is not that they are
without opportunity, for many of them during ten or fifteen years of
their lives may refuse one proposal after another, and spend the
intervals in avoiding the onset of such attentions. It is not
necessarily that the men who propose are of an inferior type. Such women
may refuse many men who come well up to or far surpass the modern male
standard. It is not that they are by any means without capacity for
affection; nor can one be at all certain that in many cases they would
not do better to marry, after all, heavy though the price may be.

What we have to recognize is that this is a phenomenon in every way
evil. There must be something wrong with any institution which does not
appeal to many members of the highest types of womanhood. Perhaps in
certain of its details this institution must be an anachronism, a
survival from times to which it may have been well suited when the
development of womanhood was habitually stunted, but inadequate to
satisfy the demands of fully developed womanhood in our own days. Now
from the eugenic point of view it is of course the finest kind of women
that we desire to be the mothers of the future--the more and not the
less fastidious, those who are capable of the highest development, those
who hold themselves in the highest honour, those who are least willing
to renounce their possession of themselves.

Men are to be heard who say that this is all nonsense; that it is
natural for women to surrender themselves, that motherhood is a splendid
reward, and that they are handsomely paid as well in material things.
But how many men would be willing to marry on the conditions with which
marriage is offered to a woman? How many men would be willing to
surrender their possession of themselves to an owner for life, so that
at no future hour can they have the right to privacy? Of course if the
conditions for marriage were for a man what they are for a woman,
scarcely any men would marry, and men would very soon see to it that
these conditions were utterly altered. They are conditions imposed in a
past age by the stronger sex upon the weaker, and no moral defence of
them is possible. It may be argued, and might long have been argued,
that a practical defence of them is possible, but that is undermined in
our own time when we find that under these conditions marriage is
declined by a large number of the best women. The practical argument is
now the other way. In the interests of ele