The usual advice to women to seek their salvation in marriage, this being their true profession, is thoughtlessly approved of by the vast majority of men. But it seems like mockery, that many of those who give such advice and of those who applaud it, refrain from marrying themselves. Schopenhauer, the philosopher, has only the conception of a philistine concerning woman and her position. He says: “woman is not called upon to perform great tasks. Her characteristic is not doing but suffering. She pays her debt to life by the throes of child-birth, care of her child and submissiveness to her husband. The supreme expressions of vitality and perception are denied her. Her life should be more tranquil and insignificant than man’s life. Woman is called upon to be the nurse and educator of childhood because she is childish herself; because throughout life she remains a big child, a sort of intermediary stage between child and man, the true human being.... Girls should be reared to be domestic and submissive.... Women are the most thoroughgoing, incurable philistines.”
The work by Lombroso and Ferrero, “Woman as a Criminal and Prostitute”, is also written in the spirit of Schopenhauer. We have never met with an equally extensive scientific book,—it consists of 590 pages,—that contains so little convincing material in regard to the subject it deals with. The statistics from which the most daring conclusions are drawn, are very inadequate. Sometimes a dozen cases have sufficed the author to form a weighty opinion. It is a noteworthy fact that the material contained in the book which may be regarded as the most trustworthy has been furnished by a woman, Dr. Mrs. Tarnowskaya. The influences of social conditions and social development are almost entirely disregarded. All phenomena are judged from a narrow physiological and psychological point of view and much ethnological information concerning various peoples—is interwoven with the argumentation, without any attempt being made to investigate the nature of this information. According to the authors, as according to Schopenhauer, woman is a big child, an incarnate liar, weak in her judgment, fickle in love, incapable of any heroic deed. The inferiority of woman,—so they claim,—has been proven by a great many physical differences and characteristics. “Woman’s love is, at the bottom, nothing but a secondary character of motherhood. All the sentiments of affection that bind a woman to a man are not derived from the sexual impulse but from instincts of devotion and submission acquired by adaptation.” But how these instincts were acquired the authors fail to examine. If they did, it would imply an investigation of the social position of woman during thousands of years which has made her what she is to-day. The authors describe the dependence and enslavement of woman among different nations and during various periods of civilization, but being blinded by a narrow conception of the Darwinian theory, they trace everything to physiological causes, and disregard the social and economic causes that have had the strongest influence on woman’s physiological and psychological development.
Among other things the authors discuss the vanity of woman and express the view that among people at a low stage of development men are the vain sex, which may be observed even to-day on the Hebrides, Madagascar and among the tribes about the Orinoco river, as also on many islands of the Polynesian Archipelago and among a number of African and South Sea Island tribes; while among nations of high stage of development, women are the vain sex. But why is this so? The answer is simple. Among peoples at a low stage of development, matriarchal conditions prevail or have been abandoned but recently. Here woman’s position is such that she is relieved of the necessity of wooing man. The man woos her, and for this purpose he adorns himself, he becomes vain. Among peoples at a higher stage of development, especially among all civilized nations, man does not woo woman, but woman woos man. It rarely occurs that woman takes the initiative and literally offers herself to a man; modesty forbids that. But the offer nevertheless is made by manner and dress, the luxury of her personal adornment and her coquetry. Such conduct is forced upon her by the fact that there are more women than men and by the social necessity of regarding marriage as a means of support and as the only institution by means of which she may satisfy her sexual impulse and obtain social recognition. Here again we find purely economic and social causes bringing forth qualities, now in the man and now in the woman, that we are accustomed to regard as quite independent of social and economic causes. From this we may draw the conclusion that when society has reached a state of development in which every form of dependence of one sex upon the other will cease, vanity and the follies of fashion will disappear as will many other vices that we deem ineradicable to-day, because we believe them to be inherent in human nature.
In regard to Schopenhauer it must be said that he, as a philosopher, is as biased in his judgment of women as the majority of our anthropologists and medical men who regard her only as a sex being, never as a social being. Schopenhauer had never been married. He failed to contribute his share that one more woman might fulfill the purpose in life that he prescribed to women. This leads us to another, no more pleasant phase of the question.
It is generally known that many women remain unmarried because they are given no opportunity to become married. Custom forbids the woman to offer herself. She must allow herself to be chosen; she may not choose. If she is not chosen she must join that great army of unfortunate women who have missed their purpose in life and who are frequently subjected to a life of poverty and want, sometimes made more bitter still by ridicule. But what causes the numerical disproportion of the sexes? Many are quick to reply: too many girls are born. The persons who make this statement are misinformed, as we shall see. Others draw the conclusion that if women are in the majority in most civilized countries, polygamy ought to be permitted. But polygamy is not only averse to our customs, it also entails the degradation of woman; although that did not prevent Schopenhauer from asserting that “to the female sex in general polygamy is a boon.” Many men do not marry because they believe that they are unable to support one woman and the children who are likely to be born according to their station in life. Only few men are able to support two women, and among these, many do have two or several wives: one legitimate wife, and one or several illegitimate wives. Those privileged by wealth allow nothing to prevent them from doing as they choose.
Even in the orient where custom and law have suffered polygamy to exist for thousands of years, relatively few men have more than one wife. We speak of the degrading influence of life in Turkish harems. But we overlook the fact that only very few men belonging to the ruling class can afford to maintain a harem, while the great mass of men live in monogamic marriage. In the city of Algiers at the close of the sixties of the last century, there were among 18,282 marriages no less than 17,319 with only one wife; there were 888 marriages with two wives, and only 75 with more than two. In Constantinople, the capital of the Turkish empire, conditions are probably quite similar. Among the rural population in the orient the conditions favoring monogamic marriage are still more striking. In the orient, as with us, material conditions come into consideration that compel the majority of men to content themselves with one wife.[74] But if conditions were equally favorable to all men polygamy could still not be generally maintained because there are not enough women. Under normal conditions the numbers of persons of both sexes are almost equal, which everywhere points to monogamic marriage. The following table which has been published by Buecher in the “General Statistic Records,” proves this assertion.[75]
| Number of male persons | Number of female persons | Entire population | Number of women for every 1000 men | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europe | 170,818,561 | 174,914,119 | 345,732,680 | 1,024 |
| America | 41,643,389 | 40,540,386 | 82,183,775 | 973 |
| Asia | 177,648,044 | 170,269,179 | 347,917,223 | 958 |
| Australia | 2,197,799 | 1,871,821 | 4,069,620 | 852 |
| Africa | 6,994,064 | 6,771,360 | 13,765,425 | 968 |
| 399,301,857 | 394,366,865 | 793,668,722 | 988 |
The result of this compilation may, to many people, be a surprising one. With the exception of Europe where there are, on an average, 1,024 female inhabitants for every 1000 male inhabitants, the male population predominates. Even if we may assume that the information is incomplete, especially in regard to the female sex, and that especially in countries with a Mohammedan population the female population surpasses the given figures, the fact remains that, except in a few European countries, the female population nowhere considerably exceeds the male population. In the meantime the imperial bureau of statistics in Berlin has published a new compilation of the census in European and non-European countries which includes 883,000,000 people. “When we take into consideration the census, not included in this compilation, of Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Costa Rica, Argentine Republic, the Transvaal, Orange River Colony, Cyprus, Formosa and Pescadores, the number of enumerated inhabitants of the earth attains 882,000,000 with a general average of 991 female persons for every 1000 male persons. For the enumerated population of the earth we may therefore assume an almost equal representation of both sexes with a slight preponderance of the male.”[76]
In Europe the conditions are different. With the exception of the countries of South Eastern Europe, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Servia, Bulgaria, Rumania and Greece, the female population predominates. The proportion is least unfavorable in Hungary and Italy where there are respectively 1,009 and 1,010 female inhabitants for every 1000 male inhabitants. Belgium comes next with 1013 female for every 1000 male inhabitants. Portugal and Norway show the most unfavorable proportion; next to these Great Britain with 1063 female for every 1000 male inhabitants. France, Germany, Austria and Russia lie in the middle having for every 1000 male inhabitants respectively 1,033, 1,032, 1,035 and 1,029 female inhabitants.[77] In Germany during the last two decades each census has shown a more favorable proportion. On Dec. 1, 1885, the female population exceeded the male population by 988,376 persons. The census of Dec. 1, 1890, still showed an excess of the female population of 966,806 persons. 1895—957,401; 1900—892,684, and according to the census of Dec. 1, 1905 the excess of the female population had sunken to 871,916 persons (1029 female for every 1000 male inhabitants). The decline of this difference may be chiefly accounted for by the decline of emigration in which the male sex is mainly concerned. This may be clearly seen from the proportion of the sexes in the United States, into which the stream of emigration is mainly directed, and where the dearth of women is almost as great as the excess of women in Germany. In 1900 for every 1000 men there were only 953 women. This emigration from Germany decreased from 220,902 persons in 1881 to 22,073 persons in 1901 and to 19,883 persons in 1908. The fact, that more men than women emigrate, accounts in the first place then for the difference between the numbers of persons of both sexes. Italy furnishes a good example; for there the male population still predominated at the beginning of the forties of the last century, while at present the female population predominates, owing to the large emigration.
Furthermore, more men than women meet with accidents in agriculture, industry, commerce and traffic. Also more men are temporarily absent abroad as merchants, sailors, marines, etc. Another fact that has been statistically proven and that constitutes an important factor is that women on an average attain a higher age than men and that therefore there are more old women than old men. According to the census of 1900 the proportion of the sexes according to age in Germany was the following: