It is, doubtless, because of these his greater material obligations and responsibilities, that passion has been planned to beset man more urgently than woman. And had Church and State not taken advantage of his inherent, chivalrous instinct, and so turned it to account, both for his own moral uplifting and for the founding and maintenance of the family, woman and society—and man, accordingly—would have remained at very low grades of development.
II
Among other "wrongs" resented by women is that his obligation and his economic means to support a wife have endowed the male, in the majority of cases, with the lordly prerogative of selecting his mate. On her side, while having much to gain materially by marriage, unless she is unusually attractive she has but little range of choice.
And yet this masculine prerogative of selection has served as the strongest incentive to the culture both of higher attribute and charm in woman. Failing that economic struggle which has been man's spur to development, this incentive has operated vastly to her benefit; inducing her parents to educate and to enhance her gifts, and influencing her to do the like for herself. A proportion of women have always been self-supporting, of course. But their work has been mainly in fields of unskilled labour, and has lacked, accordingly, the stimulus of competition. The goal of marriage has not only supplied thus the element of emulation, but it has turned Woman-culture in the direction of developing personal traits and morale, rather than industrial or professional specialisations. And this has been the right direction, seeing that the rôle of the sex is one demanding personal qualities and virtues rather than economic technicalities.
As regards human values, it is a higher privilege to be a charming personality than to be a successful stockbroker. So that in this, as in other things, woman has been privileged by her disabilities.
III
An ever-increasing number of working-class girls, on leaving school, enter a work-shop, a factory, or an office, and spend their time and powers in minor mechanical tasks; gumming labels on jam-pots, making match-boxes or tags for boot-laces, addressing envelopes, and other such employments, deadening to female intelligence, impulse and temperament. Their minds and natures become too warped and narrowed to adapt later, with ease and interest, to the many and varied intelligent functions of the home. They escape thence, accordingly, after a few months or years of marriage (supposing them to have given up their industrial tasks for a space even), and abandoning home and children, return to the old narrow, mechanical routine, to which alone their poor stultified brains have been shaped. In the education of girls, the Subconscious mimetic element in their impressionable natures should be borne in mind. It may be turned to excellent, as to disastrous account.
M. Vologotsky, head of the Omsk Government, has called attention to a significant phenomenon of modern Russian life—namely, that the women take no interest in their homes. This he attributes to their low states of culture. Could they but be persuaded to become "house-proud"—with all that this means and entails—he considers that the task of the Regeneration of this vast unhappy, although singularly gifted, people would be greatly furthered.
Constitutional deterioration, inherited or acquired, entailing defective sex-development, causes many young working-women to be deficient in the maternal instinct, whence spring fondness for and interest in children. The same defective sex-development, disqualifying them for wifehood, results in the vast majority of working-class wives lapsing, after a few years of marriage with normal, virile young men, into haggard, neurasthenic wrecks.