New Britain herald., 1915-09-06
red Women Make the Best Wives splte Theory to Contrary-Mrs. Gilman But One-half of Tn em Marry. Males Are BecOm- custOmed to Them and Find Better Wives Surplus Males Menace.

! inity.' It makes a horrific combina- ton. Moreover, this weird composite ter TOT is put forward with such sounding
 lists of figures that minds unused to doubting are likely to be impressed. d. The charge is that feminism has added it's malign influence to that of higher education, with the result that college women do not narry-by half, and that the half who do marry pro- duce little less than baby apiece! Human usefulness is not limited to parentage. The mothers or fathers of one child-or even men and wom-
 en who have none-are sometimes able to benefit mankind more effec- tually than those who, like the smil ingly explanatory Italian matron, have
 'T'ree-a, one-a-time,t two-a t'ree-a- time and one-a all-a-time."
 If you hastily run over in your mind such names of great world ser wants as you can recall you will notice that they are valued by what they did for the world-not for the number of their children.
 But to return to our college women, and their sins of omission Only one half marry-at present. If, however, we study the percentage wno married in the days when women first strug- gled forward into equality in educa- tion it will be found still less. As col lege education becomes more common
 more popular as it ceases to demand
 only the unusually brave and deter mined; as men-who, after all, nave to be consulted in the matter of mar
 rying!-become more used to college
 bred women, larger number of them marry. A woman cannot marry all
 alone. Neither can she coerce whom soever she will and compel him to come in. These figures would remain the same if treated as the measure of mems willingness to have educated wives
 With the steady increase of educa- ton among women comes an equally steady increase in the number who marry. But there are other factors to consider, many of them.
 Our Surplus Males.
 We have, to be sure, goodly num- Der of surplus males'' in our coun- try, nearly 3,000,000 in 1910, but these are mainly young immigrants, men, to be sure, but not the sort that college women would be likely to marry even if they had not been to college. Allowing fairly even numbers of men and women, there are some disad- vantageous qualifications among men which unfit certain number of them for marrying-at least from 8 wom- ans point of view. .. Among our prison population in 1910 there was a preponderance of 99,226 males; among the insane, in asylums, a preponderance of 9,595. Here is an array of 108,000 undersir- able citizens to reduce by that number woman's chances of marrying. Then there is the great army of drunkards, preponderantly. men, and, still fur ! ther, men with transmissable diseases ! "a ghastly array. In the worst of l these diseases we again find far the greater number to be male. It would 1 seem as though among our 2O,0OO,OOO l adult males the most conservative es- timate of one per cent, or 200, 1000, are
 unfitted for marriage by one disease alone, which, with all these otherwise
 unfit, gives us from 100000 to 100000 1 possible candidates for matrimony who out to be declined.
 1 The college women, who are sin gled out for criticism, amount now to perhaps 8O,OOO. Half of that is but 10000. The forty thousand men they have not married are but as one to ten in the number of undesirables above mentioned.
 Are They Asked.
 This does not, of course, prove that
 our recalcitrant college women were asked in marriage by tenor by one l-criminal, insane, feeble-minded, de- fective or diseased person. But it
 does prove that with unfit males largely outnumbering unfit females,
 some females must go unmarried through no fault of their own. The
 college women, as being a little older, somewhat wiser and more experi-
 enced, are perhaps better able to dis
 criminate, and, in added enormity of
 economic independence, better able to
 refuse.
 Cannot these opponents of fenin-
 ism see the deadly nature of their re- l f7ection 11nOn men?