Now, to be married is an incident in a woman’s career, as in a man’s.  There is not the same necessity of that household, not the same close tie; the married woman remains partially a freewoman and assimilates herself to the freewoman.  There is an increasing disposition to group solitary children and to delegate their care to specially qualified people, and this is likely to increase, because the high earning power of young women will incline them to entrust their children to others, and because a shortage of men and an excess of widows will supply other women willing to undertake that care.  The more foolish women will take these releases as a release into levity, but the common sense of the newer types of women will come to the help of men in recognising the intolerable nuisance of this prolongation of flirting and charming on the part of people who have had what should be a satisfying love.

Nor will there be much wealth or superfluity to make levity possible and desirable.  Winsome and weak womanhood will be told bluntly by men and women alike that it is a bore.  The frou-frou of skirts, the delicate mysteries of the toilette, will cease to thrill any but the very young men.  Marriage, deprived of its bonds of material necessity, will demand a closer and closer companionship as its justification and excuse.  A marriage that does not ripen into a close personal friendship between two equals will be regarded with increasing definiteness as an unsatisfactory marriage.

These things are not stated here as being desirable or undesirable.  This is merely an attempt to estimate the drift and tendency of the time as it has been accentuated by the war.  It works out to the realisation that marriage is likely to count for less and less as a state and for more and more as a personal relationship.  It is likely to be an affair of diminishing public and increasing private importance.  People who marry are likely to remain, so far as practical ends go, more detached and separable.  The essential link will be the love and affection and not the home.

With that go certain logical consequences.  The first is that the circumstances of the unmarried mother will resemble more than they have hitherto done those of many married mothers; the harsh lines once drawn between them will dissolve.  This will fall in with the long manifest tendency in modern society to lighten the disadvantages (in the case of legacy duties, for example) and stigma laid upon illegitimate children.  And a type of marriage where personal compatibility has come to be esteemed the fundamental thing will be altogether more amenable to divorce than the old union which was based upon the kitchen and the nursery, and the absence of any care, education, or security for children beyond the range of the parental household.  Marriage will not only be lighter, but more dissoluble.

To summarise all that has gone before, this war is accelerating rather than deflecting the stream of tendency, and is bringing us rapidly to a state of affairs in which women will be much more definitely independent of their sexual status, much less hampered in their self-development, and much more nearly equal to men than has ever been known before in the whole history of mankind....