ew, who do not view with alarm the modern increase of unmarried
women of types most needed for motherhood. These believe that in the
present time, and perhaps in a long future, our complex social needs
cannot be met by holding the best blood and breeding within the family
bond, but that there must be a reserve of celibates, a few men and
many women, to carry on the school and to work for social amelioration
and social progress. This point of view, which has been sometimes
characterized as "defense of a third sex," is based on two premises:
namely, first, that all of a married woman's time and strength
throughout her whole adult life must go into strictly family service
in order for the family to be maintained; and, second, that those men
and women who specialize in some vocation in such extreme degree that
they cannot marry and have children are thereby, by reason of that
celibate concentration, better able to function socially in their
chosen work. It is the object of this book to disprove both these
assumptions.

=Most Social Students Advocate Marriage.=--Celibate concentration upon
a specific task, however valuable that task may be, is open, we
contend, to serious social dangers, as history amply proves. And
family life has now such varied and efficient aids from commerce,
manufacture, educational provisions in school and recreation centres,
in summer camps and special organizations of youthful energy toward
social serviceableness, that men and women can marry and rear
families, if they really desire so to do, more easily than ever
before, provided they are willing to pay the price of simplicity in
the home and in individual mastery of the technic of new ways of
living. What is needed for the best development of the family under
modern conditions is not more celibates, men and women of high ability
and noble consecration to undertake wholesale service in its behalf,
but rather that more of the best and the best-balanced men and women
be absorbed, to necessary degree, and at the right period of life, in
the task of actual transmission of their quality and tendency through
the living tissues of the social organism in the vital process of
parenthood. What is needed to secure that result is not only a new
ideal of social obligation but also, and definitely, such skill in
economic and domestic adjustments as will more and more leave a margin
of strength and energy for a chosen vocation not wholly mortgaged to
family uses