Women and Politics | Page 8

have a far larger share than their brothers of that best of all practical and moral educations, that of family life. Any one who has had experience of the families of farmers and small tradesmen, knows how boorish the lads are, beside the intelligence, and often the refinement, of their sisters. The same rule holds (I am told) in the manufacturing districts. Even in the families of employers, the young ladies are, and have been for a generation or two, far more highly cultivated than their brothers, whose intellects are always early absorbed in business, and too often injured by pleasure. The same, I believe, in spite of all that has been written about the frivolity of the girl of the period, holds true of that class which is, by a strange irony, called 'the ruling class.' I suspect that the average young lady already learns more worth knowing at home than her brother does at the public school. Those, moreover, who complain that girls are trained now too often merely as articles for the so-called 'marriage market,' must remember this--that the great majority of those who will have votes will be either widows, who have long passed all that, have had experience, bitter and wholesome, of the realities of life, and have most of them given many pledges to the State in the form of children; or women who, by various circumstances, have been early withdrawn from the competition of this same marriage-market, and have settled down into pure and honourable celibacy, with full time, and generally full inclination, to cultivate and employ their own powers. I know not what society those men may have lived in who are in the habit of sneering at 'old maids.' My experience has led me to regard them with deep respect, from the servant retired on her little savings to the unmarried sisters of the rich and the powerful, as a class pure, unselfish, thoughtful, useful, often experienced and able; more fit for the franchise, when they are once awakened to their duties as citizens, than the average men of the corresponding class. I am aware that such a statement will be met with 'laughter, the unripe fruit of wisdom.' But that will not affect its truth.
Let me say a few words more on this point. There are those who, while they pity the two millions and a half, or more, of unmarried women earning their own bread, are tempted to do no more than pity them, from the mistaken notion that after all it is their own fault, or at least the fault of nature. They ought (it is fancied) to have been married: or at least they ought to have been good-looking enough and clever enough to be married. They are the exceptions, and for exceptions we cannot legislate. We must take care of the average article, and let the refuse take care of itself. I have put plainly, it may be somewhat coarsely, a belief which I believe many men hold, though they are too manly to express it. But the belief itself is false. It is false even of the lower classes. Among them, the cleverest, the most prudent, the most thoughtful, are those who, either in domestic service or a few--very few, alas!--other callings, attain comfortable and responsible posts which they do not care to leave for any marriage, especially when that marriage puts the savings of their life at the mercy of the husband--and they see but too many miserable instances of what that implies. The very refinement which they have acquired in domestic service often keeps them from wedlock. 'I shall never marry,' said an admirable nurse, the daughter of a common agricultural labourer. 'After being so many years among gentlefolk, I could not live with a man who was not a scholar, and did not bathe every day.'
And if this be true of the lower class, it is still more true of some, at least, of the classes above them. Many a 'lady' who remains unmarried does so, not for want of suitors, but simply from nobleness of mind; because others are dependent on her for support; or because she will not degrade herself by marrying for marrying's sake. How often does one see all that can make a woman attractive--talent, wit, education, health, beauty,--possessed by one who never will enter holy wedlock. 'What a loss,' one says, 'that such a woman should not have married, if it were but for the sake of the children she might have borne to the State.' 'Perhaps,' answer wise women of the world, 'she did not see any one whom she could condescend to many.'
And thus it is that a very large proportion of the spinsters of England, so far from being, as silly boys and wicked