this country by the disproportion of the sexes--the fact that there are,
roughly, one and three-quarters to two million more women than men in this
country; and I was obliged to confine myself simply to stating the problem,
which, to my mind, is very greatly intensified by the fact, generally
ignored, that the sex needs of a woman are just as imperative, their
suppression just as hard to bear, as a man's; that woman is fully as human
as man, and that parenthood and loverhood and all that the satisfaction of
the sex instinct means to him, it means also to her. I do not affirm that
the difficulty of self-control or the suffering of abstinence presents
itself to men and women in just the same way; I am sure it does not. I do
not under-estimate the difference. But I do emphasize the fact that, as far
as I am able to judge, the suffering is _equal_, although it is different
in character. Therefore, the denial of marriage to a very large number
of women means that, although some women, like some men, are naturally
celibate, when so great a number of women are denied the possibility of
marriage, we must take it for granted that among them the average will not
be natural celibates, but women who suffer a very great loss if they do not
marry.

Now I want to add that this disproportion of the sexes is quite artificial,
and, therefore, should be temporary. From some of the letters I have
received I gather that people imagine that there has always been a very
much larger number of women than men, and not only in this country, but
throughout the world; and that, therefore, we ought to shape our customs
and our moral standards with this disproportion in mind as a permanent
fact. I want to point out that this is not the case. The causes of the
present excess of women over men in this country are quite artificial. As a
matter of fact, there are more boys born in this country than girls--about
107 to 100 is the ratio--but the boys die in very much larger numbers
during the first twelve months of their life, because they are more