[4]. In 1923 in England and Wales there were 22 women barristers, and 66 law students; 5 women solicitors; 76,117 Government officials, and 2,000 doctors; and, in 1921, 93,987 elementary and secondary school-teachers.
Not all of the 6,403,916 spinsters—whether workers or not—are doomed to spinsterhood. As we have seen, the excess of females over males in England and Wales is only 1,720,902.[[5]] But unless they attempt to emigrate, these odd 2,000,000 must certainly remain unmated, and even if emigration could now be organized on a much bigger scale than hitherto, they could hardly be satisfactorily disposed of.
[5]. Although, however, the actual excess of women amount to 1,720,902, the number of women actually doomed to spinsterhood is much greater, owing first to the cases of celibacy among the available men and secondly to the marriage of widows.
The self-governing Dominions cannot absorb more than 432,284[[6]] in all, and even if they could, it is doubtful whether such a large number of girls could be induced to leave their native country. Why should they, when almost every one of them considers her chance of matrimony at home as at least equal to her sister’s or neighbour’s?
[6]. This figure represents the excess of men over women in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in 1921.
Dame Muriel Talbot, O.B.E., writing on the effect of Dominion life, is not so very encouraging either. “For the woman,” she says, “it means only too often an unduly heavy burden of work since there are so few at hand to help.”[[7]]
[7]. See The Woman’s Year Book, 1923.
Owing to the degeneracy and unattractiveness of modern man, a certain noble and estimable proportion of these 6,000,000 will of course refrain from any attempt at marriage. Still faithful to the lost and antiquated values that once led people to respect and care for their bodies, they will feel secretly that their bodies deserve something better than the mate the twentieth century can offer them; and, although they may be fully and admirably equipped for happy motherhood, this noble and very small minority will turn nauseated away from it in order to become absorbed in interests that will help them to forget. These are the greatest sufferers among modern women, and their unmated condition constitutes our greatest national loss.
But the great majority will be too thoroughly unsophisticated, too completely immersed in the values of their day, to see anything wrong or odd in degeneration. These, like the 9,000,000 already mated, will strive after marriage and the home. They will insist on having their third-rate or fourth-rate bodily ecstasies with the inferior men of the age, and on rearing their fourth-rate children. And, if their hopes are disappointed, either through their inability to find a mate or owing to the rude awakening that too often comes with modern matrimony, they will become either wretched spinsters or disgruntled wives. We shall consider their fate as wives, however, in the next chapter.
There are also a large number whose bodies are so conspicuously inferior in passion and equipment that they will be indifferent to marriage through sheer physiological apathy. Looking at life through the optics of their atonic or badly functioning bodies, they will declare love unnecessary to human well-being, and the natural life a wholly antiquated desideratum. They will lack the desire even for fourth-rate bodily experiences, and scorn all such experiences in consequence. They will boast that they are “above sex.” To them the Feminist reformers will point triumphantly in refutation of all the arguments of those who, like ourselves, claim that sound and desirable women cannot be happy unmated. And the more simple and unsuspecting among mankind, looking upon these adapted unmated women, will begin to believe that the Feminists are right. As the number of these women increases every year, and, in their systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who also have become slanderers of love and man, the ranks of those who scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for women, swell with imposing rapidity.