Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/773

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IS EDUCATION OPPOSED TO MOTHERHOOD?
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complete love with superficial glamour, are open to the charge of depreciating marriage. Guests are not tempted to a banquet by fear of starvation, nor are men attracted toward matrimony for the interests of the race. Instead of showing that marriage offers the greatest possibility of happiness, it is often described by men as an unintellectual, slavish, and pitiable condition. Few epithalamia are sung by the generation which asks, "Is marriage a failure?" and rare is the poet who writes:

"Clear as amber, fine as musk,
Is life to those who, pilgrim-wise,
Move hand in hand from dawn to dusk."

II. Mr. Allen seems to regard as evidence that women "are becoming unfitted for motherhood" the fact that they do not glory in their femininity, and charges also that women reformers speak and write "as though it were desirable that the mass of women should remain unmarried forever." Worse even than this, he asserts: "At the present moment a great majority of the ablest women are wholly dissatisfied with their own position as women, and with the position imposed by the facts of the case upon women generally; this as the direct result of their false education. "Here are two ideas badly entangled for want of definition—the natural and the artificial position of women. Mr. Allen gives us on the following page his opinion of "the position" (artificial) of women in language strong enough for the most blatant reformer." The position of women was not a position which could bear the test of nineteenth-century scrutiny; . . . their relation to the family, to their husbands, their children, their friends, their property, was simply insupportable." (Does he demand of these ablest women that they should be satisfied with a position he calls "insupportable"?) But, let him not be distressed because woman does not openly "glory" in her natural position of womanhood. There is no failure of healthy instinct here, but a natural feminine divergence from the masculine feeling. The differentiation of the sexes is a subject upon which we have no adequate data. We might as well try to surmise the habits of the wild cat from the domesticated pussy, as to speculate upon the essential qualities of free womanhood. But, so far as woman's physical constitution indicates anything, it points toward greater reserve on her part than is exhibited by man. This corresponds with the almost universal inclination of women to be more modest than men.[1] Therefore, though a woman may prefer her own sex and be proud of her privileges as woman, she will not voluntarily go about "glorifying" her womanhood. If Mr. Allen should meet a young woman who announced herself a candidate for mother-

  1. A few savage tribes form exceptions to this rule.