The Women of Tomorrow. William Hard

on them was squandered the emotional life of millions of young men.

      On the one side—intelligent, capable, effective young women, leading lives of emotional sterility. On the other side—inferior women blasted and withered by their specialization in the emotional life of youth!

      The connection between postponement of marriage and irregularity of living will be admitted by everybody who is willing to face facts and 29 who is optimist enough to believe that if, instead of letting facts sleep, we rouse them and fight them we can make a better race.

      The great Russian scientist, Metchnikoff, successor to Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute, mentions the postponement of marriage as one of the biological disharmonies of life. It is a disharmony that “among highly civilized peoples marriage and regular unions are impossible at the right time.”

      And Mr. A. S. Johnson, writing in the authoritative report of the committee of fifteen on the social evil, notes the parallel increase of “young unmarried men” and of a city’s “volume of vice.”

      He goes on to make, without comment, a statement of the economic facts of the case.

      “As a rule,” he says, “the income which a young man earns, while sufficient to secure a fair degree of comfort for himself, does not suffice for founding a family.”

      He cannot found a family at the right time. He goes unmarried through the romantic period of his development, when the senses are at their keenest and when the other sex, in its most vividly 30 idealized perfection, is most poignantly desired.

      Then, later on, he may begin to get a larger income. Then marriage may become more feasible. But then romance is waning. Then, as Mr. Johnson says, “his standard of personal comfort rises.” Romance has been succeeded by calculation. “Accordingly he postpones marriage to a date in the indefinite future or abandons expectation of it altogether.”

      Celibacy through the age of romance! It’s emotionally wrong. Sexlessness for a score of years after sex has awakened! It’s biologically wrong. It’s a defiance of nature. And nature responds, as she does to every defiance, with a scourge of physical and social ills.

      “But what of all that?” thought Mary. “Those things are just observations. What I am going to act on is that I want John.”

      At which point she stopped being a typical modern young woman.

      She became a woman of the future.

      “Look here,” she said to John, “I’m working. You’re working. We’re single. Very well. We’ll change it. I’m working. You’re 31 working. We’re married. Have we lost anything? And we’ve gained each other.”

      They were married and Mary kept on working.

      Two years later she stopped working.

      In those two years she had helped John to start a home. She couldn’t operate soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs and spinning wheels for him. But she brought him an equivalent of it in money. She earned from $900 to $1,000 a year.

      Being married, they were more thrifty. They saved a large part of her earnings. John was still spending a large part of his on extending his business, on traveling, on entertaining prospective clients, on making acquaintances. Sometimes she had to contribute some of her own money to his expense accounts. That was the fortune of war. She helped him pursue success.

      “I wouldn’t give up the memory of those two years,” Mary used to say, as she sat and stitched for her children, “for anything. I shared at least a part of my husband’s youth.”

      By sharing it, she won a certain happiness otherwise unattainable. They had come to know 32 each other and to help form each other’s character and to share each other’s difficulties in the years when only there is real joy in the struggle of life. They had not postponed their love till, with a settled income, John could support her in comfort and they could look back like Browning’s middle-aged estranged lovers to say: