And the mother answered: “Surely you will, my child; the woods are full of offers of marriage—no woman can avoid them.”
And ere many years had passed the maiden had learned that the wisdom of her mother’s prophecy was fully vindicated.
Every one knows that a woman needs neither beauty, talent, nor money to win the deepest and sincerest love that man is capable of giving.
Single life is, with rare exceptions, a matter of choice and not of necessity; and while it is true that a happy married life is the happiest position for either man or woman, there are many things which are infinitely worse than being an old maid, and chiefest among these is marrying the wrong man!
The modern woman looks her future squarely in the face and decides according to her best light whether her happiness depends upon spinsterhood or matrimony. This decision is of course influenced very largely by the quality of her chances in either direction, but if the one whom she fully believes to be the right man comes along, he is likely to be able to overcome strong objections to the married state. If love comes to her from the right source, she takes it gladly; otherwise she bravely goes her way alone, often showing the world that some of the most mother-hearted women are not really mothers. Think of the magnificent solitude of such women as Florence Nightingale and our own splendid Frances Willard! Who shall say that these, and thousands of others of earth’s grandest souls, were not better for their single-heartedness in the service of humanity?
A writer in a leading journal recently said: “The fact that a woman remains single is a tribute to her perception. She gains an added dignity from being hard to suit.”
This, from the pen of a man, is somewhat of a revelation, in the light of various masculine criticisms concerning superfluous women. No woman is superfluous. God made her, and put her into this world to help her fellow-beings. There is a little niche somewhere which she, and she alone, can fill. She finds her own completeness in rounding out the lives of others.
It has been said that the average man may be piloted through life by one woman, but it must be admitted that several of him need somewhere near a dozen of the fair sex to wait upon him at the same time. His wife and mother are kept “hustling,” while his “sisters and his aunts” are likely to be “on the keen jump” from the time his lordship enters the house until he leaves it!
But to return to the “superfluous woman,”—although we cannot literally return to her because she does not exist. Of the “old maid” of to-day, it is safe to say that she has her allotted plane of usefulness. She isn’t the type our newspaper brethren delight to caricature. She doesn’t dwell altogether upon the subject of “woman’s sphere,” which, by the way, comes very near being the plane of the earth’s sphere, and she need not, for her position is now well recognised.