We are told by our census that more people marry in the thousand and marry young in the United States than in other countries.[2] And although it may be claimed that the older Americans and the finest types do not reproduce so freely as social well-being requires, there is much hope that movements of population, so much freer here than elsewhere among the educated and competent, will lead to better sex-adjustments and to the absorbing of more first-class women in family life.
=A Few Believe in a "Third Sex."=--There are those, however, although but a few, who do not view with alarm the modern increase of unmarried women of types most needed for motherhood.

These believe that in the present time, and perhaps in a long future, our complex social needs cannot be met by holding the best blood and breeding within the family bond, but that there must be a reserve of celibates, a few men and many women, to carry on the school and to work for social amelioration and social progress.

This point of view, which has been sometimes characterized as "defense of a third sex," is based on two premises: namely, first, that all of a married woman's time and strength throughout her whole adult life must go into strictly family service in order for the family to be maintained; and, second, that those men and women who specialize in some vocation in such extreme degree that they cannot marry and have children are thereby, by reason of that celibate concentration, better able to function socially in their chosen work.

It is the object of this book to disprove both these assumptions.
=Most Social Students Advocate Marriage.=--Celibate concentration upon a specific task, however valuable that task may be, is open, we contend, to serious social dangers, as history amply proves.

And family life has now such varied and efficient aids from commerce, manufacture, educational provisions in school and recreation centres, in summer camps and special organizations of youthful energy toward social serviceableness, that men and women can marry and rear families, if they really desire so to do, more easily than ever before, provided they are willing to pay the price of simplicity in the home and in individual mastery of the technic of new ways of living.