HUSBAND-HUNTING.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 44, 6 October 1911, Page 3

HUSBAND-HUNTING.

Miss Cicely Hamilton, the famous suffragist, writing in the Empire Magazine, deprecates what she calls hus-band-hunting over the seas. As far as one can gather, she says that the status of women is of greater importance than the question of population for our dominions overseas She does not. like the idea of young women going to Australia or Canada possessed of the one idea that they will get married there. Miss Hamilton says: “I cannot help thinking that a groat deal of harm lias been don? hr this continued and emphatic

demand. not for women, lint for wives. The more continued and emphatic it is, the more will tlio women who would make the right kind of wile—the self-respecting, self-supporting woman, and because self-supporting, probably capable—shrink from identifying herself with a class she- despises:

the husband-hunting class that .will marry for the sake of marriage. Eren if it be the case (which I, for one, can hardly believ) that the dominions beyond the seas offer to a woman no prospect in life but marriage, it would surely bo wise on the part of emigration authorities not to lay too much stress upon the fact; that is to say, if they wish to attract women emigrants of the best kind, women emigrants not only self-respecting, but adventurous, accustomed to making their ow n way by their own work, not merely to being supported by other people.* And, after all, a woman ■who can make her own way in the stress of modern competition is not less likely to have her wits about her, both as mother and housekeeper, than her sister who has failed at the job ox keeping herself. Offer to such 'a woman, young and adventurous, the chance of a livelihood on her own account, an honest independence, and the chance of success and competence, and you will get her fast enough; suggest to her that she should go where she can easily pick up a husband, and she will take the suggestion as an insult. . . . There are

plenty,' of course, who will not take it as an insult; but they are not the sort that any land requires for its good and the good of its sons.”