THE OLD MAID'S RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD
Now the right to bear children without taking a husband could not
be confined to women who are superfluous in the monogamic
reckoning. There is the practical difficulty that although in our
population there are about a million monogamically superfluous
women, yet it is quite impossible to say of any given unmarried
woman that she is one of the superfluous. And there is the
difficulty of principle. The right to bear a child, perhaps the
most sacred of all women's rights, is not one that should have any
conditions attached to it except in the interests of race welfare.
There are many women of admirable character, strong, capable,
independent, who dislike the domestic habits of men; have no
natural turn for mothering and coddling them; and find the
concession of conjugal rights to any person under any conditions
intolerable by their self-respect. Yet the general sense of the
community recognizes in these very women the fittest people to
have charge of children, and trusts them, as school mistresses and
matrons of institutions, more than women of any other type when it
is possible to procure them for such work. Why should the taking
of a husband be imposed on these women as the price of their right
to maternity? I am quite unable to answer that question.
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