Woman and Womanhood: A Search for PrinciplesSaleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Science
Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
Saleeby, C. W. (Caleb Williams)
Eugenics; Women
"whither are we tending," part of the answer will be that by such
measures as this for the care of child life, which means in practice
especially for the keeping alive of boys, we are tending toward the
correction of one of the gravest, though least recognized, evils of the
present day.
Our business in the present volume is not with childhood. It is not
possible to go fully into the statistical details of the comparative
death-rate of the sexes, but the data can readily be obtained by any
interested reader.[17]
It may be argued that the questions now under consideration are foreign
to a chapter entitled "The Conditions of Marriage," but the excess of
women in a community is one of the most fundamental conditions of
marriage therein, and the question is not the less necessary to be dealt
with because, so far as one can ascertain, its consequences have escaped
the notice of previous students.
Having dealt with the waste of male life in infancy, in childhood and in
war, we must pass on to a totally different factor of our problem, and
that is the emigration to our colonies and elsewhere of a greatly
disproportionate number of men. One does not assert for a moment that
the men should not go, but merely that if they do, so should women also.
As everyone knows they go for many reasons and purposes. These are
largely industrial and imperial. The Civil Service claims a large
number. These bachelors go in the cause of Empire, whether as actual
servants of the State or in the interests of commerce. They are largely
picked men, capable of discipline and initiative and of withstanding
hardships; and also in large degree intellectually able. It is certainly
not good for them to be alone, and it is worse for the women whom they
leave behind. All this may seem right and the only practicable thing for
the day, but it is fundamentally wrong because it is wrong for the
morrow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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