They are the modern spinsters, happy and busy, who often feed their
motherly instincts by caring for other people's children and feel a
sense of relief that it is a voluntary service, which they may rightly
indulge in vacations, and not a bond that never releases from duty.
They are the maiden aunts who spend affection and money upon the
families of their relatives; who help their younger brothers and
sisters through college; who take care of the aged and invalid in the
family connection, and act often as stay and prop to all the weaker
and more burdened of their kin. What many families would do without
this type of unmarried woman is hard to tell. They are often grateful
for their release from wearing domestic cares and enjoy their sense of
power in general serviceableness to those they love while at the same
time appreciating with keen satisfaction their own joy of
craftsmanship in some chosen profession. Except for a brief hour now
and then, when sister has a new baby or brother takes a new wife, they
feel anything but troubled over their condition of single blessedness
until, perhaps, a premonition of lonely old age stirs regret.
=The Demand of Eugenists.=--From the point of view of the eugenists,
who demand more fecundity on the higher and less on the lower levels
of life, one of the most sinister of all influences inimical to family
life is this large and increasing band of superior and happy single
women who are not even discontented and make no demand for any closer
touch with life than is now given them. If it is bad for the family
for a large number of women unable to find suitable permanent mates to
be so eager for motherhood that they claim social permission for that
public service whatever their marital position, it may be still worse
for the family for a large number of highly superior women to cease to
care greatly for intimate comradeship with men or for the actual
experience of motherhood. Many women working and living in solitary
fashion until too old to risk the chances of marriage, and able to
find highest comradeship and largest comfort in other women's
companionship, have been so held by family burdens in youth that this
result has been inevitable. Society has, therefore, a task to prevent
the weight of past generations, falling now so heavily upon some young
men and upon far more young women, from operating against the
well-being of the generations to come. We should make it our social
business to share more justly the burdens due to old age and chronic
invalidism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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