libates.

But you cannot suppose that of 2,000,000! Among the number how many are
young widows, girls engaged to marry men now dead, and how many whose
_natural_ vocation was marriage, motherhood, home-making, and all that is
meant by such things as these? If this be the normal vocation of the normal
woman how many of these have been deprived of all that seemed to them to
make life worth living? Is it astonishing if they rebel? If they determine
to snatch at anything that yet lies in their grasp? If they affirm "the
right to motherhood" when they want children, or the satisfaction of the
sex-instinct when that need becomes imperious?

If we are to say to such women--"The normal life is denied to you, not
by your fault, or because you do not need it, but because we have
unfortunately been obliged to sacrifice in war the men who should have been
your mates: and we now invite you in the interests of morality to accept as
your lot perpetual virginity"--it is not difficult to imagine their reply:
"What is this morality in whose interests you ask so huge a sacrifice? Is
it worth such a price? Is the whole community willing to pay it, or is it
exacted from us alone? And on what, in the end, is it based?"

The answer to this question is often given to the young, even before the
question arises; and it is given in the lives of men and women. The lives
of those who are nobly celibate, or nobly married, are in themselves so
moving a plea, that few who have been closely in contact with them are left
untouched. It is the ideal realized that is the best defence of the ideal.
But let us admit that, too often, the actual marriage is a very pitiful
comment on our morality, and celibacy either a mere pretence or a very
mean and pinched reality. What answer then shall we give to the rising
generation which questions us--"On what do you base your moral standards?"

I do not doubt that I am voicing the experience of many if I say that when
I first began to ask such questions I met first of all with extreme horror
at such a question being put at all; and that, when I persisted, I found
that it was almost entirely by women that the cost was to be borne. Women
were to conform strictly to the moral standard (whose basis I was not
questioning), but men need not and, generally speaking, did not. I reasoned
that if men need not be chaste there must exist at least a certain number
of women who _could_ not be so, and that this reduced "morality" to