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 approach the
business with far greater fastidiousness than their grandmothers or
even their mothers exhibited. They are harder to please, and hence