We conclude, therefore, that this increase in the class of economically independent bachelor women that is now taking place is a permanent increase.  It is probably being reinforced by a considerable number of war widows who will not remarry.  We have to consider in what directions this mass of capable, intelligent, energetic, undomesticated freewomen is likely to develop, what its effect will be on social usage, and particularly how it will react upon the lives of the married women about them.  Because, as we have already pointed out in this chapter, the release of feminine energy upon which the feminist problem depends is twofold, being due not only to the increased unmarriedness of women through the disproportion of the sexes and the rise in the age of marriage, but also to the decreased absorption of married women in domestic duties.  A woman, from the point of view of this discussion, is not “married and done for,” as she used to be.  She is not so extensively and completely married.  Her large and increasing leisure remains in the problem.

The influence of this coming body of freewomen upon the general social atmosphere will be, I venture to think, liberalising and relaxing in certain directions and very bracing in others.  This new type of women will want to go about freely without an escort, to be free to travel alone, take rooms in hotels, sit in restaurants, and so forth.  Now, as the women of the past decade showed, there are for a woman two quite antagonistic ways of going about alone.  Nothing showed the duplicate nature of the suffragist movement more than the great variety of deportment of women in the London streets during that time.  There were types that dressed neatly and quietly and went upon their business with intent and preoccupied faces.  Their intention was to mingle as unobtrusively as possible into the stream of business, to be as far as possible for the ordinary purposes of traffic “men in a world of men.”  A man could speak to such women as he spoke to another man, without suspicion, could, for example, ask his way and be directed without being charged with annoying or accosting a delicate female.

At the other extreme there was a type of young woman who came into the streets like something precious that has got loose.  It dressed itself as feminine loveliness; it carried sex like a banner and like a challenge.  Its mind was fully prepared by the Pankhurst literature for insult.  It swept past distressed manhood imputing motives.  It was pure hareem, and the perplexed masculine intelligence could never determine whether it was out for a demonstration or whether it was out for a spree.  Its motives in thus marching across the path of feminine emancipation were probably more complicated and confused than that alternative suggests, and sheer vanity abounded in the mixture.  But undoubtedly that extremity is the vanishing extremity of these things.  The new freewoman is going to be a grave and capable being, soberly dressed, and imposing her own decency and neutrality of behaviour upon the men she meets.  And along the line of sober costume and simple and restrained behaviour that the freewoman is marking out, the married woman will also escape to new measures of freedom.