He further held that "although many women now remain unmarried from
necessity rather than from choice, there are always considerable numbers
who feel no strong impulse to marriage, and accept husbands to secure
subsistence and a home of their own rather than from personal affection
or sexual emotion. In a state of society in which all women were
economically independent, where all were fully occupied with public
duties and social or intellectual pleasures, and had nothing to gain by
marriage as regards material well-being or social position, it is highly
probable that the numbers of unmarried from choice would increase. It
would probably come to be considered a degradation for any woman to
marry a man whom she could not love and esteem, and this reason would
tend at least to delay marriage till a worthy and sympathetic partner
was encountered." But this choice, he considered, would be further
strengthened by the fact that, with the ever-increasing approach to
equality of opportunity for every child born in our country, that
terrible excess of male deaths, in boyhood and early manhood especially,
due to various preventable causes, would disappear, and change the
present majority of women to a majority of men. This would lead to a
greater rivalry for wives, and give to women the power of rejecting all
the lower types of character among their suitors.
"It will be their special duty so to mould public opinion, through home
training and social influence, as to render the women of the future the
regenerators of the entire human race.
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