IS EDUCATION OPPOSED TO MOTHERHOOD? 753 



complete love with superficial glamour, are open to the charge of 

 depreciating marriage. Guests are not tempted to a banquet by- 

 fear of starvation, nor are men attracted toward matrimony for 

 the interests of the race. Instead of showing that marriage offers 

 the greatest possibility of happiness, it is often described by men 

 as an unintellectual, slavish, and pitiable condition. Few epi- 

 thalamia are sung by the generation which asks, " Is marriage a 

 failure ? " and rare is the poet who writes : 



" Clear as amber, fine as musk, 

 Is life to those who, pilgrim- wise, 

 Move hand in hand from dawn to dusk." 



II. Mr. Allen seems to regard as evidence that women " are 

 becoming unfitted for motherhood" the fact that they do not 

 glory in their femininity, and charges also that women reformers 

 speak and write " as though it were desirable that the mass of 

 women should remain unmarried forever/' Worse even than 

 this, he asserts : " At the present moment a great majority of the 

 ablest women are wholly dissatisfied with their own position as 

 women, and with the position imposed by the facts of the case 

 upon women generally ; this as the direct result of their false edu- 

 cation." Here are two ideas badly entangled for want of defini- 

 tion the natural and the artificial position of women. Mr. Allen 

 gives us on the following page his opinion of " the position " (arti- 

 ficial) of women in language strong enough for the most blatant 

 reformer. " The position of women was not a position which 

 could bear the test of nineteenth-century scrutiny ; . . . their rela- 

 tion to the family, to their husbands, their children, their friends, 

 their property, was simply insupportable." (Does he demand of 

 these ablest women that they should be satisfied with a position 

 he calls " insupportable " ?) But, let him not be distressed because 

 woman does not openly " glory " in her natural position of woman- 

 hood. There is no failure of healthy instinct here, but a natural 

 feminine divergence from the masculine feeling. The differentia- 

 tion of the sexes is a subject upon which we have no adequate 

 data. We might as well try to surmise the habits of the wild cat 

 from the domesticated pussy, as to speculate upon the essential 

 qualities of free womanhood. But, so far as woman's physical 

 constitution indicates anything, it points toward greater reserve 

 on her part than is exhibited by man. This corresponds with the 

 almost universal inclination of women to be more modest than 

 men.* Therefore, though a woman may prefer her own sex and 

 be proud of her privileges as woman, she will not voluntarily go 

 about " glorifying " her womanhood. If Mr. Allen should meet a 

 young woman who announced herself a candidate for mother- 



* A few savage tribes form exceptions to this rule. 

 vol. xxxvi. 48 



