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[1] La Femme dans le Theatre d’Ibsen, by FRIEDERICKE BOETTCHER.–THE AUTHOR.

The Feminists therefore propose, by training woman’s reason, to place her beyond the scope of mere emotion and mere prejudice, to enable her to judge, to select a mate for herself and a father for her children,–a double and necessary process.

There is a flavor of eugenics about these ideas: the right to choose means that women wish to be placed in such a position that, being economically independent to the extent of having equal opportunities, they will not be compelled to sell themselves in marriage as they now very often do. I do not refer to entirely loveless marriages, for these are not very common in Anglo-Saxon states, but to marriages dictated by the desire of woman to escape the authority of her parents, and to gain the dignity of a wife, the possession of a home and of money to spend. In the Feminist view, these are bad unions because love does not play the major part in them, and often plays hardly any part at all. The Feminists believe that the educated woman, informed on the subject of sex-relations, able to earn her own living, to maintain a political argument, will not fall an easy prey to the offer held out to her by a man who will be her master, because he will have bought her on a truck system.

Under Feminist rule, women will be able to select, because they will be able to sweep out of their minds the monetary consideration; therefore they will love better, and unless they love, they will not marry at all. It is therefore probable that they will raise the standard of masculine attractiveness by demanding physical and mental beauty in those whom they choose; that they will apply personal eugenics. The men whom they do not choose will find themselves in exactly the same position as the old maids of modern times: that is to say, these men, if they are unwed, will be unwed because they have chosen to remain so, or because they were not sought in marriage. The eugenic characteristic appears, in that women will no longer consent to accept as husbands the old, the vicious, the unpleasant. They will tend to choose the finest of the species, and those likely to improve the race. As the Feminist revolution implies a social revolution, notably “proper work for proper pay”, it follows that marriage will be easy, and that those women who wish to mate will not be compelled to wait indefinitely for the consummation of their loves. Incidentally, also, the Feminists point out that their proposals hold forth to men a far greater chance of happiness than they have had hitherto, for they will be sure that the women who select them do so because they love them, and not because they need to be supported.

This does not mean that Feminism is entirely a creed of reason; indeed a number of militant Feminists who collected round the English paper, The Freewoman, have as an article of their faith that one of the chief natural needs of woman and society is not less passion, but more. If they wish to raise women’s wages, to give them security, education, opportunity, it is because they want to place them beyond material temptations, to make them independent of a protector, so that nothing may stand in the way of the passionate development of their faculties. To this effect, of course, they propose to introduce profound changes in the conception of marriage itself.

Without committing themselves to free union, the Feminists wish to loosen the marriage tie, and they might not be averse to making marriage less easy, to raising, for instance, the marriage age for both sexes; but as they are well aware that, in the present state of human passions, impediments to marriage would lead merely to an increase in irregular alliances, they lay no stress upon that point. Moreover, as they are not prepared to admit that any moral damage ensues when woman contracts more than one alliance in the course of her life,–which view is accepted very largely in the United States, and in all countries with regard to widows,–they incline rather to repair the effects of bad marriages, than to prevent their occurrence.