Coupled, however, with our attitude of callous indifference to the young female’s body is also the increasing doubt which is spreading among all classes regarding the actual value of the normal and natural life for woman. Impaired physical efficiency has turned so many of the joys and beauties of the natural life to pain and horror that there is no longer that certainty which Manu felt about the desirability of motherhood for women. And, even when motherhood is not regarded as a greatly over-rated pleasure, the mates by means of whom motherhood can be experienced are, as a rule, such poor shadows of men that the whole of Manu’s attitude has begun to be discredited. The Feminist Movement, in fact, is actively engaged in discrediting it, and that is why the Feminist Movement itself may be regarded as a remote off-shoot of the body-despising values.
Indeed, things have come to such a pass in this country that at present rich and poor alike are far more concerned about giving their daughters a calling than a mate; and, when once this has been done, it is felt that parents have discharged their responsibility.
The most convincing demonstration of the prevalence of this attitude was the uproar that arose a year or two ago, when one or two imprudent journalists inadvertently referred to our 2,000,000 excess of women over men as “surplus women.” The daily press was immediately flooded by indignant letters from women of all classes, protesting that, as a large proportion of these 2,000,000 were self-supporting and ample room existed for the remainder in our industries and professions, it was absurd to speak of them as “surplus.” Articles soon followed, in which the same views were expressed, though possibly more magisterially. But there was no reference to the bodily destiny of these 2,000,000 females—not a hint that the word “surplus” might have some relevancy if they were looked at in relation to the available males, or that a civilization which condemns one-sixth of its adult females to celibacy must be very wrong!
It was for all the world as if being self-supporting and useful in industry or the professions were the sole and unique object of human life, and nobody seemed to see that, in this case, there was no conceivable reason why human beings should have been created or become male and female. Of course the howl of indignation that arose at the word “surplus” was greatest among those women who are frankly hostile to men, and who are keenest about making the bodily destiny of their sex a matter of no consequence. Nevertheless, the cruelty of the attitude adopted by all was never actually felt as cruelty by anyone, because the very people responsible for those articles and letters would have been the last to suspect themselves, or to be suspected by others, of any trace of inhumanity. All they wanted to imply, and wished everybody else to believe, was that a human life can be full and can be lived adequately without that!
And yet to anyone who reveres the body, and who knows how the spirit is tortured by a body unsatisfied and neglected, how thoroughly unfounded does this claim appear! A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside. It seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff. True sublimation, except through whole-hearted and unremitting religious practices, is rare. What then is the fate of these 2,000,000 women? Can we reckon with certainty on their all being so much below even the common standard of their married sisters that they will have no instincts to thwart? There is an inclination abroad to adopt this comforting view. So accustomed have we become to the spectacle of our omnibuses, trams, and trains being filled each morning with unmarried female workers, that we are easily led to the erroneous conclusion that, as time goes on, these female workers will grow as used to filling their lives by means of self-support as we have grown accustomed to seeing them.
And, indeed, there would be something to be said for this view if, by a kind of unemotional parthenogenesis, these spinster workers could breed their own kind, each generation of whom would be ever more perfectly adapted. But unfortunately this cannot be so. People forget that each generation of them is born from mothers who, in an uninterrupted line reaching right back to our anthropoid ancestors, have filled their lives with something more than self-support and business usefulness. Each generation of these unmated women-workers is born from mothers who must have known the ardent embrace of a lover, the ecstasy of consummated love, and the clinging devotion of adoring offspring. No break can have occurred in this long dynasty of love, otherwise they—the women-workers themselves—would not be there. It is impossible at present to rear a species of human beings to lovelessness as you can rear a breed of dogs to retrieving or sheep-minding. Love must always have existed one step back. And it is this fact, that these unmated women-workers are all so fatally close to love, all such near blood-relations of love, that makes lovelessness such an ordeal and a trial to them—an ordeal and a trial no human being who has not sinned against society should be made to suffer.
Thus the modern world is inclined to be very cruel to the young unmated woman. For, while everything is done to facilitate her self-support and usefulness, no provision is made either to ensure the sublimation of her mating instincts (a problem of almost insuperable difficulty now, though solved with success in the Middle Ages), or to give her the chance of expressing them without dishonour and disgrace. On the contrary, the whole tendency is to ignore, to shelve, and to conceal that aspect of her life; and thousands of bitter or sub-normal women, whose thwarted or deficient passions have unsaddled their natural love of man, are now only too eager to assure her and everybody else that human beings can well get on and be happy without sexual expression—in fact that a spirit and a body can quite easily play the life-long rôle of a disembodied spirit.
All this does not mean that the solution of the unmated woman problem is an easy and obvious one, which modern people are too blind to see. But it does mean that the very first step towards its proper solution can never be taken as long as we persist in arguing and behaving as if a full life can be lived by merely paying one’s way.
In 1921 the population of England and Wales amounted to 37,885,242 persons, of whom 19,803,022 were females. Of this female population 4,302,568 consisted of children under twelve, and the remainder, amounting to 15,501,454, were divided up as follows:
9,070,538 were married or widowed or divorced, and 6,403,916 were single. Of the married 1,106,433, and of the single 4,000,000 (to be precise, 3,914,127) were occupied in some form of work, thus making a total of 5,020,560 women-workers, 3,000,000 of whom were employed in industry alone.