Social Environment and Moral Progress

by Alfred Russel Wallace

It will be generally admitted that although many women now remain unmarried from necessity rather than from choice, there are always considerable numbers who feel no strong impulse to marriage, and accept husbands to secure subsistence and a home of their own rather than from personal affection or strong sexual emotion. In a state of society in which all women were economically independent, were all fully occupied with public duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly probable that the numbers of the unmarried from choice would increase. It would probably come to be considered a degradation for any woman to marry a man whom she could not love and esteem, and this reason would tend at least to delay marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner was encountered.

In man, on the other hand, the passion of love is more general and usually stronger; and in such a society as here postulated there would be no way of gratifying this

passion but by marriage. Every woman, therefore, would be likely to receive offers, and a powerful selective agency would rest with the female sex. Under the system of education and public opinion here supposed, there can be little doubt how this selection would be exercised. The idle or the utterly selfish would be almost universally rejected; the chronically diseased or the weak in intellect would also usually remain unmarried, at least till an advanced period of life; while those who showed any tendency to insanity or exhibited any congenital deformity would also be rejected by the younger women, because it would be considered an offence against society to be the means of perpetuating any such diseases or imperfections.

We must also take account of a special factor, hitherto almost unnoticed, which would tend to intensify the selection thus exercised. It is a fact well known to statisticians that although females are in excess in almost all civilised populations, yet this is not due to a law of Nature; for with us, and I believe in all parts of the Continent, more males than females are born to an amount of about

3½ to 4 per cent. But between the ages of five and thirty-five there were, in 1910, 4·225 deaths of males from accident or violence and only 1·300 of females, showing an excess of male deaths of 2·925 in one year; and for many years the numbers of this class of deaths have not varied much, the excess of preventable deaths of males at those ages being very nearly 3,000 annually. This excess is no doubt due to boys and young men being more exposed, both in play and work, to various kinds of accidents than are women, and this brings about the constant excess of females in what may be termed normal civilised populations.

In 1901 it was about a million; while fifty years earlier, when the population was about half, it was only 359,000, or considerably less than half the present proportion. This is what we should expect from the constant increase of accidents and of emigration, the effects of both of which fall most upon males.

It appears, therefore, that the larger number of women in our population to-day is not a natural phenomenon, but is almost wholly the result of our own

man-made social environment. When the lives of all our citizens are accounted of equal value to the community, irrespective of class or of wealth, a much smaller number will be allowed to suffer from such preventable causes; while, as our colonies fill up with a normal population, and the enormous areas of uncultivated or half-cultivated land at home are thrown open to our own people on the most favourable terms, the great tide of emigration will be diminished and will then cease to affect the proportion of the sexes. The result of these various causes, now all tending to increase the numbers of the female population, will, in a rational and just system of society, of which we may hope soon to see the commencement, act in a contrary direction, and will in a few generations bring the sexes first to an equality, and later on to a majority of males.

There are some, no doubt, who will object that even when women have a free choice, owing to improved economic conditions, they will not choose wisely so as to advance the race. But no one has the right to make such a statement without adducing very strong evidence in support of it. We have for generations degraded

women in every possible way; but we now know that such degradation is not hereditary, and therefore not permanent. The great philosopher and seer, Swedenborg, declared that whereas men loved justice, wisdom and power for their own sakes, women loved them as seen in the characters of men. It is generally admitted that there is truth in this observation; but there is surely still more truth in the converse, that they do not admire those men who are palpably unjust, stupid, or weak, and still less those who are distorted, diseased, or grossly vicious, though under present conditions they are often driven to marry them. It may be taken as certain, therefore, that when women are economically and socially free to choose, numbers of the worst men among all classes who now readily obtain wives will be almost universally rejected.