HUSBAND-HUNTING OVERSEAS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3310, 31 August 1911, Page 3

HUSBAND-HUNTING OVERSEAS.

Mies Cicely Hamilton, the famous suffragette, writing in the Empire Magazine, deprecates what she calls xins-band-hunting overseas. As far as one can gather, she says that the status of women is of greater importance than the question of population for our Dominions Overseas. She does not like the idea of young women going out to Australia or Canada possessed of the one idea that they will get married there. Miss Cicely Hamilton says : I cannot help thinking that a great deal of harm lias been done by this continued and emphatic demand, not for women, but for wives. The more continued and emphatic it is the more will the woman who would make the right kind of wife —the self-respecting, selfsupporting woman, and because selfsupporting, probably capable—shrink from identifying herself with a class she despises: the husband-hunting class that- will marry for the sake of marriage. “ Even if it be the case (which I, for one. can hardly believe) that the dominions beyond the seas offer to a woman no prospect in life but marriage, it would surely be wise on the part of emigration authorities not to lay too much stress upon the fact; that is to say. if they wish to attract women emigrants of 'the best kind; women emigrants not only self-respecting,, hut adventurous-; accustomed to making their own way by their own work, not merely to being supported by other people. “ And, after all, a woman who can make her own way in the stress of modern competition is not less likely to have her wits about her, both as mother and housekeeper, than her sister who has failed at the job of keeping herself. Offer to such a woman, young and adventurous, the chance of a livelihood on her own account, an honest independence and the chance of success and competence, and you will get her fast enough; suggest to her that she should go where she can easily pick up a husband, and she will take the suggestion as an insult. . .

“There are plenty, of _ course, who will not take it as an insult; but they are not the sort that any land requires for its good and the good of its sons.”