Note 3 — Chapter VI · THE INFLUENCE OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT UPON MARRIAGE

This idealism has naturally part also in the fact that, for example, two-thirds of the women who have gone through college in America do not marry, and find in club life a compensation for domestic life. But other motives also must often play a part here, from the desire to devote herself entirely to one of the lifeworks serviceable to mankind, to the egoism of spiritually barren young girls with its distaste for burdens and restraint.

A keen-sighted observer who recently spent a half year in North America corroborated what many have already stated: that the student and working young American girls devote themselves with true passion to the cultivation of their beauty, their toilette, their flirtations. All this belongs for her to the “Fine Arts” and as such is an end sufficient in itself, while for European women these arts, as a rule, are still means for alluring men to marriage. While study or work often makes European women in outer sense less “womanly,” although her soul always guards its full power to love, in America the reverse is the case: the outer appearance is bewitchingly womanly, but the soul no longer vibrates for love. The sexual sterility which Maudsley already prophesied thirty years ago, when he spoke about the “sexless ants,” has been partly realised, partly chosen voluntarily. In Europe it still frequently happens that a young woman who has put love aside for the sake of study or work is suddenly seized by an irresistible passion; in America, on the contrary, this is extremely rare. Women students look down upon the less cultured men, who ordinarily finish their studies earlier in order to earn a livelihood. The sympathy which they need, women find more easily in their own sex. The unmarried have quite the same social position as the married and do not desire children. If they finally marry, it is ordinarily because a more brilliant position is offered them than the one which they could create themselves, and the man is then considered and treated as a money-getter.

My authority emphasises also that the young students or working girls are ordinarily less original, of less personal significance, less individually developed, than the older women, especially women’s rights women, who often have not studied but have grown grey in marriage and motherhood, in self-development and in social work. The interesting significant American feminists were women between the ages of fifty and ninety; the woman of the present generation, however, which now enjoys the fruits of the work of the older generation, is, in spite of excellent scholarship and great working proficiency, less a woman and less a human being, less a personality.

These wholly fresh observations, which were communicated to me during the printing of my book, seem to me to confirm so strongly my point of view that I wish to repeat them here.

But in France and elsewhere mothers tell us how clear, intelligent, and universally interested their daughters are, and at the same time how critical, how free from ardour and enthusiasm. It is not the hasty love marriage that many mothers now fear for their daughters, but a worldly-wise marriage without love.