Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.
In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at that latter age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say, Providence, Rhode Island, in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five, twenty out of every hundred women are still single.
In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for poisoning the blood of life.
Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.
Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any Great Cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of them.
Then, on the other side, Mary looked at the great army of women in the midnight restaurants, in the streets, in their segregated quarters—women who, however they may be sentimentalized about and however irresponsible they may be for their own condition, are, as a matter of fact, ignorant, stupid, silly, and dirty. Yet on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.
On the one side—intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side—inferior women blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of youth!
The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts lie, we face them and fight them we can make a better race.
The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that "among highly civilized peoples marriage and REGLULAR unions are impossible at the RIGHT TIME."
And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the Committee of Fifteen on the Social Evil, notes the parallel increase of "young unmarried men" and of a city's "volume of vice."