I do not believe that among women of the same social origins and the same educational quality there can exist side by side entirely distinct schools of costume, deportment, and behaviour based on entirely divergent views of life.  I do not think that men can be trained to differentiate between different sorts of women, sorts of women they will often be meeting simultaneously, and to treat this one with frankness and fellowship and that one with awe passion and romantic old-world gallantry.  All sorts of intermediate types—­the majority of women will be intermediate types—­will complicate the problem.  This conflict of the citizen-woman ideal with the loveliness-woman ideal, which was breaking out very plainly in the British suffrage movement before the war, will certainly return after the war, and I have little doubt which way the issue will fall.  The human being is going to carry it against the sexual being.  The struggle is going to be extensive and various and prolonged, but in the serious years ahead the serious type must, I feel, win.  The plain, well-made dress will oust the ribbon and the decolletage.

In every way the war is accelerating the emancipation of women from sexual specialisation.  It is facilitating their economic emancipation.  It is liberating types that will inevitably destroy both the “atmosphere of gallantry” which is such a bar to friendliness between people of opposite sexes and that atmosphere of hostile distrust which is its counterpart in the minds of the over-sexual suffragettes.  It is arresting the change of fashions and simplifying manners.

In another way also it is working to the same end.  That fall in the birth-rate which has been so marked a feature in the social development of all modern states has become much more perceptible since the war began to tell upon domestic comfort.  There is a full-cradle agitation going on in Germany to check this decline; German mothers are being urged not to leave the Crown Prince of 1930 or 1940 without the necessary material for glory at some fresh Battle of Verdun.  I doubt the zeal of their response.  But everywhere the war signifies economic stress which must necessarily continue long after the war is over, and in the present state of knowledge that stress means fewer children.  The family, already light, will grow lighter.  This means that marriage, although it may be by no means less emotionally sacred, will become a lighter thing.

Once, to be married was a woman’s whole career.  Household cares, a dozen children, and she was consumed.  All her romances ended in marriage.  All a decent man’s romance ended there, too.  She proliferated and he toiled, and when the married couple had brought up some of their children and buried the others, and blessed their first grandchildren, life was over.