Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.
Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself, reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was created as an afterthought of nature’s for the purpose of introducing greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to begin with, 26 had only one function. That was to be a male. He was purely a sex-thing.
Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.
There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While on his “Inland Voyage” he observed in this matter that “it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being.”
The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this time have demolished the ethical code.
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 27 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 last age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say, Providence, R.I., 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 28 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.