_Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, art. "Sexes, Separation
of").

By attempting to desexualize the idea of man and to oversexualize
the idea of woman, Christianity necessarily degraded the position
of woman and the conception of womanhood. As Donaldson well
remarks, in pointing this out (op. cit., p. 182), "I may define
man as a male human being and woman as a female human being....
What the early Christians did was to strike the 'male' out of the
definition of man, and 'human being' out of the definition of
woman." Religion generally appears to be a powerfully depressing
influence on the position of woman notwithstanding the appeal
which it makes to woman. Westermarck considers, indeed (_Origin
and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. i, p. 669), that
religion "has probably been the most persistent cause of the
wife's subjection to her husband's rule."

It is sometimes said that the Christian tendency to place women
in an inferior spiritual position went so far that a church
council formally denied that women have souls. This foolish story
has indeed been repeated in a parrot-like fashion by a number of
writers. The source of the story is probably to be found in the
fact, recorded by Gregory of Tours, in his history (lib. viii,
cap. XX), that at the Council of Macon, in 585, a bishop was in
doubt as to whether the term "man" included woman, but was
convinced by the other members of the Council that it did. The
same difficulty has presented itself to lawyers in more modern
times, and has not always been resolved so favorably to woman as
by the Christian Council of Macon.

The low estimate of women that prevailed even in the early Church
is admitted by Christian scholars. "We cannot but notice," writes
Meyrick (art. "Marriage," Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of
Christian Antiquities_), "even in the greatest of the Christian
fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and consequently of
the marriage relationship. Even St. Augustine can see no
justification for marriage, except in a grave desire deliberately
adopted of having children; and in accordance with this view, all
married intercourse, except for this single purpose, is harshly
condemned. If marriage is sought after for the sake of children,
it is justifiable; if entered into as a _remedium_ to avoid worse
evils, it is pardonable; the idea of the mutual society, help,
and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in
prosperity and adversity, hardly existed, and could hardly yet
exist."

From the woman's point of view, Lily Braun, in her important work
on the woman question (_Die Frauenfrage_, 1901, pp. 28 et seq.)
concludes that, in so far as Christianity was favorable to women,
we must see that favorable influence in the placing of women on
the same moral level as men, as illustrated in the saying of
Jesus, "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first
stone," implying that each sex owes the same fidelity. It
reached, she adds, no further than this. "Christianity, which
women accepted as a deliverance with so much enthusiasm, and died
for as martyrs, has not fulfilled their hopes."

Even as regards the moral equality of the sexes in marriage, the
position of Christian authorities was sometimes equivocal. One of
the greatest of the Fathers, St. Basil, in the latter half of the
fourth century, distinguished between adultery and fornication as
committed by a married man; if with a married woman, it was
adultery; if with an unmarried woman, it was merely fornication.
In the former case, a wife should not receive her husband back;
in the latter case, she should (art. "Adultery," Smith and
Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_). Such a
decision, by attaching supreme importance to a distinction which
could make no difference to the wife, involved a failure to
recognize her moral personality. Many of the Fathers in the
Western Church, however, like Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose,
could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for
the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on
the legal and popular side was already approximating to that
view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to
attain it. It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman
Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by
either conjugal party in two degrees: (1) _simplex_, of the
married with the unmarried, and (2) _duplex_, of the married with
the married.

It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in
attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the
sexes into actual practical morality. It was accepted in theory;
it was not followed in practice. W.G. Sumner, discussing this
question (_Folkways_, pp. 359-361), concludes: "Why are these
views not in the _mores?_ Undoubtedly it is because they are
dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or
philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience
of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in
ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman
and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on
this point later.

It was probably, however, not so much the Church as Teutonic customs and
the development of the feudal system, with the masculine and military
ideals it fostered, that was chiefly decisive in fixing the inferior
position of women in the mediaeval world. Even the ideas of chivalry, which
have often been supposed to be peculiarly favorable to women, so far as
they affected women seem to have been of little practical significance.

In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much
evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit
always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain
for women, even though it occasionally idealized them. "Go into
your painted and gilded rooms," we read in _Renaus de Montauban_,
"sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work
tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy
yourselves with our affairs. Our business is to strike with the
steel sword. Silence!" And if the woman insists she is struck on
the face till the blood comes. The husband had a legal right to
beat his wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting
him. Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a
thirteenth century collection of _Coutumes_, it is set down that
a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, _resnablement_. (As
regards the husband's right to chastise his wife, see also
Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 234. In England it
was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern
movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal
right.)

In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a
horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman.
In _Girbers de Metz_, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert,
ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of
a rose and the white flesh of a lily. "Look, cousin Girbert,
look! By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!" "Ah," Girbert replies,
"a beautiful beast is my horse!" "I have never seen anything so
charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark
eyes," says Garin. "I know no steed to compare with mine,"
retorts Girbert. When the men were thus absorbed in the things
that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances
were left to young girls to make. "In all the _chansons de
geste_," Gautier remarks, "it is the young girls who make the
advances, often with effrontery," though, he adds, wives are
represented as more virtuous (L. Gautier, _La Chevalerie_, pp.
236-8, 348-50).

In England Pollock and Maitland (_History of English Law_, vol.
ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever
existed as among other Teutonic peoples. "From the Conquest
onwards," Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), "the
unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes
fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal
personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years
before." But the developed English law more than made up for any
privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent
manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of
irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence
of injuring her lord and master. The English wife, as Hobhouse
continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband's slave, at any
rate his liege subject; if she killed him it was "petty treason,"
the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature
kingdom, and a more serious offence than murder. Murder she could
not commit in his presence, for her personality was merged in
him; he was responsible for most of her crimes and offences (it
was that fact which gave him the right to chastise her), and he
could not even enter into a contract with her, for that would be
entering into a contract with himself. "The very being and legal
existence of a woman is suspended during marriage," said
Blackstone, "or at least is incorporated and consolidated into
that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she
performs everything. So great a favorite," he added, "is the
female sex of the laws of England." "The strength of woman," says
Hobhouse, interpreting the sense of the English law, "was her
weakness. She conquered by yielding. Her gentleness had to be
guarded from the turmoil of the world, her fragrance to be kept
sweet and fresh, away from the dust and the smoke of battle.
Hence her need of a champion and guardian."

In France the wife of the mediaeval and Renaissance periods
occupied much the same position in her husband's house. He was
her absolute master and lord, the head and soul of "the feminine
and feeble creature" who owed to him "perfect love and
obedience." She was his chief servant, the eldest of his
children, his wife and subject; she signed herself "your humble
obedient daughter and friend," when she wrote to him. The
historian, De Maulde la Claviere, who has brought together
evidence on this point in his _Femmes de la Renaissance_, remarks
that even though the husband enjoyed this lofty and superior
position in marriage, it was still generally he, and not the
wife, who complained of the hardships of marriage.

Law and custom assumed that a woman should be more or less under the
protection of a man, and even the ideals of fine womanhood which arose in
this society, during feudal and later times, were necessarily tinged by
the same conception. It involved the inequality of women as compared with
men, but under the social conditions of a feudal society such inequality
was to woman's advantage. Masculine force was the determining factor in
life and it was necessary that every woman should have a portion of this
force on her side. This sound and reasonable idea naturally tended to
persist even after the growth of civilization rendered force a much less
decisive factor in social life. In England in Queen Elizabeth's time no
woman must be masterless, although the feminine subjects of Queen
Elizabeth had in their sovereign the object lesson of a woman who could
play a very brilliant and effective part in life and yet remain absolutely
masterless. Still later, in the eighteenth century, even so fine a
moralist as Shaftesbury, in his _Characteristics_, refers to lovers of
married women as invaders of property. If such conceptions still ruled
even in the best minds, it is not surprising that in the same century,
even in the following century, they were carried out into practice by less
educated people who frankly bought and sold women.

Schrader, in his _Reallexicon_ (art. "Brautkauf"), points out
that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her
person, and not merely of the right of protecting her. The
original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on
account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization. In
the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc to stop the
sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the
English (Pike, _History of Crime in England_, vol. i, p. 99). The
practice never quite died out, however, in remote country
districts.

Such transactions have taken place even in London. Thus in the
_Annual Register_ for 1767 (p. 99) we read: "About three weeks
ago a bricklayer's laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he
had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a
quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. The workman went off with
the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a
legacy of L200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in
Devonshire. The parties were married last Friday."

The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (_Church Folk-lore_, second edition, p.
146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought
by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century. In
one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to
market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and
led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had
purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man's
wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.

It is the same conception of woman as property which, even to the
present, has caused the retention in many legal codes of clauses
rendering a man liable to pay pecuniary damages to a woman,
previously a virgin, whom he has intercourse with and
subsequently forsakes (Natalie Fuchs, "Die Jungfernschaft im
Recht und Sitte," _Sexual-Probleme_, Feb., 1908). The woman is
"dishonored" by sexual intercourse, depreciated in her market
value, exactly as a new garment becomes "second-hand," even if it
has but once been worn. A man, on the other hand, would disdain
the idea that his personal value could be diminished by any
number of acts of sexual intercourse.

This fact has even led some to advocate the "abolition of
physical virginity." Thus the German authoress of _Una
Poenitentium_ (1907), considering that the protection of a woman
is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as
by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the
operation of removal of the hymen in childhood. It is undoubtedly
true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a
false conception of feminine "honor," and to an unwholesome
conception of feminine purity.

Custom and law are slowly changing in harmony with changed social
conditions which no longer demand the subjection of women either in their
own interests or in the interests of the community. Concomitantly with
these changes a different ideal of womanly personality is developing. It
is true that the ancient ideal of the lordship of the husband over the
wife is still more or less consciously affirmed around us. The husband
frequently dictates to the wife what avocations she may not pursue, what
places she may not visit, what people she may not know, what books she may
not read. He assumes to control her, even in personal matters having no
direct concern with himself, by virtue of the old masculine prerogative of
force which placed a woman under the hand, as the ancient patriarchal
legists termed it, of a man. It is, however, becoming more and more widely
recognized that such a part is not suited to the modern man. The modern
man, as Rosa Mayreder has pointed out in a thoughtful essay,[292] is no
longer equipped to play this domineering part in relation to his wife. The
"noble savage," leading a wild life on mountain and in forest, hunting
dangerous beasts and scalping enemies when necessary, may occasionally
bring his club gently and effectively on to the head of his wife, even, it
may be, with grateful appreciation on her part.[293] But the modern man,
who for the most part spends his days tamely at a desk, who has been
trained to endure silently the insults and humiliations which superior
officials or patronizing clients may inflict upon him, this typical modern
man is no longer able to assume effectually the part of the "noble savage"
when he returns to his home. He is indeed so unfitted for the part that
his wife resents his attempts to play it. He is gradually recognizing
this, even apart from any consciousness of the general trend of
civilization. The modern man of ideas recognizes that, as a matter of
principle, his wife is entitled to equality with himself; the modern man
of the world feels that it would be both ridiculous and inconvenient not
to accord his wife much the same kind of freedom which he himself
possesses. And, moreover, while the modern man has to some extent acquired
feminine qualities, the modern woman has to a corresponding extent
acquired masculine qualities.

Brief and summary as the preceding discussion has necessarily been, it
will have served to bring us face to face with the central fact in the
sexual morality which the growth of civilization has at the present day
rendered inevitable: personal responsibility. "The responsible human
being, man or woman, is the centre of modern ethics as of modern law;"
that is the conclusion reached by Hobhouse in his discussion of the
evolution of human morality.[294] The movement which is taking place among
us to liberate sexual relationships from an excessive bondage to fixed and
arbitrary regulations would have been impossible and mischievous but for
the concomitant growth of a sense of personal responsibility in the
members of the community. It could not indeed have subsisted for a single
year without degenerating into license and disorder. Freedom in sexual
relations involves mutual trust and that can only rest on a basis of
personal responsibility. Where there can be no reliance on personal
responsibility there can be no freedom. In most fields of moral action
this sense of personal responsibility is acquired at a fairly early stage
of social progress. Sexual morality is the last field of morality to be
brought within the sphere of personal responsibility. The community
imposes the most varied, complicated, and artificial codes of sexual
morality on its members, especially its feminine members, and, naturally
enough, it is always very suspicious of their ability to observe these
codes, and is careful to allow them, so far as possible, no personal
responsibility in the matter. But a training in restraint, when carried
through a long series of generations, is the best preparation for freedom.
The law laid on the earlier generations, as old theology stated the
matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to
Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later
generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain
degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the
earlier generations.

The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal
responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately
acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous
organization. This is especially the case as regards sexual
morality, and has often been illustrated on the contact of a
higher with a lower civilization. It has constantly happened that
missionaries--entirely against their own wishes, it need not be
said--by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found
established, and by substituting the freedom of European customs
among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted
the most disastrous effects on morality. This has been the case
among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of
Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel
Lambkin (_British Medical Journal_, Oct. 3, 1908).

As regards Polynesia, also, R.L. Stevenson, in his interesting
book, _In the South Seas_ (Ch. V), pointed out that, while before
the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole,
chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise.

Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore--who was High
Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent
critic--missionary effort has been "wonderfully successful,"
where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which
has much modified life and character, yet chastity has suffered.
This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the
native races in Fiji. Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report
(Australasian _Review of Reviews_, Oct., 1897) remarks: "Not a
few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral
advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type. The abolition of
polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in
favor of women. The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the
support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the
burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be
carried by one. In heathen times female chastity was guarded by
the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily
put to death. Christianity has abolished club-law, and purely
moral restraints, or the terror of the penalties of the next
world, do not, to the limited imagination of the Fijian, quite
take its place. So the standard of Fijian chastity is
distressingly low."

It must always be remembered that when the highly organized
primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is
removed, chastity becomes more delicately and unstably poised.
The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and
essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain
the volcanic forces of the passion of love even in high
civilizations. "No perfection of moral constitution in a woman,"
Hinlon has well said, "no power of will, no wish and resolution
to be 'good,' no force of religion or control of custom, can
secure what is called the virtue of woman. The emotion of
absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep
them all away. Society, in choosing to erect itself on that
basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and so long as it continues
to choose it will continue to have that result."

It is necessary to insist for a while on this personal responsibility in
matters of sexual morality, in the form in which it is making itself felt
among us, and to search out its implications. The most important of these
is undoubtedly economic independence. That is indeed so important that
moral responsibility in any fine sense can scarcely be said to have any
existence in its absence. Moral responsibility and economic independence
are indeed really identical; they are but two sides of the same social
fact. The responsible person is the person who is able to answer for his
actions and, if need be, to pay for them. The economically dependent
person can accept a criminal responsibility; he can, with an empty purse,
go to prison or to death. But in the ordinary sphere of everyday morality
that large penalty is not required of him; if he goes against the wishes
of his family or his friends or his parish, they may turn their backs on
him but they cannot usually demand against him the last penalties of the
law. He can exert his own personal responsibility, he can freely choose to
go his own way and to maintain himself in it before his fellowmen on one
condition, that he is able to pay for it. His personal responsibility has
little or no meaning except in so far as it is also economic independence.

In civilized societies as they attain maturity, the women tend to acquire
a greater and greater degree alike of moral responsibility and economic
independence. Any freedom and seeming equality of women, even when it
actually assumes the air of superiority, which is not so based, is unreal.
It is only on sufferance; it is the freedom accorded to the child, because
it asks for it so prettily or may scream if it is refused. This is merely
parasitism.[295] The basis of economic independence ensures a more real
freedom. Even in societies which by law and custom hold women in strict
subordination, the woman who happens to be placed in possession of
property enjoys a high degree alike of independence and of
responsibility.[296] The growth of a high civilization seems indeed to be
so closely identified with the economic freedom and independence of women
that it is difficult to say which is cause and which effect. Herodotus, in
his fascinating account of Egypt, a land which he regarded as admirable
beyond all other lands, noted with surprise that, totally unlike the
fashion of Greece, women left the men at home to the management of the
loom and went to market to transact the business of commerce.[297] It is
the economic factor in social life which secures the moral responsibility
of women and which chiefly determines the position of the wife in relation
to her husband.[298] In this respect in its late stages civilization
returns to the same point it had occupied at the beginning, when, as has
already been noted, we find greater equality with men and at the same time
greater economic independence.[299]

In all the leading modern civilized countries, for a century past, custom
and law have combined to give an ever greater economic independence to
women. In some respects England took the lead by inaugurating the great
industrial movement which slowly swept women into its ranks,[300] and made
inevitable the legal changes which, by 1882, insured to a married woman
the possession of her own earnings. The same movement, with its same
consequences, is going on elsewhere. In the United States, just as in
England, there is a vast army of five million women, rapidly increasing,
who earn their own living, and their position in relation to men workers
is even better than in England. In France from twenty-five to seventy-five
per cent. of the workers in most of the chief industries--the liberal
professions, commerce, agriculture, factory industries--are women, and in
some of the very largest, such as home industries and textile industries,
more women are employed than men. In Japan, it is said, three-fifths of
the factory workers are women, and all the textile industries are in the
hands of women.[301] This movement is the outward expression of the modern
conception of personal rights, personal moral worth, and personal
responsibility, which, as Hobhouse has remarked, has compelled women to
take their lives into their own hands, and has at the same time rendered
the ancient marriage laws an anachronism, and the ancient ideals of
feminine innocence shrouded from the world a mere piece of false
sentiment.[302]

There can be no doubt that the entrance of women into the field
of industrial work, in rivalry with men and under somewhat the
same conditions as men, raises serious questions of another
order. The general tendency of civilization towards the economic
independence and the moral responsibility of women is
unquestionable. But it is by no means absolutely clear that it is
best for women, and, therefore, for the community, that women
should exercise all the ordinary avocations and professions of
men on the same level as men. Not only have the conditions of the
avocations and professions developed in accordance with the
special aptitudes of men, but the fact that the sexual processes
by which the race is propagated demand an incomparably greater
expenditure of time and energy on the part of women than of men,
precludes women in the mass from devoting themselves so
exclusively as men to industrial work. For some biologists,
indeed, it seems clear that outside the home and the school women
should not work at all. "Any nation that works its women is
damned," says Woods Hutchinson (_The Gospel According to Darwin_,
p. 199). That view is extreme. Yet from the economic side, also,
Hobson, in summing up this question, regards the tendency of
machine-industry to drive women away from the home as "a tendency
antagonistic to civilization." The neglect of the home, he
states, is, "on the whole, the worst injury modern industry has
inflicted on our lives, and it is difficult to see how it can be
compensated by any increase of material products. Factory life
for women, save in extremely rare cases, saps the physical and
moral health of the family. The exigencies of factory life are
inconsistent with the position of a good mother, a good wife, or
the maker of a home. Save in extreme circumstances, no increase
of the family wage can balance these losses, whose values stand
upon a higher qualitative level" (J.A. Hobson, _Evolution of
Modern Capitalism_, Ch. XII; cf. what has been said in Ch. I of
the present volume). It is now beginning to be recognized that
the early pioneers of the "woman's movement" in working to remove
the "subjection of woman" were still dominated by the old ideals
of that subjection, according to which the masculine is in all
main respects the superior sex. Whatever was good for man, they
thought, must be equally good for woman. That has been the source
of all that was unbalanced and unstable, sometimes both a little
pathetic and a little absurd, in the old "woman's movement."
There was a failure to perceive that, first of all, women must
claim their right to their own womanhood as mothers of the race,
and thereby the supreme law-givers in the sphere of sex and the
large part of life dependent on sex. This special position of
woman seems likely to require a readjustment of economic
conditions to their needs, though it is not likely that such
readjustment would be permitted to affect their independence or
their responsibility. We have had, as Madame Juliette Adam has
put it, the rights of men sacrificing women, followed by the
rights of women sacrificing the child; that must be followed by
the rights of the child reconstituting the family. It has already
been necessary to touch on this point in the first chapter of
this volume, and it will again be necessary in the last chapter.

The question as to the method by which the economic independence of women
will be completely insured, and the part which the community may be
expected to take in insuring it, on the ground of woman's special
child-bearing functions, is from the present point of view subsidiary.
There can be no doubt, however, as to the reality of the movement in that
direction, whatever doubt there may be as to the final adjustment of the
details. It is only necessary in this place to touch on some of the
general and more obvious respects in which the growth of woman's
responsibility is affecting sexual morality.

The first and most obvious way in which the sense of moral responsibility
works is in an insistence on reality in the relationships of sex. Moral
irresponsibility has too often combined with economic dependence to induce
a woman to treat the sexual event in her life which is biologically of
most fateful gravity as a merely gay and trivial event, at the most an
event which has given her a triumph over her rivals and over the superior
male, who, on his part, willingly condescends, for the moment, to assume
the part of the vanquished. "Gallantry to the ladies," we are told of the
hero of the greatest and most typical of English novels, "was among his
principles of honor, and he held it as much incumbent on him to accept a
challenge to love as if it had been a challenge to fight;" he heroically
goes home for the night with a lady of title he meets at a masquerade,
though at the time very much in love with the girl whom he eventually
marries.[303] The woman whose power lies only in her charms, and who is
free to allow the burden of responsibility to fall on a man's
shoulder,[304] could lightly play the seducing part, and thereby exert
independence and authority in the only shapes open to her. The man on his
part, introducing the misplaced idea of "honor" into the field from which
the natural idea of responsibility has been banished, is prepared to
descend at the lady's bidding into the arena, according to the old legend,
and rescue the glove, even though he afterwards flings it contemptuously
in her face. The ancient conception of gallantry, which Tom Jones so well
embodies, is the direct outcome of a system involving the moral
irresponsibility and economic dependence of women, and is as opposed to
the conceptions, prevailing in the earlier and later civilized stages, of
approximate sexual equality as it is to the biological traditions of
natural courtship in the world generally.

In controlling her own sexual life, and in realizing that her
responsibility for such control can no longer be shifted on to the
shoulders of the other sex, women will also indirectly affect the sexual
lives of men, much as men already affect the sexual lives of women. In
what ways that influence will in the main be exerted it is still premature
to say. According to some, just as formerly men bought their wives and
demanded prenuptial virginity in the article thus purchased, so nowadays,
among the better classes, women are able to buy their husbands, and in
their turn are disposed to demand continence.[305] That, however, is too
simple-minded a way of viewing the question. It is enough to refer to the
fact that women are not attracted to virginal innocence in men and that
they frequently have good ground for viewing such innocence with
suspicion.[306] Yet it may well be believed that women will more and more
prefer to exert a certain discrimination in the approval of their
husbands' past lives. However instinctively a woman may desire that her
husband shall be initiated in the art of making love to her, she may often
well doubt whether the finest initiation is to be secured from the average
prostitute. Prostitution, as we have seen, is ultimately as incompatible
with complete sexual responsibility as is the patriarchal marriage system
with which it has been so closely associated. It is an arrangement mainly
determined by the demands of men, to whatever extent it may have
incidentally subserved various needs of women. Men arranged that one group
of women should be set apart to minister exclusively to their sexual
necessities, while another group should be brought up in asceticism as
candidates for the privilege of ministering to their household and family
necessities. That this has been in many respects a most excellent
arrangement is sufficiently proved by the fact that it has nourished for
so long a period, notwithstanding the influences that are antagonistic to
it. But it is obviously only possible during a certain stage of
civilization and in association with a certain social organization. It is
not completely congruous with a democratic stage of civilization involving
the economic independence and the sexual responsibility of both sexes
alike in all social classes. It is possible that women may begin to
realize this fact earlier than men.

It is also believed by many that women will realize that a high degree of
moral responsibility is not easily compatible with the practice of
dissimulation and that economic independence will deprive deceit--which is
always the resort of the weak--of whatever moral justification it may
possess. Here, however, it is necessary to speak with caution or we may be
unjust to women. It must be remarked that in the sphere of sex men also
are often the weak, and are therefore apt to resort to the refuge of the
weak. With the recognition of that fact we may also recognize that
deception in women has been the cause of much of the age-long blunders of
the masculine mind in the contemplation of feminine ways. Men have
constantly committed the double error of overlooking the dissimulation of
women and of over-estimating it. This fact has always served to render
more difficult still the inevitably difficult course of women through the
devious path of sexual behavior. Pepys, who represents so vividly and so
frankly the vices and virtues of the ordinary masculine mind, tells how
one day when he called to see Mrs. Martin her sister Doll went out for a
bottle of wine and came back indignant because a Dutchman had pulled her
into a stable and tumbled and tossed her. Pepys having been himself often
permitted to take liberties with her, it seemed to him that her
indignation with the Dutchman was "the best instance of woman's falseness
in the world."[307] He assumes without question that a woman who has
accorded the privilege of familiarity to a man she knows and, one hopes,
respects, would be prepared to accept complacently the brutal attentions
of the first drunken stranger she meets in the street.

It was the assumption of woman's falseness which led the ultra-masculine
Pepys into a sufficiently absurd error. At this point, indeed, we
encounter what has seemed to some a serious obstacle to the full moral
responsibility of women. Dissimulation, Lombroso and Ferrero argue, is in
woman "almost physiological," and they give various grounds for this
conclusion.[308] The theologians, on their side, have reached a similar
conclusion. "A confessor must not immediately believe a woman's words,"
says Father Gury, "for women are habitually inclined to lie."[309] This
tendency, which seems to be commonly believed to affect women as a sex,
however free from it a vast number of individual women are, may be said,
and with truth, to be largely the result of the subjection of women and
therefore likely to disappear as that subjection disappears. In so far,
however, as it is "almost physiological," and based on radical feminine
characters, such as modesty, affectability, and sympathy, which have an
organic basis in the feminine constitution and can therefore never
altogether be changed, feminine dissimulation seems scarcely likely to
disappear. The utmost that can be expected is that it should be held in
check by the developed sense of moral responsibility, and, being reduced
to its simply natural proportions, become recognizably intelligible.

It is unnecessary to remark that there can be no question here as
to any inherent moral superiority of one sex over the other. The
answer to that question was well stated many years ago by one of
the most subtle moralists of love. "Taken altogether," concluded
Senancour (_De l'Amour_, vol. ii, p. 85), "we have no reason to
assert the moral superiority of either sex. Both sexes, with
their errors and their good intentions, very equally fulfil the
ends of nature. We may well believe that in either of the two
divisions of the human species the sum of evil and that of good
are about equal. If, for instance, as regards love, we oppose the
visibly licentious conduct of men to the apparent reserve of
women, it would be a vain valuation, for the number of faults
committed by women with men is necessarily the same as that of
men with women. There exist among us fewer scrupulous men than
perfectly honest women, but it is easy to see how the balance is
restored. If this question of the moral preeminence of one sex
over the other were not insoluble it would still remain very
complicated with reference to the whole of the species, or even
the whole of a nation, and any dispute here seems idle."

This conclusion is in accordance with the general compensatory
and complementary relationship of women to men (see, e.g.,
Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, especially pp.
448 et seq.).

In a recent symposium on the question whether women are morally
inferior to men, with special reference to aptitude for loyalty
(_La Revue_, Jan. 1, 1909), to which various distinguished French
men and women contributed their opinions, some declared that
women are usually superior; others regarded it as a question of
difference rather than of superiority or inferiority; all were
agreed that when they enjoy the same independence as men, women
are quite as loyal as men.

It is undoubtedly true that--partly as a result of ancient traditions and
education, partly of genuine feminine characteristics--many women are
diffident as to their right to moral responsibility and unwilling to
assume it. And an attempt is made to justify their attitude by asserting
that woman's part in life is naturally that of self-sacrifice, or, to put
the statement in a somewhat more technical form, that women are naturally
masochistic; and that there is, as Krafft-Ebing argues, a natural "sexual
subjection" of woman. It is by no means clear that this statement is
absolutely true, and if it were true it would not serve to abolish the
moral responsibility of women.

Bloch (_Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis_, Part
II, p. 178), in agreement with Eulenburg, energetically denies
that there is any such natural "sexual subjection" of women,
regarding it as artificially produced, the result of the socially
inferior position of women, and arguing that such subjection is
in much higher degree a physiological characteristic of men than
of women. (It has been necessary to discuss this question in
dealing with "Love and Pain" in the third volume of these
_Studies_.) It seems certainly clear that the notion that women
are especially prone to self-sacrifice has little biological
validity. Self-sacrifice by compulsion, whether physical or moral
compulsion, is not worthy of the name; when it is deliberate it
is simply the sacrifice of a lesser good for the sake of a
greater good. Doubtless a man who eats a good dinner may be said
to "sacrifice" his hunger. Even within the sphere of traditional
morality a woman who sacrifices her "honor" for the sake of her
love to a man has, by her "sacrifice," gained something that she
values more. "What a triumph it is to a woman," a woman has said,
"to give pleasure to a man she loves!" And in a morality on a
sound biological basis no "sacrifice" is here called for. It may
rather be said that the biological laws of courtship
fundamentally demand self-sacrifice of the male rather than of
the female. Thus the lioness, according to Gerard the
lion-hunter, gives herself to the most vigorous of her lion
wooers; she encourages them to fight among themselves for
superiority, lying on her belly to gaze at the combat and lashing
her tail with delight. Every female is wooed by many males, but
she only accepts one; it is not the female who is called upon for
erotic self-sacrifice, but the male. That is indeed part of the
divine compensation of Nature, for since the heavier part of the
burden of sex rests on the female, it is fitting that she should
be less called upon for renunciation.

It thus seems probable that the increase of moral responsibility may tend
to make a woman's conduct more intelligible to others;[310] it will in any
case certainly tend to make it less the concern of others. This is
emphatically the case as regards the relations of sex. In the past men
have been invited to excel in many forms of virtue; only one virtue has
been open to women. That is no longer possible. To place upon a woman the
main responsibility for her own sexual conduct is to deprive that conduct
of its conspicuously public character as a virtue or a vice. Sexual union,
for a woman as much as for a man, is a physiological fact; it may also be
a spiritual fact; but it is not a social act. It is, on the contrary, an
act which, beyond all other acts, demands retirement and mystery for its
accomplishment. That indeed is a general human, almost zooelogical, fact.
Moreover, this demand of mystery is more especially made by woman in
virtue of her greater modesty which, we have found reason to believe, has
a biological basis. It is not until a child is born or conceived that the
community has any right to interest itself in the sexual acts of its
members. The sexual act is of no more concern to the community than any
other private physiological act. It is an impertinence, if not an outrage,
to seek to inquire into it. But the birth of a child is a social act. Not
what goes into the womb but what comes out of it concerns society. The
community is invited to receive a new citizen. It is entitled to demand
that that citizen shall be worthy of a place in its midst and that he
shall be properly introduced by a responsible father and a responsible
mother. The whole of sexual morality, as Ellen Key has said, revolves
round the child.

At this final point in our discussion of sexual morality we may perhaps be
able to realize the immensity of the change which has been involved by the
development in women of moral responsibility. So long as responsibility
was denied to women, so long as a father or a husband, backed up by the
community, held himself responsible for a woman's sexual behavior, for
her "virtue," it was necessary that the whole of sexual morality should
revolve around the entrance to the vagina. It became absolutely essential
to the maintenance of morality that all eyes in the community should be
constantly directed on to that point, and the whole marriage law had to be
adjusted accordingly. That is no longer possible. When a woman assumes her
own moral responsibility, in sexual as in other matters, it becomes not
only intolerable but meaningless for the community to pry into her most
intimate physiological or spiritual acts. She is herself directly
responsible to society as soon as she performs a social act, and not
before.

In relation to the fact of maternity the realization of all that is
involved in the new moral responsibility of women is especially
significant. Under a system of morality by which a man is left free to
accept the responsibility for his sexual acts while a woman is not equally
free to do the like, a premium is placed on sexual acts which have no end
in procreation, and a penalty is placed on the acts which lead to
procreation. The reason is that it is the former class of acts in which
men find chief gratification; it is the latter class in which women find
chief gratification. For the tragic part of the old sexual morality in its
bearing on women was that while it made men alone morally responsible for
sexual acts in which both a man and a woman took part, women were rendered
both socially and legally incapable of availing themselves of the fact of
masculine responsibility unless they had fulfilled conditions which men
had laid down for them, and yet refrained from imposing upon themselves.
The act of sexual intercourse, being the sexual act in which men found
chief pleasure, was under all circumstances an act of little social
gravity; the act of bringing a child into the world, which is for women
the most massively gratifying of all sexual acts, was counted a crime
unless the mother had before fulfilled the conditions demanded by man.
That was perhaps the most unfortunate and certainly the most unnatural of
the results of the patriarchal regulation of society. It has never existed
in any great State where women have possessed some degree of regulative
power.

It has, of course, been said by abstract theorists that women
have the matter in their own hands. They must never love a man