, while these men themselves instinctively prefer a less critical and more sensual partner. And if, a refined woman should marry such a man, it is evident that no woman, however vital, is likely to satisfy one who has acquired the habits of promiscuity.

A partial explanation of the changing attitude of young women toward marriage must be sought in the entirely altered conditions of courtship. The girls of two and three generations ago were courted briefly and married promptly before their physique was mature or their characters crystallized. It was far easier for a semi-child of eighteen or less to accept a husband's rule than it is for the modern woman, who marries at maturity, and who has already had some life of her own. In our day nearly two-thirds of all girls in the whole country between sixteen and twenty years of age are engaged in some gainful occupation. The period of courtship, and even of betrothal, is greatly prolonged, and marriages are far less likely to be hastily made. If the marital adjustments are more difficult because the habits of the partners are more fixed, there is compensation in the fact that they marry less blindly and with better judgment.

Moreover, the conditions of courtship are rapidly changing. It is less the game of pursuer and pursued; more a preliminary excursion in which the young pair who are mutually attracted try out each other's characters. Formerly courtship was carried on under abnormal circumstances, at parties, and when both boy and girl were on their best behavior. But nowadays they grow up seeing each other every day, in school and college classrooms, in stores and offices, on boats and cars, as they travel to and fro about their work. There is constant opportunity for them to learn each other's essential qualities, and time enough for one or more trial engagements before marriage is possible.

So far from this freedom resulting in laxity of morals, it seems to operate the other way. Jane Addams has pointed out that, in spite of this modern army of girl wage-earners, whose wages are below a decent living standard, the price of "white slaves" is constantly rising, and the procurers find it more and more difficult to supply the market. It is certainly encouraging that girls so hardly pressed in an inhuman industrial world, sell themselves less readily both into marriages of convenience and into body-slavery than ever before. With economic independence there has come a higher degree of self-respect.

In this period of transition the financial aspects of married women's lives are certainly perplexing. Although the law still entitles a wife to support, there is an increasing group of thinking people who believe that that right should be qualified, or made in some degree reciprocal between husband and wife. Some believe that childless women ought to earn their own living, whether married or single; or, at least, to give their leisure to philanthropy and civic service. Others go as far as Charlotte Perkins Gilman in requiring even child-bearing women to definitely contribute other services to society, except during the small part of their lives when they are actually bearing and nursing children. They point to our grandmothers who, even with large families, gave more than half their time to domestic production. For the present, however, most thoughtful people will feel that it is for the best welfare of children, and therefore of society, that mothers should be supported either by their husbands or pensioned by society temporarily, until the children themselves have been fitted for some vocation and are old enough to earn a living.

With the elimination of many processes from the household, and the application of scientific invention to others, the simple housekeeping necessary to family life becomes steadily less and the attention bestowed upon children constantly greater. Domesticity is becoming relatively unimportant, while motherhood and child-nurture are rising in value. This change of emphasis points to a fundamental modification of the ideals of wifehood and motherhood. It is at last conceivable that a woman may fulfil both duties acceptably without being able to darn her husband's socks, to make buttonholes, or produce mince pies. One of the most successful mothers of my acquaintance—judged by the product of her life, two capable and morally superior sons—can do none of these things, and never did do them, although she had only a moderate income. Left a widow when she was scarcely more than a girl, she concentrated her attention, not on feeding and indulging her boys, and practising exhausting economies to pamper their selfishness, but on guiding their minds and morals. As she herself says: "I had to be father as well as mother to them," and her interpretation of that was to make herself a delightfully sympathetic companion in every thought and impulse of their lives, interested in their school and athletic activities, and even in their sex problems. She is still their chosen confidante in manhood, while devoting herself to the personal culture for which she had scant time formerly.

In proportion as the meaning of the family centers in the needs and companionship of children rather than in physical luxury and wife-service, the mentality of women is stimulated. It has already been pointed out that for the proper nurture and guidance of children something more is required in the mother than an ornamental education and perfection in superfluous domestic detail. We are at the beginning of a movement to adapt public education to the needs of ordinary men and women. The culture of common things is beginning to take precedence of learning, which has often existed solely "for its own sake," as a sort of personal luxury, like diamonds or antiques. In this progress women will share, and, in so doing, motherhood will become something more than a blind obedience to nature and mankind. It will become—what it has always been potentially—a high vocation worthy of the best preparation and the profoundest devotion. At the same time it will not demand, as it used to do, the absolute surrender of all personal life and liberty. It may even happen very soon that nothing will be too good for those whose chief task it is to raise the quality of the race. And self-sacrifice, which has long been the excessive virtue of maternal women, may be reduced to a normal minimum, leaving just enough to keep feminine conceit within bounds, and masculine selfishness as well. The time has certainly come when maternity is no longer an excuse for keeping women within "their sphere," but is rather an imperative rea son for compelling them to enlarge it to the periphery of the world.

Just now, the most serious perplexity of the intelligent married woman of middle age is what to do with herself when her children are gone from home, and when housekeeping, properly systematized and modernized, ought not to engage more than half her working-day. Dreading the atrophy of premature age into which many women fall for want of tasks commensurate with their powers, she seeks to contribute something more than mere manual busyness and social chitchat and hospitality to her neighborhood. She is, however, seriously handicapped by the superficial education of her youth, her lack of experience of the world, and by the disuse of her intellect during the twenty or twenty-five years given to family duties. While she may be strong and capable, she has no vocation, and does not know where to take hold on life. A large body of women in this situation are trying to solve it by the cultural opportunities of women's clubs, where they are often led by those only a little better equipped than themselves. Others devote the time to charity councils and committees, and to a thousand other unpaid social services. Yet even for these tasks of citizenship their training has been quite insufficient. Many, in default of any proper chance for a belated education, and without any necessity for self-support, relapse into the conventional social pleasures in order to fill up the time till old age comes upon them.

The loss to society by this waste or partial use of released human capacity is incalculable—comparable only to the waste of human life in prisons. It is a curious fact that we still cling to the notion that education must be formal, and that it is properly confined to the first third or quarter of life. Whenever middle-aged persons attempt to remedy the defects of earlier years, they are commonly regarded with a mixture of pity and amusement, instead of with the admiration which their aspirations deserve. Formal education in youth is in reality a sort of skeleton to be clothed and filled out by personal experience and continuous accretions. It is more convenient to begin life with a skeleton to work upon, but there is no reason why education should not be coextensive with the whole mental development. When a house has been well built and the foundations rot out, it is possible and very good economy to jack it up and put new supports underneath—it need not be left to decay. When repaired, enlarged, and perhaps refurnished, it is often more interesting and comfortable than a new one. So is it, likewise, with human beings.

These difficulties of the middle-aged woman point unquestionably to a reconstruction in women's education. Since parents cannot know whether a daughter is to marry or not, they must prepare her for marriage certainly, and for self-support as well. No woman, even when married, can be sure that she will never have to support herself. These two aims are by no means incompatible, if the order of studies in the present curriculum were readjusted so as to give first the essentials and afterward as much culture as there may be time for. There is really very little dispute about what the ordinary girl needs to know—none at all, except with regard to sex matters—and since the majority of girls leave school before they are sixteen years of age, there is approximately only ten years in which to prepare them for life. Yet our present program takes this hardly at all into account, but assumes that education is to make conventional gentlemen and ladies rather than efficient citizens. It is in thrall still to a tradition as strong as that which has imprisoned women—the idea that the object of education is to attain gentility rather than to develop industrial and moral capacity.

For the daughter of the laboring man, wage-earning is usually imperative until she marries, and, in many cases, afterward, since her husband is liable to be out of work, to be ill, or to become disabled. But she rarely stays in school long enough to get training for self-support, even were it offered. Among young women somewhat better off, self-support is rapidly becoming the rule, because they like the sense of economic independence; but as yet the common schools, and even the high schools, only afford inadequate training in a few limited lines. Vocational training is, therefore, an expensive luxury, instead of an essential preparation provided by the state. This has brought about a terrible competition in all the lines of work open to girls, which require only a short apprenticeship, and from which there is no possible promotion.

But when the readjustment of educational methods to the real needs of youth shall have been made, there will still remain the problem of what to do with the married women when they shall have fulfilled their maternal functions. They must, somehow, begin to educate themselves over again, and it is an interesting fact that the agricultural colleges point out the way in which it may be done. The "short courses" offered at Cornell, Wisconsin, and other colleges, set a model for the coming schools for re-education, for the education of the middle-aged. Already there are courses of reading and study for the farmers' wives, and the time may come when the ambitious mother and wife, partially liberated from family cares, will neither be "laid on the shelf" nor be an object of jest when she undertakes to develop her latent abilities.

The case of the able-bodied woman of fifty is clear-she ought to have something more to do than that which housekeeping usually requires in modern life-but the solution of the restlessness of younger wives is not so easy. More and more, trained nurses and nursemaids, mothers' assistants, kindergartens, playgrounds, nurseries, and primary schools remove children from their mothers' care during several hours a day. The preparation of many foods and the making of garments are better and, oftentimes, more economically done outside the home than they can be in it. The pleasures of the family, which once involved much labor for the housewife, are found outside the house. Industrial changes on the one hand, and household conveniences on the other, continually release more and more domestic women from really necessary and satisfying labor. Thus the age limit of partial leisure for this class is pushed back to, perhaps, thirty-five or forty years, if there are not more than three children in the family.

Not only does the intelligent married woman of small family have more time in which to think, but the ideal of the family bond itself has been altered since women were exclusively domestic. Until quite recently marriage had only two aims: offspring and the regulation of the sex instinct. It has now come to have another of profound import: the comradeship of congenial temperaments. At present this third motive is demanded by the wife more than by the husband, partly because she has time to think about it, and more probably because the man's gregariousness finds satisfaction in business association with other men. Professor Thomas has expressed this admirably in the following paragraphs:

"An examination, also, of so-called happy marriages shows very generally that they do not, except for the common interest of children, rest on the true comradeship of like minds, but represent an equilibrium reached through an extension of the maternal interest of the woman to the man, whereby she looks after his personal needs as she does after those of the children—cherishing him, in fact, as a child—or in extension to woman on the part of man of that nurture and affection which is in his nature to give to pets and all helpless (and preferably dumb) creatures. . .

"Obviously a more solid basis of association is necessary than either of these two instinctively based compromises; and the practice of an occupational activity of her own choosing by the woman, and a generous attitude toward this on the part of the man, would contribute to relieve the strain and to make marriage more frequently successful."

For any one to suggest a solution for all these family perplexities would require the assumption of omniscience. It is sufficient here to show that many types of family and marital relations are being evolved which give promise of greater justice and more content to all concerned. Lester Ward remarks that, while most persons suppose that nothing is so certainly fixed by nature, and even by divine decree, as the particular form of marriage which happens to prevail in their own country, there is, in fact, nothing which is so purely conventional as just the way in which men and women agree to carry on the work of continuing the race. Professor George Elliott Howard boldly declares that the problems of the family should be studied in connection "with the actual conditions of modern social life;" that it is vain to appeal to ideals born of old and very different ones; and he urges that the moral leaders of men should preach "actual instead of conventional righteousness."

There can be no doubt that, with relative economic independence, and with a broader and more practical education, women are rapidly passing from purely instinctive to conscious and voluntary motherhood; nor that, as they do so, they will set a higher standard of sex morality for men. In this process there will inevitably be some mal-adjustment and some unhappiness—whether more or less than our forbears endured when conditions were even farther from the ideal than now, there is no means of knowing. So far as women are concerned, this growth means a larger life, a life not exclusively domestic and maternal; and by so much as mothers are more than instinctively maternal, their children will be better born and more intelligently nurtured.

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