SUPERFLUOUS WOMEN

Evening Post, Volume CV, Issue 5, 7 January 1928, Page 10

SUPERFLUOUS WOMEN

ENGLISH WRITER'S VIEWS Taking a light, perhaps "skittish" point of view, a woman writer in the London "Daily Telegraph" discusses thus about the overplus of women in the world:— "As long as 1 can remember serious people have been exhorting us to attend to the fact that our country has more women than men. The lessons deduced from that are various. One, of course, is that women must be provided with opportunities of earning a living outside tho profession of matrimony. At the other end of things, as it were, you find people arguing that to give women the vote must mean tho extinction or submersion of man. We have hitherto in a characteristically British way avoided extremes. We have given a great many women the vote, but not. all, not the young ones. We have, theoretically, opened most of the professions and a number of occupations to women, but there has been no multiplication of opportunities for women to take the best positions; "Par be it from me to suggest that this is evidence of the injustice to man. He is naturally a slow creature, but he has probably been doing his best to adjust himself to a great change in conditions. Most men have now, whether they like the prospect or not, got it firmly into their heads that our country has to provide for a permanent majority of women. I don't say they know how it is going to be done. ~Vexy few, I suspect, have got beyond vague ideas of an increase of the number of women employed in the simpler routine tasks of commerce and industry. Some have notions of putting things right by exporting the superfluous females to countries where there are not enough to go round. But this is a big business. Women are a large majority. Of people between the ages of 15 and 65, women are 12 per cent, more numerous than men. "The statistician from whom I borrow these sad figures, Professor Bowley, is full of consolation. 'Unmarried women,' he is good enough to assure us, 'are not necessarily unwanted, any more than unmarried men. There are plenty of useful occupations for them and those who have been occupied' (the phrase is not quite "kind to the wives) 'will not be the least contented of the vast numbers of elderty women whose existence the statistician can foresee in the remote future.' It is very likely. I don't know that on such a question I should be inclined to take the opinion of an economist or statistician as more valuable than yours or mine. But that many women can attain to a state of content without marrying I am prepared to believe independently of the authority of my professor. Certainly content is not of necessity the final result of marriage. I suppose if you and I wore to enumerate the elderly women we know, single and married, we should find that, as far as anyone but themselves can judge, the single are quite as content as the married. "The professor should remark, however, that this does not amount to a proof that single life suits a woman as well as marriage. We do not spend all our time here below in being elderly. There are earlier years. It is not enough to be happy when you are old. But I do not suggest that all women are alike. That everyone who is not a man wants to be married, and will always be unhappy unless she is married, is a delusion born and bred of masculine vanity. Wo can all agree with the professor that to speak of the 12 per cent, margin of women as unwanted is confusion of terms and thought. Both men and women have other functions than the matrimonial to. perform, and are wanted to take other positions than that of husband and wife. "Still, however much you revolt against being treated as necessarily dependent on the other sex, you will agree that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is likely to be attained by tho numerical equality of the sexes. That every woman would then marry is not, ill the present state of civilisation, likely, and certainly not to be desired. But there would bo reasonable opportunity for everyone to do as she liked, which is not at present offered. Is it ever likely to be? Most of us would have said that in an old country like ours there seems to be no chance of such a state of things. "But Professor Bowley declares that the future will not be like the past. As the years go by the majority of women over men will grow smaller by degrees and beautifully less till fortyseven years hence (it is a long time to wait) the excess of 12 per. cent, will have dwindled to 1J per cent. This, I take it, is to be the happy result of the decrease in infant mortality. Nature provides that the numbers of the sexes born should be roughly equal. The boy baby has been found by the civilised mother more difficult to rear, and that is the chief cause of the superfluity of women. Now that the probability of every baby growing up is so much greater we may expect that tho .intentions of Nature in tho numbers of men and women will be realised. What will happen in the year 1971, what the world will then be like, are matters in which you and I may not bo personally involved. But it is pleasant to think of our grandchildren living in a country not very much more populous, says the statistician, than it is now, but with just as many boys as girls. I cannot doubt that it win be good for tlie boys. I wonder whether the girls will make tho best of their opportunities. Yet more do I wonder whether in a nation thus equitably divided tho progress which has been made in the employment of women in occupations outside matrimony will be continued. It is most disturbing to feel the surge of a suspicion that the future is not going to approve of everything we have been doing, and may oven revert to tho manners and customs of the shameful past."