Men, Women, and God by A. Herbert (Arthur Herbert) Gray

Author:A. Herbert (Arthur Herbert) Gray [Gray, A. Herbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781491251324
Google: 2Hp1ngEACAAJ
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: 2013-08-04T03:53:46+00:00

CHAPTER IX

INVOLUNTARY CELIBACY

Modern England has for many generations been a place so unhealthy for the young that a vast problem has grown up in our midst which seriously disturbs the normal adjustment of sex relationships. It would seem to have been Nature's intention that there should be slightly more men than women in the world, for boy babies outnumber girl babies [Footnote: The actual figures are 1052 boy babies to 1000 girl babies.] What it would mean if there were more adult men than women in the world it is hard to imagine. It would at once have enormous social consequences. No woman would remain a celibate except by her own choice. Men would have to behave themselves in order to win wives, and would cease to occupy the demoralizing position of being able to get wives whenever they want them. It would in fact mean a new world in many ways.

As things are, however, the unhealthy conditions of modern life produce a greater mortality among boy babies than among girl babies, and males come to be in a minority. This state of affairs has been greatly aggravated by the war, but it was serious even before 1914. It was then the case that the women outnumbered the men by about a million. The number must be nearer a million and a half to-day.

The result is that over a million women have to face the prospect of a life in which their most deeply implanted instincts—the instincts for wifehood and motherhood—cannot find their normal satisfaction, and the problem thus created is one of the most difficult in the whole of life. It is, of course, nothing less than insulting nonsense to talk about these women as "superfluous women." Behind the very phrase there lurks the old delusion that women are only needed in the world as wives and mothers. As a matter of fact a great deal of the work that is most needed in our civilization—work in education, art, literature, nursing, social service, and other departments of life—is being done by these women.

But while that is true it is also true that the personal life of the unmarried woman presents acute problems of a most intricate kind. Probably only a woman can truly understand those problems or justly estimate their urgency, but no man with any insight or sympathy can fail to know that the lot of the unmarried woman involves secret stresses, unsatisfied yearnings, and sometimes hours of dark depression. She may be unmarried because she has persistently refused to try to be satisfied with any second best. As a witty woman friend of mine once put it, she may be unmarried because "the attainable was not desirable and the desirable was not attainable." She may be unmarried because a very true lover of early days went on before, and she has never felt able to put anyone else in his place. Or she may have loved truly some man who loved another. Or nothing may ever have

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