Note 139 — Chapter IX · The Old Maid and Her Relation to Society

Now, the dread lest a daughter should not be self-supporting at twenty-one leads parents in all poorer middle-class families to sink all thoughts of marriage and making her fit for marriage beneath the consideration of providing her with a calling. The ideal of independence for women, from being pursued for purely economic reasons, has come to be pursued for its own sake, as if independence were in itself a desirable condition for the female. But even if we concede the point that dependence on certain modern men amounts to ignominy, we should not allow the argument to assume a shape which must identify woman’s chief source of happiness with her relation to the man to whom she becomes related; and we ought always to correct it by considering that, in the long run, man is only a means to an end where woman is concerned, and that independence which is achieved without the experience of motherhood, even if such independence saves the woman from association with a third or fourth-rate man, is only equivalent to clutching at the shadow to let the substance go.