UNPOPULARITY OF WOMEN.

Evening Star, Issue 3072, 23 December 1872, Page 3

UNPOPULARITY OF WOMEN.

There is no denying the fact that women are not so popular among men as they used to be. Marriages are not so numerous in comparison with population, and if we may infer anything from the Divorce Courr, they cannot be so successful. What is the reason of it all ? Are men more exigent, or are women less loving ? Is it our fault or theirs ? No right-thinking man wishes women to be ignorant or silly ; but no man wants to see their intellect cultivated to the exclusion of their affections, the deadening of their instincts, or the annihilation of their sense of duty. It is one thing to have for a wife a mere brainless doll, whose ideas of life are bounded by fashion on the right side, and pleasure on the left, and another thing to have a learned mummy, whose heart has become atrophied in favor of her head, and who has dropped the sweetest characteristics of her womanhood in the class-room. It may bo quite right aud proper that women should understand conic sections and the differential calculus, if they are strongly impelled that way - that they should even put enthusiasm into the study of logarithms and find enjoyment in digesting some of the stitfest doctrines of political economy ; but it is better that they should be tender to men and gentle to children, careful housekeepers, kindly mistresses, puretoned leaders of society. It is good for them to have knowledge, but better to keep love. Yet this is what so many of the “advanced” woman have not kept. The odd antagonism to men professed by them, and the painfnl depreciation of all the home life, both in its affections and its duties, which they declare, baa created almost a distinct class among them ; and it is not a lovely one. They are enthusiastic for the franchise, aud passionate for an equal share in the so-called privileges men, but they are nuly scornful of the disabilities aud obligations alike of sex in all that relates to marriage, the home and children. In their regard for intellectual ambition they have ceased to respect the emotional side of human nature ; and iu their demand for free trade in the work of the world, for leave to share in all the specialities of the man’s life, they have forgotten that part pf their owp happiness lies in ministering to hjs. This, then, is the reason why jbey are pot so popular among men as they psed to be. Rivals, in the place of helppiates ; antagonists, not lovers ; can it be wpndeml at if men have follpwed as they |iq,ye been led, and have left off adoring a group of intermediate persons who only desire to be feared.

This is one class of women who are unpopg'ar with men, and deservedly so. Another is that of the women whose souls are centered upon “getting on in society,” and who regard men as husbands, merely as steppingstones to that end. Marriage means with them a banker’s book, and the liberty accorded to the wife which was denied the maiden. The man counts for nothing, provided always he is not exceptionably stingy, tyrannical, or jealous. Granted a moderate amount of liberality and uneasiness of temper, and he may be ugly, old, vicious, utterly unloveable throughout. What docs it matter? He has money ; and money is the Moloch of the day. So the woman of this class passes through the sacrificial lire all her beat affections, her poetry and aspirations, her hopes, her dreams, and sells herself for so much a year sterling—“getting on in society” being her reward. It is not because the grapes are sour that poor men dread and dislike this class of women ; and it is only because hu{nau perceptions are so easily blinded by

vanity and passion, that the very men who pny the price ignore the worthlessness of the thine; they buy. Sometimes knowledge comes when too late, and the stepping-stone .awakens, to the fact that, though money may pay f r youth and beauty, it caunot buy honor, nor yet love; and that the woman who sells herself in the first instance, has rarely anything to give in the second. How can we wonder, then, that %v tli these two sections of womanhood, so laige and imports'.t as they are, women should be less popular with men than they used to be, and marriage held a thing to he shy of, or undertaken only under extremity ? To he sure, men are poor fellows as bachelors, in spite of oar freedom and the desolate liberty of the latchkey. That traditional button is always coining off, and we sigh in vain for the dclt fingers of the ideal woman, while we prick our own in our clumsy attempts to sew it on again. We are badgered by our housekeepers, neglected by our laud ladies, and cheated by both. We fare vilely in chambers, worse in lodging®, and club living is not econ ■mica!. The dingy room, unswept and ill-garnished, is but a miserable kind of home, as wo sorrowfully confess to our own souls, it we are afraid to carry the secret farther. And yet we live <n in growing discontent, hating much what we have, but dreading more what we have not. Meanwhile, the country swarms with unmarried women, and sociologists shake their heads at the phenomenon, seeking to account for it on every plea hut the right one. Of course we do not deny the actual numerical redundancy of women in England. But we do say positively that more girls are unmarried than need he, while many good men are vowed to celibacy and button less discomfort because women have lost the trick of loving as they used to love ; because they have abjured the old virtues of patience, modesty, tenderness, self-sacri-fice, home-keeping, and home-blessing-—old characteristics ot them—and have become cold and hard and worldly and self-assertive instead; because they have ceased to be women in all that constitutes true womanhood, consequently they have ceased to charm men as in aforetime.- -Glohe.