PLAIN WORDS ON THE WOMAN QUESTION. i 77 



husbands provided for them by nature, and only four need go into 

 a nunnery or take to teaching the higher mathematics. And if 

 the marriageable men and women only are reckoned in the ac- 

 count, as far as I can gather from existing statistics, the dispro- 

 portion sinks to a quite insignificant fraction. 



Nevertheless, it is a fact, that both in England and America the 

 marriageable men of the middle and upper classes are not to the 

 fore, and that accordingly in these classes the discussing, think- 

 ing, agitating classes an undue proportion of women remains un- 

 married. The causes of this class disparity are not far to seek. 

 In America the young man has gone West. In England he is in 

 the army, in the navy, in the Indian Civil Service, in the Cape 

 Mounted Rifles. He is sheep-farming in New Zealand, ranching 

 in Colorado, growing tea in Assam, planting coffee in Ceylon ; he 

 is a cowboy in Montana, or a wheat-farmer in Manitoba, or a dia- 

 mond-digger at Kimberley, or a merchant at Melbourne : in short, 

 he is anywhere and everywhere except where he ought to be, mak- 

 ing love to the pretty girls in England. For, being a man, I, of 

 course, take it for granted that the first business of a girl is to be 

 pretty. 



Owing to these causes, it has unfortunately happened that a 

 period of great upheaval in the female mind has coincided with a 

 period when the number of unmarried women in the cultivated 

 classes was abnormally large. The upheaval would undoubtedly 

 have taken place in our time, even without the co-operation 

 of this last exacerbating cause. The position of women was not 

 a position which could bear the test of nineteenth-century 

 scrutiny. Their education was inadequate ; their social status 

 was humiliating ; their political power was nil ; their practical 

 and personal grievances were innumerable : above all, their 

 relation to the family to their husbands, their children, their 

 friends, their property was simply insupportable. A real Wom- 

 an Question there was, and is, and must be. The pity of it is 

 that the coincidence of its recognition with the dearth of mar- 

 riageable men in the middle and upper classes has largely de- 

 flected the consequent movement into wrong and essentially im- 

 practicable channels. 



For the result has been that, instead of subordinating the 

 claims of the unmarried women to the claims of the wives and 

 mothers, the movement has subordinated the claims of the wives 

 and mothers to the claims of the unmarried women. Almost all 

 the Woman's Rights women have constantly spoken, thought, 

 and written as though it were possible and desirable for the mass 

 of women to support themselves, and to remain unmarried for- 

 ever. The point of view they all tacitly take is the point of view 

 of the self-supporting spinster. Now, the self-supporting spinster 



VOL. XXXVI. 12 



