Eugenia. The laws of nature render our position infinitely stronger than that of men ever was. We mounted by the ladder of adult suffrage, but we kicked it down immediately afterwards. It will never be revived. Men had no tremors about the large surplusage of women as long as they were without votes. Why should we have any now about the surplusage of men?
Henry. Then there is another point. You talk so much about the importance of the physique of the race, and I agree with all my heart. But there are so few women to marry nowadays, and women show such a marked disinclination towards marriage till their youth is quite over, that half the men I know can’t get wives at all. And those who do, have almost no power of selection left to them, and are forced to put up with ill-developed, sickly, peevish, or ugly women past their first bloom rather than remain unmarried and childless.
Eugenia. The subject is under consideration at this moment, but when the position was reversed in Edward the Seventh’s time, and there were not enough men to go round, women were in the same plight, and men said nothing then about the deterioration of the race. They did not even make drunkards’ marriages a penal offence. Drunkards and drug-takers, and men dried up by nicotine constantly married and had children in those days.
Henry. I can’t think the situation was as difficult for women as it is now for men. I was at Oxford last week, and do you know that during the last forty years only five per cent. of the male Dons and Professors have been able to find mates. Women won’t look at them.
Eugenia. In the nineteenth century, when first women went to Universities and became highly educated, only four per cent. of them afterwards married, and then to schoolmasters.
Henry. And I assure you the amount of hysteria and quarrelling among the older Dons is lamentable.
Eugenia. I appointed a committee which reported to me on the subject last year, and I gathered that the present Dons are not more hysterical than they were in Victorian days, when they forfeited their fellowships on marriage. You must remember, Henry, that from the earliest times men and women have always hated anything “blue” in the opposite sex. Female blue stockings were seldom attractive to men in bygone days. And nowadays women are naturally inclined to marry young men, and healthy and athletic men, rather than sedentary old male blue stockings. It is most fortunate for the race that is is so.
Henry [with a sigh]. Well, all the “blue” women can marry nowadays.
Eugenia. Yes, thank heaven, all women can marry nowadays. What women must have endured in the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth century makes me shudder. For if they did not marry they were never spared the ridicule or the contemptuous compassion of men. It seems incredible, looking back, to realise that large families of daughters were kept idle and unhappy at home, after their youth was over, not allowed to take up any profession, only to be turned callously adrift in their middle age at their father’s death, with a pittance on which they could barely live. And yet these things were done by educated and kindly men who professed to care for the interests of women, and were personally fond of their daughters. Over and over again in the biographies of notable women of the Victorian and Edward the Seventh’s time one comes across instances of the way in which men of the country-squire type kept their daughters at home uneducated till they were beyond the age when they could take up a profession, and then left them to poverty. They did not even insure their lives for each child as we do now. Surely, Henry, it is obvious that women have done one thing admirably. The large reduction which they have effected in their own numbers has almost eliminated the superfluous, incompetent, unhappy women who found it so difficult to obtain a livelihood a hundred years ago, and has replaced them by an extra million competent, educated, fairly contented men who are all necessary to the State, who are encouraged, almost forced into various professions.
Henry. Not contented, Eugenia.