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 29 who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts sleep, we rouse 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 regular 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.”
He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts of the case.
“As a rule,” he says, “the income which a young man earns, while sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not suffice for founding a family.”
He cannot found a family at the right time. He goes unmarried through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at their keenest and when the other sex, in its most vividly 30 idealized perfection, is most poignantly desired.
Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson says, “his standard of personal comfort rises.” Romance has been succeeded by calculation. “Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether.”
Celibacy through the age of romance! It’s emotionally wrong. Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It’s biologically wrong. It’s a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social ills.