Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped the notice of previous students.

Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem, and that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also. As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the morrow.

If other needs were not so pressing, one might well devote an entire volume, not inappropriately in these days of fiscal controversy, to the question of vital imports and exports. Year after year passes, and politicians in Great Britain grow more and more voracious and, if possible, less and less veracious on the subject of what they misunderstand by imports and exports. The subject is really one for knowledge, not for politicians. With great ceremony at intervals, they go through the highly superfluous performance of calling each other liars, as who should say that Queen Anne is dead: and while this tragical farce continues the question of vital imports and exports is ignored. Within it there lies the key to the Irish question, for instance, since no nation can be saved which persistently exports the best of its life. And in this question also lies the key to a great part of the woman question and to a great part of the colonial question. Politicians who have not even discovered yet that trade is a process of exchange, and who assume that in every bargain someone is being worsted, pay no heed to the questions what sort of people leave our shores, and what sort of people enter them. Or rather, as if in order to emphasize their blindness to fundamentals, they make a point about passing an act against alien immigration, which merely serves to throw into prominence our national neglect of this great issue. This is not the time and the place in which I can deal with it in its entirety, but it must be referred to in so far as it bears on the proportion of the sexes. Toward the end of 1909 there was a long correspondence in the Times on the subject of "Unmarried Daughters." One may print in the text the admirable letter in which a finger is put upon the heart of the question. We are told about the incompetence of women to deal with national affairs, but here we find a woman writing to the Times on a fundamental matter for the Imperialist, though no member of our Houses of Parliament has yet given any attention to it.

Sir: Only two of your numerous correspondents on this subject have really reached the root of the matter.

For more than thirty years the young men of the British Isles have found it increasingly difficult to make a living in their native land. Therefore there has been—and still is—a steady exodus of our male population to our Colonies, where they are unhampered by the many disadvantages prevailing here. Unfortunately they are obliged to leave the corresponding proportion of women behind. The result is a surplus of 1,000,000 women in Great Britain; but let me hasten to add (lest the mistake be laid upon Nature when it is not hers) that there is a proportionate shortage of 1,000,000 women in our colonies. I have recently been on a tour throughout Canada and the States, and was most struck by the scarcity of women in Western Canada—there are about eight men to one woman. And in America the saddest sight of all is the appalling number of half-castes, a blot on the civilization of the States, but a blot for which Europeans are responsible. The absence of white women is answerable for the worst type of population, so that in reality this is a very pressing Imperial question; and all those interested in the growth and future of Canada should turn their attention to it. For, unless we can induce the right sort of British women to emigrate we shall not have the Colonies peopled with our own race or speaking our own mother tongue.

Canada wants unmarried women, her cry is for our marriageable daughters, and each one would find her vocation out there.

Canadian men are one of the finest types of manhood possible, but they are too hard working to be able to return here in search of a wife. How gladly they would welcome the possibility of sharing their homes with a sister or a wife can only be guessed by those who have been there.

I am so greatly impressed with the advisability of encouraging English women to go out there that I strongly urge every suitable, healthy, and useful woman between the age of twenty-five and thirty-five to depart (if she has nothing to prevent her), and, through the British Emigration Society, Imperial Institute, I shall hope to do all that I can to assist them financially.

I am, sir,

Yours faithfully,