smay. But no one ever heard of a woman who
pitied the poor fellow whose honest passion she had found it expedient
to spurn. On the contrary, women take delight in such clownish agonies,
and exhibit them proudly, and boast about them to other women.

V. The New Age

42. The Transvaluation of Values

The gradual emancipation of women that has been going on for the last
century has still a long way to proceed before they are wholly delivered
from their traditional burdens and so stand clear of the oppressions
of men. But already, it must be plain, they have made enormous
progress--perhaps more than they made in the ten thousand years
preceding. The rise of the industrial system, which has borne so
harshly upon the race in general, has brought them certain unmistakable
benefits. Their economic dependence, though still sufficient to make
marriage highly attractive to them, is nevertheless so far broken
down that large classes of women are now almost free agents, and quite
independent of the favour of men. Most of these women, responding
to ideas that are still powerful, are yet intrigued, of course, by
marriage, and prefer it to the autonomy that is coming in, but the fact
remains that they now have a free choice in the matter, and that dire
necessity no longer controls them. After all, they needn't marry if they
don't want to; it is possible to get their bread by their own labour
in the workshops of the world. Their grandmothers were in a far more
difficult position. Failing marriage, they not only suffered a cruel
ignominy, but in many cases faced the menace of actual starvation. There
was simply no respectable place in the economy of those times for the
free woman. She either had to enter a nunnery or accept a disdainful
patronage that was as galling as charity.

Nothing could be, plainer than the effect that the increasing economic
security of women is having upon their whole habit of life and mind. The
diminishing marriage rate and the even more rapidly diminishing
birth rates how which way the wind is blowing. It is common for male
statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in
the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This
growing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no
considerable, body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that
marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that
large numbers of them now app