SEXUAL MORALITY

Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 by Havelock Ellis is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. SEXUAL MORALITY

IX. SEXUAL MORALITY

Prostitution in Relation to Our Marriage System—Marriage and Morality—The Definition of the Term "Morality"—Theoretical Morality—Its Division Into Traditional Morality and Ideal Morality—Practical Morality—Practical Morality Based on Custom—The Only Subject of Scientific Ethics—The Reaction Between Theoretical and Practical Morality—Sexual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic Morality—The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality—The Growth of a Specific Sexual Morality and the Evolution of Moral Ideals—Manifestations of Sexual Morality—Disregard of the Forms of Marriage—Trial Marriage—Marriage After Conception of Child—Phenomena in Germany, Anglo-Saxon Countries, Russia, etc.—The Status of Woman—The Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Equality of Women with Men—The Theory of the Matriarchate—Mother-Descent—Women in Babylonia—Egypt—Rome—The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—The Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman—The Ambiguous Influence of Christianity—Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism—Chivalry—Woman in England—The Sale of Wives—The Vanishing Subjection of Woman—Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer—The Growth of Moral Responsibility in Women—The Concomitant Development of Economic Independence—The Increase of Women Who Work—Invasion of the Modern Industrial Field by Women—In How Far This Is Socially Justifiable—The Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences—The Alleged Moral Inferiority of Women—The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women—Society Not Concerned with Sexual Relationships—Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the State—The Supreme Importance of Maternity.

It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question in so far as it constitutes a social problem. If we look at prostitution from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which it would fall to pieces. This will probably be fairly clear to all who have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena. There is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prostitution to-day, as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is itself in certain respects a form of prostitution. This has been emphasized so often and from so many widely different standpoints that it may seem hardly necessary to labor the point here. But the point is one of extreme importance in relation to the question of sexual morality. Our social conditions are unfavorable to the development of a high moral feeling in woman. The difference between the woman who sells herself in prostitution and the woman who sells herself in marriage, according to the saying of Marro already quoted, "is only a difference in price and duration of the contract." Or, as Forel puts it, marriage is "a more fashionable form of prostitution," that is to say, a mode of obtaining, or disposing of, for monetary considerations, a sexual commodity. Marriage is, indeed, not merely a more fashionable form of prostitution, it is a form sanctified by law and religion, and the question of morality is not allowed to intrude. Morality may be outraged with impunity provided that law and religion have been invoked. The essential principle of prostitution is thus legalized and sanctified among us. That is why it is so difficult to arouse any serious indignation, or to maintain any reasoned objections, against our prostitution considered by itself. The most plausible ground is that of those who, bringing marriage down to the level of prostitution, maintain that the prostitute is a "blackleg" who is accepting less than the "market rate of wages," i.e., marriage, for the sexual services she renders. But even this low ground is quite unsafe. The prostitute is really paid extremely well considering how little she gives in return; the wife is really paid extremely badly considering how much she often gives, and how much she necessarily gives up. For the sake of the advantage of economic dependence on her husband, she must give up, as Ellen Key observes, those rights over her children, her property, her work, and her own person which she enjoys as an unmarried woman, even, it may be added, as a prostitute. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, as the wife is compelled to do; the prostitute, unlike the wife, retains her freedom and her personal rights, although these may not often be of much worth. It is the wife rather than the prostitute who is the "blackleg."

It is by no means only during recent years that our marriage system has been arraigned before the bar of morals. Forty years ago James Hinton exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation in describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity. "There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations," Hinton wrote. "Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be wisely ignored. Take the case of women of marked eminence consenting to be a married man's mistress; of pure and simple girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have any legal tie; of its being necessary—or thought so by good and wise men—to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance. These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in the marriage relations. This must be probed and searched to the bottom."

At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his Die Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution—a remarkable book which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an epoch-marking significance—vigorously showed that the problem of prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.

More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions, and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his books. Describing modern marriage in his Fable of the Bees (1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover, Mandeville wrote: "The fine gentleman I spoke of need not practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the first. The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear. If he is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over, let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as extravagantly as his strength and manhood will give him leave. He may, with safety, laugh at the wise men that should reprove him: all the women and above nine in ten of the men are of his side; nay, he has the liberty of valuing himself upon the fury of his unbridled passions, and the more he wallows in lust and strains every faculty to be abandonedly voluptuous, the sooner he shall have the good-will and gain the affection of the women, not the young, vain, and lascivious only, but the prudent, grave, and most sober matrons."

Thus the charge brought against our marriage system from the point of view of morality is that it subordinates the sexual relationship to considerations of money and of lust. That is precisely the essence of prostitution.

The only legitimately moral end of marriage—whether we regard it from the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human society—is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard. But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the interests of the race affected.

It must, of course, be clearly understood that the idea of marriage as a form of sexual union based not on biological but on economic considerations, is very ancient, and is sometimes found in societies that are almost primitive. Whenever, however, marriage on a purely property basis, and without due regard to sexual selection, has occurred among comparatively primitive and vigorous peoples, it has been largely deprived of its evil results by the recognition of its merely economic character, and by the absence of any desire to suppress, even nominally, other sexual relationships on a more natural basis which were outside this artificial form of marriage. Polygamy especially tended to conciliate unions on an economic basis with unions on a natural sexual basis. Our modern marriage system has, however, acquired an artificial rigidity which excludes the possibility of this natural safeguard and compensation. Whatever its real moral content may be, a modern marriage is always "legal" and "sacred." We are indeed so accustomed to economic forms of marriage that, as Sidgwick truly observed (Method of Ethics, Bk. ii, Ch. XI), when they are spoken of as "legalized prostitution" it constantly happens that "the phrase is felt to be extravagant and paradoxical."

A man who marries for money or for ambition is departing from the biological and moral ends of marriage. A woman who sells herself for life is morally on the same level as one who sells herself for a night. The fact that the payment seems larger, that in return for rendering certain domestic services and certain personal complacencies—services and complacencies in which she may be quite inexpert—she will secure an almshouse in which she will be fed and clothed and sheltered for life makes no difference in the moral aspect of her case. The moral responsibility is, it need scarcely be said, at least as much the man's as the woman's. It is largely due to the ignorance and even the indifference of men, who often know little or nothing of the nature of women and the art of love. The unintelligence with which even men who might, one thinks, be not without experience, select as a mate, a woman who, however fine and charming she may be, possesses none of the qualities which her wooer really craves, is a perpetual marvel. To refrain from testing and proving the temper and quality of the woman he desires for a mate is no doubt an amiable trait of humility on a man's part. But it is certain that a man should never be content with less than the best of what a woman's soul and body have to give, however unworthy he may feel himself of such a possession. This demand, it must be remarked, is in the highest interests of the woman herself. A woman can offer to a man what is a part at all events of the secret of the universe. The woman degrades herself who sinks to the level of a candidate for an asylum for the destitute.

Our discussion of the psychic facts of sex has thus, it will be seen, brought us up to the question of morality. Over and over again, in setting forth the phenomena of prostitution, it has been necessary to use the word "moral." That word, however, is vague and even, it may be, misleading because it has several senses. So far, it has been left to the intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the context in what sense the word was used. But at the present point, before we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what precisely are the chief main senses in which the word "morality" is commonly used.

The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is theoretical morality. It is concerned with what people "ought"—or what is "right" for them—to do. Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with such theoretical morality: what "ought" people to seek in their actions? The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the whole of it, is concerned with that question. Such theoretical morality is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only be based on what is, not on what ought to be.

Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a shade of contempt, "moral." These two kinds of theoretical morality are traditional morality and ideal morality. Traditional morality is founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest years. It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the individual himself no longer accepts them. Many persons, for example, who were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances were "right," they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the automatically aroused voice of "conscience," that is to say the expression within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.

Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community but to its future. It is based not on the old social actions that are becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but on new social actions that are as yet only practiced by a small though growing minority of the community. Nietzsche in modern times has been a conspicuous champion of ideal morality, the heroic morality of the pioneer, of the individual of the coming community, against traditional morality, or, as he called it, herd-morality, the morality of the crowd. These two moralities are necessarily opposed to each other, but, we have to remember, they are both equally sound and equally indispensable, not only to those who accept them but to the community which they both contribute to hold in vital theoretical balance. We have seen them both, for instance, applied to the question of prostitution; traditional morality defends prostitution, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the marriage system which it regards as sufficiently precious to be worth a sacrifice, while ideal morality refuses to accept the necessity of prostitution, and looks forward to progressive changes in the marriage system which will modify and diminish prostitution.

But altogether outside theoretical morality, or the question of what people "ought" to do, there remains practical morality, or the question of what, as a matter of fact, people actually do. This is the really fundamental and essential morality. Latin mores and Greek ἠθος both refer to custom, to the things that are, and not to the things that "ought" to be, except in the indirect and secondary sense that whatever the members of the community, in the mass, actually do, is the thing that they feel they ought to do. In the first place, however, a moral act was not done because it was felt that it ought to be done, but for reasons of a much deeper and more instinctive character.[258] It was not first done because it was felt it ought to be done, but it was felt it "ought" to be done because it had actually become the custom to do it.

The actions of a community are determined by the vital needs of a community under the special circumstances of its culture, time, and land. When it is the general custom for children to kill their aged parents that custom is always found to be the best not only for the community but even for the old people themselves, who desire it; the action is both practically moral and theoretically moral.[259] And when, as among ourselves, the aged are kept alive, that action is also both practically and theoretically moral; it is in no wise dependent on any law or rule opposed to the taking of life, for we glory in the taking of life under the patriotic name of "war," and are fairly indifferent to it when involved by the demands of our industrial system; but the killing of the aged no longer subserves any social need and their preservation ministers to our civilized emotional needs. The killing of a man is indeed notoriously an act which differs widely in its moral value at different periods and in different countries. It was quite moral in England two centuries ago and less, to kill a man for trifling offences against property, for such punishment commended itself as desirable to the general sense of the educated community. To-day it would be regarded as highly immoral. We are even yet only beginning to doubt the morality of condemning to death and imprisoning for life an unmarried girl who destroyed her infant at birth, solely actuated, against all her natural impulses, by the primitive instinct of self-defense. It cannot be said that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants generally. Every age or land has its own morality.

"Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck, "involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom."[260] Custom is not only the basis of morality but also of law. "Custom is law."[261] The field of theoretical morality has been found so fascinating a playground for clever philosophers that there has sometimes been a danger of forgetting that, after all, it is not theoretical morality but practical morality, the question of what men in the mass of a community actually do, which constitutes the real stuff of morals.[262] If we define more precisely what we mean by morals, on the practical side, we may say that it is constituted by those customs which the great majority of the members of a community regard as conducive to the welfare of the community at some particular time and place. It is for this reason—i.e., because it is a question of what is and not of merely what some think ought to be—that practical morals form the proper subject of science. "If the word 'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science," Westermarck says, "the object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a fact."[263]

Lecky's History of European Morals is a study in practical rather than in theoretical morals. Dr. Westermarck's great work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, is a more modern example of the objectively scientific discussion of morals, although this is not perhaps clearly brought out by the title. It is essentially a description of the actual historical facts of what has been, and not of what "ought" to be. Mr. L. T. Hobhouse's Morals in Evolution, published almost at the same time, is similarly a work which, while professedly dealing with ideas, i.e., with rules and regulations, and indeed disclaiming the task of being "the history of conduct," yet limits itself to those rules which are "in fact, the normal conduct of the average man" (vol. i, p. 26). In other words, it is essentially a history of practical morality, and not of theoretical morality. One of the most subtle and suggestive of living thinkers, M. Jules de Gaultier, in several of his books, and notably in La Dépendance de la Morale et l'Indépendance des Mœurs (1907), has analyzed the conception of morals in a somewhat similar sense. "Phenomena relative to conduct," as he puts it (op. cit., p. 58), "are given in experience like other phenomena, so that morality, or the totality of the laws which at any given moment of historic evolution are applied to human practice, is dependent on customs." I may also refer to the masterly exposition of this aspect of morality in Lévy-Bruhl's La Morale et la Science des Mœurs (there is an English translation).

Practical morality is thus the solid natural fact which forms the biological basis of theoretical morality, whether traditional or ideal. The excessive fear, so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality is misplaced. We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves. Morals is based on nature and can at the most only be modified. As Crawley rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses. The evil of them only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead, they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital reaction to the environment. They thus provoke new forms of ideal morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and practical morals or morality proper. For not only is theoretical morality the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality, stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. Practical morality, or morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond to either of its forms. It always fails to catch up with ideal morality; it is always outgrowing traditional morality.

It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three chief forms in which the word "moral" is used, although under one shape or another they cannot but be familiar to the reader. In the discussion of prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined by the context. But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use. In this chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior morality.

Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability. If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure and function—of what is called the traditional with what is called the ideal—that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found this hard to understand. In a vain desire for an impossible logicality they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed to them because of the impressive authority its dicta seem to convey. The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions, so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.

We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with "morality" in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral, what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality. The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god. Our sexual morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality but an immorality.

The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves, to reach a stage in which there seems to be an opposition between different standards lies in the fact that as yet we really have no specific sexual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to "sexual morality." And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality which we apply to the sphere of sex. But that morality is one which belongs mainly to the sphere of property and was very largely developed on a property basis. All the historians of morals in general, and of marriage in particular, have set forth this fact, and illustrated it with a wealth of historical material. We have as yet no generally recognized sexual morality which has been based on the specific sexual facts of life. That becomes clear at once when we realize the central fact that the sexual relationship is based on love, at the very least on sexual desire, and that that basis is so deep as to be even physiological, for in the absence of such sexual desire it is physiologically impossible for a man to effect intercourse with a woman. Any specific sexual morality must be based on that fact. But our so-called "sexual morality," so far from being based on that fact, attempts to ignore it altogether. It makes contracts, it arranges sexual relationships beforehand, it offers to guarantee permanency of sexual inclinations. It introduces, that is, considerations of a kind that is perfectly sound in the economic sphere to which such considerations rightly belong, but ridiculously incongruous in the sphere of sex to which they have solemnly been applied. The economic relationships of life, in the large sense, are, as we shall see, extremely important in the evolution of any sound sexual morality, but they belong to the conditions of its development and do not constitute its basis.[267]

The fact that, from the legal point of view, marriage is primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property and inheritance is well illustrated by the English divorce law to-day. According to this law, if a woman has sexual intercourse with any man beside her husband, he is entitled to divorce her; if, however, the husband has intercourse with another woman beside his wife, she is not entitled to a divorce; that is only accorded if, in addition, he has also been cruel to her, or deserted her, and from any standpoint of ideal morality such a law is obviously unjust, and it has now been discarded in nearly all civilized lands except England.

But from the standpoint of property and inheritance it is quite intelligible, and on that ground it is still supported by the majority of Englishmen. If the wife has intercourse with other men there is a risk that the husband's property will be inherited by a child who is not his own. But the sexual intercourse of the husband with other women is followed by no such risk. The infidelity of the wife is a serious offence against property; the infidelity of the husband is no offence against property, and cannot possibly, therefore, be regarded as a ground for divorce from our legal point of view. The fact that his adultery complicated by cruelty is such a ground, is simply a concession to modern feeling. Yet, as Helena Stöcker truly points out ("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes," Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Dec., 1908), a married man who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage, has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her husband. In the first case, the husband, and in the second case, the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author of The Question of English Divorce, p. 56.)

I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality, because that is the element which has given it a kind of stability and become established in law. But if we take a wider view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to it. Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality, neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual life. It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law, but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation towards sexual intercourse per se, although such intercourse is regarded as an essential part of the property-based and religiously sanctified institution of legal marriage.

The glorification of virginity led by imperceptible stages to the formulation of "fornication" as a deadly sin, and finally as an actual secular "crime." It is sometimes stated that it was not until the Council of Trent that the Church formally anathematized those who held that the state of marriage was higher than that of virginity, but the opinion had been more or less formally held from almost the earliest ages of Christianity, and is clear in the epistles of Paul. All the theologians agree that fornication is a mortal sin. Caramuel, indeed, the distinguished Spanish theologian, who made unusual concessions to the demands of reason and nature, held that fornication is only evil because it is forbidden, but Innocent XI formally condemned that proposition. Fornication as a mortal sin became gradually secularized into fornication as a crime. Fornication was a crime in France even as late as the eighteenth century, as Tarde found in his historical investigations of criminal procedure in Périgord; adultery was also a crime and severely punished quite independently of any complaint from either of the parties (Tarde, "Archéologie Criminelle en Périgord," Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, Nov. 15, 1898).

The Puritans of the Commonwealth days in England (like the Puritans of Geneva) followed the Catholic example and adopted ecclesiastical offences against chastity into the secular law. By an Act passed in 1653 fornication became punishable by three months' imprisonment inflicted on both parties. By the same Act the adultery of a wife (nothing is said of a husband) was made felony, both for her and her partner in guilt, and therefore punishable by death (Scobell, Acts and Ordinances, p. 121).

The action of a pseudo-morality, such as our sexual morality has been, is double-edged. On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity, on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded into a more or less empty form. "The human race would gain much," said the wise Sénancour, "if virtue were made less laborious. The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be sustained?"[268] At present, as a more recent moralist, Ellen Key, puts it, we only have an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is "worse than folly, it is crime."

It is on the lines along which Sénancour a century ago and Ellen Key to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.

There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart from the production of children.

There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual relationships until such relationships have been well established and the hope of offspring has become justifiable. This tendency has been crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions. But at the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended to die out. It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked. We see throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.

The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not merely an increase of free unions but an increase of all forms of normal and abnormal sexuality outside marriage. Thus in England and Wales, in 1906, only 43 per 1,000 husbands and 146 per 1,000 wives were under age, while the average age for husbands was 28.6 years and for wives 26.4 years. For men the age has gone up some eight months during the past forty years, for women more than this. In the large cities, like London, where the possibilities of extra-matrimonial relationships are greater, the age for legal marriage is higher than in the country.

If we are to regard the age of legal marriage as, on the whole, the age at which the population enters into sexual unions, it is undoubtedly too late. Beyer, a leading German neurologist, finds that there are evils alike in early and in late marriage, and comes to the conclusion that in temperate zones the best age for women to marry is the twenty-first year, and for men the twenty-fifth year.

Yet, under bad economic conditions and with a rigid marriage law, early marriages are in every respect disastrous. They are among the poor a sign of destitution. The very poorest marry first, and they do so through the feeling that their condition cannot be worse. (Dr. Michael Ryan brought together much interesting evidence concerning the causes of early marriage in Ireland in his Philosophy of Marriage, 1837, pp. 58-72). Among the poor, therefore, early marriage is always a misfortune. "Many good people," says Mr. Thomas Holmes, Secretary of the Howard Association and missionary at police courts (in an interview, Daily Chronicle, Sept. 8, 1906), "advise boys and girls to get married in order to prevent what they call a 'disgrace.' This I consider to be absolutely wicked, and it leads to far greater evils than it can possibly avert."

Early marriages are one of the commonest causes both of prostitution and divorce. They lead to prostitution in innumerable cases, even when no outward separation takes place. The fact that they lead to divorce is shown by the significant circumstance that in England, although only 146 per 1,000 women are under twenty-one at marriage, of the wives concerned in divorce cases, 280 per 1,000 were under twenty-one at marriage, and this discrepancy is even greater than it appears, for in the well-to-do class, which can alone afford the luxury of divorce, the normal age at marriage is much higher than for the population generally. Inexperience, as was long ago pointed out by Milton (who had learnt this lesson to his cost), leads to shipwreck in marriage. "They who have lived most loosely," he wrote, "prove most successful in their matches, because their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been so many divorces to teach them experience."

Miss Clapperton, referring to the educated classes, advocates very early marriage, even during student life, which might then be to some extent carried on side by side (Scientific Meliorism, Ch. XVII). Ellen Key, also, advocates early marriage. But she wisely adds that it involves the necessity for easy divorce. That, indeed, is the only condition which can render early marriage generally desirable. Young people—unless they possess very simple and inert natures—can neither foretell the course of their own development and their own strongest needs, nor estimate accurately the nature and quality of another personality. A marriage formed at an early age very speedily ceases to be a marriage in anything but name. Sometimes a young girl applies for a separation from her husband even on the very day after marriage.

The more or less permanent free unions formed among us in Europe are usually to be regarded merely as trial-marriages. That is to say they are a precaution rendered desirable both by uncertainty as to either the harmony or the fruitfulness of union until actual experiment has been made, and by the practical impossibility of otherwise rectifying any mistake in consequence of the antiquated rigidity of most European divorce laws. Such trial marriages are therefore demanded by prudence and caution, and as foresight increases with the development of civilization, and constantly grows among us, we may expect that there will be a parallel development in the frequency of trial marriage and in the social attitude towards such unions. The only alternative—that a radical reform in European marriage laws should render the divorce of a legal marriage as economical and as convenient as the divorce of a free marriage—cannot yet be expected, for law always lags behind public opinion and public practice.

If, however, we take a wider historical view, we find that we are in presence of a phenomenon which, though favored by modern conditions, is very ancient and widespread, dating, so far as Europe is concerned, from the time when the Church first sought to impose ecclesiastical marriage, so that it is practically a continuation of the ancient European custom of private marriage.

Trial-marriages pass by imperceptible gradations into the group of courtship customs which, while allowing the young couple to spend the night together, in a position of more or less intimacy, exclude, as a rule, actual sexual intercourse. Night-courtship flourishes in stable and well-knit European communities not liable to disorganization by contact with strangers. It seems to be specially common in Teutonic and Celtic lands, and is known by various names, as Probenächte, fensterln, Kiltgang, hand-fasting, bundling, sitting-up, courting on the bed, etc. It is well known in Wales; it is found in various English counties as in Cheshire; it existed in eighteenth century Ireland (according to Richard Twiss's Travels); in New England it was known as tarrying; in Holland it is called questing. In Norway, where it is called night-running, on account of the long distance between the homesteads, I am told that it is generally practiced, though the clergy preach against it; the young girl puts on several extra skirts and goes to bed, and the young man enters by door or window and goes to bed with her; they talk all night, and are not bound to marry unless it should happen that the girl becomes pregnant.

Rhys and Brynmor-Jones (Welsh People, pp. 582-4) have an interesting passage on this night-courtship with numerous references. As regards Germany see, e.g., Rudeck, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit, pp. 146-154. With reference to trial-marriage generally many facts and references are given by M. A. Potter (Sohrab and Rustem, pp. 129-137).

The custom of free marriage unions, usually rendered legal before or after the birth of children, seems to be fairly common in many, or perhaps all, rural parts of England. The union is made legal, if found satisfactory, even when there is no prospect of children. In some counties it is said to be almost a universal practice for the women to have sexual relationships before legal marriage; sometimes she marries the first man whom she tries; sometimes she tries several before finding the man who suits her. Such marriages necessarily, on the whole, turn out better than marriages in which the woman, knowing nothing of what awaits her and having no other experiences for comparison, is liable to be disillusioned or to feel that she "might have done better." Even when legal recognition is not sought until after the birth of children, it by no means follows that any moral deterioration is involved. Thus in some parts of Staffordshire where it is the custom of the women to have a child before marriage, notwithstanding this "corruption," we are told (Burton, City of the Saints, Appendix IV), the women are "very good neighbors, excellent, hard-working, and affectionate wives and mothers."

"The lower social classes, especially peasants," remarks Dr. Ehrhard ("Auch Ein Wort zur Ehereform," Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 10), "know better than we that the marriage bed is the foundation of marriage. On that account they have retained the primitive custom of trial-marriage which, in the Middle Ages, was still practiced even in the best circles. It has the further advantage that the marriage is not concluded until it has shown itself to be fruitful. Trial-marriage assumes, of course, that virginity is not valued beyond its true worth." With regard to this point it may be mentioned that in many parts of the world a woman is more highly esteemed if she has had intercourse before marriage (see, e.g., Potter, op. cit., pp. 163 et seq.). While virginity is one of the sexual attractions a woman may possess, an attraction that is based on a natural instinct (see "The Evolution of Modesty," in vol. i of these Studies), yet an exaggerated attention to virginity can only be regarded as a sexual perversion, allied to paidophilia, the sexual attraction to children.

In very small coördinated communities the primitive custom of trial-marriage tends to decay when there is a great invasion of strangers who have not been brought up to the custom (which seems to them indistinguishable from the license of prostitution), and who fail to undertake the obligations which trial-marriage involves. This is what happened in the case of the so-called "island custom" of Portland, which lasted well on into the nineteenth century; according to this custom a woman before marriage lived with her lover until pregnant and then married him; she was always strictly faithful to him while living with him, but if no pregnancy occurred the couple might decide that they were not meant for each other, and break off relations. The result was that for a long period of years no illegitimate children were born, and few marriages were childless. But when the Portland stone trade was developed, the workmen imported from London took advantage of the "island custom," but refused to fulfil the obligation of marriage when pregnancy occurred. The custom consequently fell into disuse (see, e.g., translator's note to Bloch's Sexual Life of Our Time, p. 237, and the quotation there given from Hutchins, History and Antiquities of Dorset, vol. ii, p. 820).

It is, however, by no means only in rural districts, but in great cities also that marriages are at the outset free unions. Thus in Paris Després stated more than thirty years ago (La Prostitution à Paris, p. 137) that in an average arrondissement nine out of ten legal marriages are the consolidation of a free union; though, while that was an average, in a few arrondissements it was only three out of ten. Much the same conditions prevail in Paris to-day; at least half the marriages, it is stated, are of this kind.

In Teutonic lands the custom of free unions is very ancient and well-established. Thus in Sweden, Ellen Key states (Liebe und Ehe, p. 123), the majority of the population begin married life in this way. The arrangement is found to be beneficial, and "marital fidelity is as great as pre-marital freedom is unbounded." In Denmark, also, a large number of children are conceived before the unions of the parents are legalized (Rubin and Westergaard, quoted by Gaedeken, Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Feb. 15, 1909).

In Germany not only is the proportion of illegitimate births very high, since in Berlin it is 17 per cent., and in some towns very much higher, but ante-nuptial conceptions take place in nearly half the marriages, and sometimes in the majority. Thus in Berlin more than 40 per cent, of all legitimate firstborn children are conceived before marriage, while in some rural provinces (where the proportion of illegitimate births is lower) the percentage of marriages following ante-nuptial conceptions is much higher than in Berlin. The conditions in rural Germany have been especially investigated by a committee of Lutheran pastors, and were set forth a few years ago in two volumes, Die Geschlecht-sittlich Verhältnisse im Deutschen Reiche, which are full of instruction concerning German sexual morality. In Hanover, it is said in this work, the majority of authorities state that intercourse before marriage is the rule. At the very least, a probe, or trial, is regarded as a matter-of-course preliminary to a marriage, since no one wishes "to buy a pig in a poke." In Saxony, likewise, we are told, it is seldom that a girl fails to have intercourse before marriage, or that her first child is not born, or at all events conceived, outside marriage. This is justified as a proper proving of a bride before taking her for good. "One does not buy even a penny pipe without trying it," a German pastor was informed. Around Stettin, in twelve districts (nearly half the whole), sexual intercourse before marriage is a recognized custom, and in the remainder, if not exactly a custom, it is very common, and is not severely or even at all condemned by public opinion. In some districts marriage immediately follows pregnancy. In the Dantzig neighborhood, again, according to the Lutheran Committee, intercourse before marriage occurs in more than half the cases, but marriage by no means always follows pregnancy. Nearly all the girls who go as servants have lovers, and country people in engaging servants sometimes tell them that at evening and night they may do as they like. This state of things is found to be favorable to conjugal fidelity. The German peasant girl, as another authority remarks (E. H. Meyer, Deutsche Volkskunde, 1898, pp. 154, 164), has her own room; she may receive her lover; it is no great shame if she gives herself to him. The number of women who enter legal marriage still virgins is not large (this refers more especially to Baden), but public opinion protects them, and such opinion is unfavorable to the disregard of the responsibilities involved by sexual relationships. The German woman is less chaste before marriage than her French or Italian sister. But, Meyer adds, she is probably more faithful after marriage than they are.

It is assumed by many that this state of German morality as it exists to-day is a new phenomenon, and the sign of a rapid national degeneration. That is by no means the case. In this connection we may accept the evidence of Catholic priests, who, by the experience of the confessional, are enabled to speak with authority. An old Bavarian priest thus writes (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, 1907, Bd. ii, Heft I): "At Moral Congresses we hear laudation of 'the good old times' when, faith and morality prevailed among the people. Whether that is correct is another question. As a young priest I heard of as many and as serious sins as I now hear of as an old man. The morality of the people is not greater nor is it less. The error is the belief that immorality goes out of the towns and poisons the country. People talk as though the country were a pure Paradise of innocence. I will by no means call our country people immoral, but from an experience of many years I can say that in sexual respects there is no difference between town and country. I have learnt to know more than a hundred different parishes, and in the most various localities, in the mountain and in the plain, on poor land and on rich land. But everywhere I find the same morals and lack of morals. There are everywhere the same men, though in the country there are often better Christians than in the towns."

If, however, we go much farther back than the memories of a living man it seems highly probable that the sexual customs of the German people of the present day are not substantially different—though it may well be that at different periods different circumstances have accentuated them—from what they were in the dawn of Teutonic history. This is the opinion of one of the profoundest students of Indo-Germanic origins. In his Reallexicon (art. "Keuschheit") O. Schrader points out that the oft-quoted Tacitus, strictly considered, can only be taken to prove that women were chaste after marriage, and that no prostitution existed. There can be no doubt, he adds, and the earliest historical evidence shows, that women in ancient Germany were not chaste before marriage. This fact has been disguised by the tendency of the old classic writers to idealize the Northern peoples.

Thus we have to realize that the conception of "German virtue," which has been rendered so familiar to the world by a long succession of German writers, by no means involves any special devotion to the virtue of chastity. Tacitus, indeed, in the passage more often quoted in Germany than any other passage in classic literature, while correctly emphasizing the late puberty of the Germans and their brutal punishment of conjugal infidelity on the part of the wife, seemed to imply that they were also chaste. But we have always to remark that Tacitus wrote as a satirizing moralist as well as a historian, and that, as he declaimed concerning the virtues of the German barbarians, he had one eye on the Roman gallery whose vices he desired to lash. Much the same perplexing confusion has been created by Gildas, who, in describing the results of the Saxon Conquest of Britain, wrote as a preacher as well as a historian, and the same moral purpose (as Dill has pointed out) distorts Salvian's picture of the vices of fifth century Gaul. (I may add that some of the evidence in favor of the sexual freedom involved by early Teutonic faiths and customs is brought together in the study of "Sexual Periodicity" in the first volume of these Studies; cf. also, Rudeck, Geschichte der öffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland, 1897, pp. 146 et seq.).

The freedom and tolerance of Russian sexual customs is fairly well-known. As a Russian correspondent writes to me, "the liberalism of Russian manners enables youths and girls to enjoy complete independence. They visit each other alone, they walk out alone, and they return home at any hour they please. They have a liberty of movement as complete as that of grown-up persons; some avail themselves of it to discuss politics and others to make love. They are able also to procure any books they please; thus on the table of a college girl I knew I saw the Elements of Social Science, then prohibited in Russia; this girl lived with her aunt, but she had her own room, which only her friends were allowed to enter: her aunt or other relations never entered it. Naturally, she went out and came back at what hours she pleased. Many other college girls enjoy the same freedom in their families. It is very different in Italy, where girls have no freedom of movement, and can neither go out alone nor receive gentlemen alone, and where, unlike Russia, a girl who has sexual intercourse outside marriage is really 'lost' and 'dishonored'" (cf. Sexual-Probleme, Aug., 1908, p. 506).

It would appear that freedom of sexual relationships in Russia—apart from the influence of ancient custom—has largely been rendered necessary by the difficulty of divorce. Married couples, who were unable to secure divorce, separated and found new partners without legal marriage. In 1907, however, an attempt was made to remedy this defect in the law; a liberal divorce law has been introduced, mutual consent with separation for a period of over a year being recognized as adequate ground for divorce (Beiblatt to Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, Heft 5, p. 145).

During recent years there has developed among educated young men and women in Russia a movement of sexual license, which, though it is doubtless supported by the old traditions of sexual freedom, must by no means be confused with that freedom, since it is directly due to causes of an entirely different order. The strenuous revolutionary efforts made during the last years of the past century to attain political freedom absorbed the younger and more energetic section of the educated classes, involved a high degree of mental tension, and were accompanied by a tendency to asceticism. The prospect of death was constantly before their eyes, and any pre-occupation with sexual matters would have been felt as out of harmony with the spirit of revolution. But during the present century revolutionary activity has largely ceased. It has been, to a considerable extent, replaced by a movement of interest in sexual problems and of indulgence in sexual unrestraint, often taking on a somewhat licentious and sensual character. "Free love" unions have been formed by the students of both sexes for the cultivation of these tendencies. A novel, Artzibascheff's Ssanin, has had great influence in promoting these tendencies. It is not likely that this movement, in its more extravagant forms, will be of long duration. (For some account of this movement, see, e.g., Werner Daya, "Die Sexuelle Bewegung in Russland," Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft, Aug., 1908; also, "Les Associations Erotiques en Russe," Journal du Droit International Privé, Jan., 1909, fully summarized in Revue des Idées, Feb., 1909.)

The movement of sexual freedom in Russia lies much deeper, however, than this fashion of sensual license; it is found in remote and uncontaminated parts of the country, and is connected with very ancient customs.

There is considerable interest in realizing the existence of long-continued sexual freedom—by some incorrectly termed "immorality," for what is in accordance with the customs or mores of a people cannot be immoral—among peoples so virile and robust, so eminently capable of splendid achievements, as the Germans and the Russians. There is, however, a perhaps even greater interest in tracing the development of the same tendency among new prosperous and highly progressive communities who have either not inherited the custom of sexual freedom or are now only reviving it. We may, for instance, take the case of Australia and New Zealand. This development may not, indeed, be altogether recent. The frankness of sexual freedom in Australia and the tolerance in regard to it were conspicuous thirty years ago to those who came from England to live in the Southern continent, and were doubtless equally visible at an earlier date. It seems, however, to have developed with the increase of self-conscious civilization. "After careful inquiry," says the Rev. H. Northcote, who has lived for many years in the Southern hemisphere (Christianity and Sex Problems, Ch. VIII), "the writer finds sufficient evidence that of recent years intercourse out of wedlock has tended towards an actual increase in parts of Australia." Coghlan, the chief authority on Australian statistics, states more precisely in his Childbirth in New South Wales, published a few years ago: "The prevalence of births of ante-nuptial conception—a matter hitherto little understood—has now been completely investigated. In New South Wales, during six years, there were 13,366 marriages, in respect of which there was ante-nuptial conception, and, as the total number of marriages was 49,641, at least twenty-seven marriages in a hundred followed conception. During the same period the illegitimate births numbered 14,779; there were, therefore, 28,145 cases of conception amongst unmarried women; in 13,366 instances marriage preceded the birth of the child, so that the children were legitimatized in rather more than forty-seven cases out of one hundred. A study of the figures of births of ante-nuptial conception makes it obvious that in a very large number of instances pre-marital intercourse is not an anticipation of marriage already arranged, but that the marriages are forced upon the parties, and would not be entered into were it not for the condition of the woman" (cf. Powys, Biometrika, vol. i, 1901-2, p. 30). That marriage should be, as Coghlan puts it, "forced upon the parties," is not, of course, desirable in the general moral interests, and it is also a sign of imperfect moral responsibility in the parties themselves.

The existence of such a state of things, in a young country belonging to a part of the world where the general level of prosperity, intelligence, morality and social responsibility may perhaps be said to be higher than in any other region inhabited by people of white race, is a fact of the very first significance when we are attempting to forecast the direction in which civilized morality is moving.

It is sometimes said, or at least implied, that in this movement women are taking only a passive part, and that the initiative lies with men who are probably animated by a desire to escape the responsibilities of marriage. This is very far from being the case.

The active part taken by German girls in sexual matters is referred to again and again by the Lutheran pastors in their elaborate and detailed report. Of the Dantzig district it is said "the young girls give themselves to the youths, or even seduce them." The military manœuvres are frequently a source of unchastity in rural districts. "The fault is not merely with the soldiers, but chiefly with the girls, who become half mad as soon as they see a soldier," it is reported from the Dresden district. And in summarizing conditions in East Germany the report states: "In sexual wantonness girls are not behind the young men; they allow themselves to be seduced only too willingly; even grown-up girls often go with half-grown youths, and girls frequently give themselves to several men, one after the other. It is by no means always the youth who effects the seduction, it is very frequently the girls who entice the youth to sexual intercourse; they do not always wait till the men come to their rooms, but will go to the men's rooms and await them in their beds. With this inclination to sexual intercourse, it is not surprising that many believe that after sixteen no girl is a virgin. Unchastity among the rural laboring classes is universal, and equally pronounced in both sexes" (op. cit., vol. i, 218).

Among women of the educated classes the conditions are somewhat different. Restraints, both internal and external, are very much greater. Virginity, at all events in its physical fact, is retained, for the most part, till long past girlhood, and when it is lost that loss is concealed with a scrupulous care and prudence unknown to the working-classes. Yet the fundamental tendencies remain the same. So far as England is concerned, Geoffrey Mortimer quite truly writes (Chapters on Human Love, 1898, p. 117) that the two groups of (1) women who live in constant secret association with a single lover, and (2) women who give themselves to men, without fear, from the force of their passions, are "much larger than is generally supposed. In all classes of society there are women who are only virgins by repute. Many have borne children without being even suspected of cohabitation; but the majority adopt methods of preventing conception. A doctor in a small provincial town declared to me that such irregular intimacies were the rule, and not by any means the exception in his district." As regards Germany, a lady doctor, Frau Adams-Lehmann, states in a volume of the Transactions of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease (Sexualpädagogik, p. 271): "I can say that during consultation hours I see very few virgins over thirty. These women," she adds, "are sensible, courageous and natural, often the best of their sex; and we ought to give them our moral support. They are working towards a new age."

It is frequently stated that the pronounced tendency witnessed at the present time to dispense as long as possible with the formal ceremony of binding marriage is unfortunate because it places women in a disadvantageous position. In so far as the social environment in which she lives views with disapproval sexual relationship without formal marriage, the statement is obviously to that extent true, though it must be remarked, on the other hand, that when social opinion strongly favors legal marriage it acts as a compelling force in the direction of legitimating free unions. But if the absence of the formal marriage bond constituted a real and intrinsic disadvantage to women in sexual relations they would not show themselves so increasingly ready to dispense with it. And, as a matter of fact, those who are intimately acquainted with the facts declare that the absence of formal marriage tends to give increased consideration to women and is even favorable to fidelity and to the prolongation of the union. This seems to be true as regards people of the most different social classes and even of different races. It is probably based on fundamental psychological facts, for the sense of compulsion always tends to produce a movement of exasperation and revolt. We are not here concerned with the question as to how far formal marriage also is based on natural facts; that is a question which will come up for discussion at a later stage.

The advantage for women of free sexual unions over compulsory marriage is well recognized in the case of the working classes of London, among whom sexual relationships before marriage are not unusual, and are indulgently regarded. It is, for instance, clearly asserted in the monumental work of C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People. "It is even said of rough laborers," we read, for instance, in the final volume of this work (p. 41), "that they behave best if not married to the woman with whom they live." The evidence on this point is often the more impressive because brought forward by people who are very far indeed from being anxious to base any general conclusions on it. Thus in the same volume a clergyman is quoted as saying: "These people manage to live together fairly peaceably so long as they are not married, but if they marry it always seems to lead to blows and rows."

It may be said that in such a case we witness not so much the operation of a natural law as the influences of a great centre of civilization exerting its moralizing effects even on those who stand outside the legally recognized institution of marriage. That contention may, however, be thrust aside. We find exactly the same tendency in Jamaica where the population is largely colored, and the stress of a high civilization can scarcely be said to exist. Legal marriage is here discarded to an even greater extent than in London, for little care is taken to legitimate children by marriage. It was found by a committee appointed to inquire into the marriage laws of Jamaica, that three out of every five births are illegitimate, that is to say that legal illegitimacy has ceased to be immoral, having become the recognized custom of the majority of the inhabitants. There is no social feeling against illegitimacy. The men approve of the decay of legal marriage, because they say the women work better in the house when they are not married; the women approve of it, because they say that men are more faithful when not bound by legal marriage. This has been well brought out by W. P. Livingstone in his interesting book, Black Jamaica (1899). The people recognize, he tells us (p. 210), that "faithful living together constitutes marriage;" they say that they are "married but not parsoned." One reason against legal marriage is that they are disinclined to incur the expense of the official sanction. (In Venezuela, it may be added, where also the majority of births take place outside official marriage, the chief reason is stated to be, not moral laxity, but the same disinclination to pay the expenses of legal weddings.) Frequently in later life, sometimes when they have grown up sons and daughters, couples go through the official ceremony. (In Abyssinia, also, it is stated by Hugues Le Roux, where the people are Christian and marriage is indissoluble and the ceremony expensive, it is not usual for married couples to make their unions legal until old age is coming on, Sexual-Probleme, April, 1908, p. 217.) It is significant that this condition of things in Jamaica, as elsewhere, is associated with the superiority of women. "The women of the peasant class," remarks Livingstone (p. 212), "are still practically independent of the men, and are frequently their superiors, both in physical and mental capacity." They refuse to bind themselves to a man who may turn out to be good for nothing, a burden instead of a help and protection. So long as the unions are free they are likely to be permanent. If made legal, the risk is that they will become intolerable, and cease by one of the parties leaving the other. "The necessity for mutual kindness and forbearance establishes a condition that is the best guarantee of permanency" (p. 214). It is said, however, that under the influence of religious and social pressure the people are becoming more anxious to adopt "respectable" ideas of sexual relationships, though it seems evident, in view of Livingstone's statement, that such respectability is likely to involve a decrease of real morality. Livingstone points out, however, one serious defect in the present conditions which makes it easy for immoral men to escape paternal responsibilities, and this is the absence of legal provision for the registration of the father's name on birth certificates (p. 256). In every country where the majority of births are illegitimate it is an obvious social necessity that the names of both parents should be duly registered on all birth certificates. It has been an unpardonable failure on the part of the Jamaican Government to neglect the simple measure needed to give "each child born in the country a legal father" (p. 258).

We thus see that we have to-day reached a position in which—partly owing to economic causes and partly to causes which are more deeply rooted in the tendencies involved by civilization—women are more often detached than of old from legal sexual relationship with men and both sexes are less inclined than in earlier stages of civilization to sacrifice their own independence even when they form such relationships. "I never heard of a woman over sixteen years of age who, prior to the breakdown of aboriginal customs after the coming of the whites, had not a husband," wrote Curr of the Australian Blacks.[271] Even as regards some parts of Europe, it is still possible to-day to make almost the same statement. But in all the richer, more energetic, and progressive countries very different conditions prevail. Marriage is late and a certain proportion of men, and a still larger proportion of women (who exceed the men in the general population) never marry at all.[272]

Before we consider the fateful significance of this fact of the growing proportion of adult unmarried women whose sexual relationships are unrecognized by the state and largely unrecognized altogether, it may be well to glance summarily at the two historical streams of tendency, both still in action among us, which affect the status of women, the one favoring the social equality of the sexes, the other favoring the social subjection of women. It is not difficult to trace these two streams both in conduct and opinion, in practical morality and in theoretical morality.

At one time it was widely held that in early states of society, before the establishment of the patriarchal stage which places women under the protection of men, a matriarchal stage prevailed in which women possessed supreme power.[273] Bachofen, half a century ago, was the great champion of this view. He found a typical example of a matriarchal state among the ancient Lycians of Asia Minor with whom, Herodotus stated, the child takes the name of the mother, and follows her status, not that of the father.[274] Such peoples, Bachofen believed, were gynæcocratic; power was in the hands of women. It can no longer be said that this opinion, in the form held by Bachofen, meets with any considerable support. As to the widespread prevalence of descent through the mother, there is no doubt whatever that it has prevailed very widely. But such descent through the mother, it has become recognized, by no means necessarily involves the power of the mother, and mother-descent may even be combined with a patriarchal system.[275] There has even been a tendency to run to the opposite extreme from Bachofen and to deny that mother-descent conferred any special claim for consideration on women. That, however, seems scarcely in accordance with the evidence and even in the absence of evidence could scarcely be regarded as probable. It would seem that we may fairly take as a type of the matriarchal family that based on the ambil anak marriage of Sumatra, in which the husband lives in the wife's family, paying nothing and occupying a subordinate position. The example of the Lycians is here in point, for although, as reported by Herodotus, there is nothing to show that there was anything of the nature of a gynæcocracy in Lycia, we know that women in all these regions of Asia Minor enjoyed high consideration and influence, traces of which may be detected in the early literature and history of Christianity. A decisive and better known example of the favorable influence of mother-descent on the status of woman is afforded by the beena marriage of early Arabia. Under such a system the wife is not only preserved from the subjection involved by purchase, which always casts upon her some shadow of the inferiority belonging to property, but she herself is the owner of the tent and the household property, and enjoys the dignity always involved by the possession of property and the ability to free herself from her husband.[276]

It is also impossible to avoid connecting the primitive tendency to mother-descent, and the emphasis it involved on maternal rather than paternal generative energy, with the tendency to place the goddess rather than the god in the forefront of primitive pantheons, a tendency which cannot possibly fail to reflect honor on the sex to which the supreme deity belongs, and which may be connected with the large part which primitive women often play in the functions of religion. Thus, according to traditions common to all the central tribes of Australia, the woman formerly took a much greater share in the performance of sacred ceremonies which are now regarded as coming almost exclusively within the masculine province, and in at least one tribe which seems to retain ancient practices the women still actually take part in these ceremonies.[277] It seems to have been much the same in Europe. We observe, too, both in the Celtic pantheon and among Mediterranean peoples, that while all the ancient divinities have receded into the dim background yet the goddesses loom larger than the gods.[278] In Ireland, where ancient custom and tradition have always been very tenaciously preserved, women retained a very high position, and much freedom both before and after marriage. "Every woman," it was said, "is to go the way she willeth freely," and after marriage she enjoyed a better position and greater freedom of divorce than was afforded either by the Christian Church or the English common law.[279] There is less difficulty in recognizing that mother-descent was peculiarly favorable to the high status of women when we realize that even under very unfavorable conditions women have been able to exert great pressure on the men and to resist successfully the attempts to tyrannize over them.[280]

If we consider the status of woman in the great empires of antiquity we find on the whole that in their early stage, the stage of growth, as well as in their final stage, the stage of fruition, women tend to occupy a favorable position, while in their middle stage, usually the stage of predominating military organization on a patriarchal basis, women occupy a less favorable position. This cyclic movement seems to be almost a natural law of the development of great social groups. It was apparently well marked in the very stable and orderly growth of Babylonia. In the earliest times a Babylonian woman had complete independence and equal rights with her brothers and her husband; later (as shown by the code of Hamurabi) a woman's rights, though not her duties, were more circumscribed; in the still later Neo-Babylonian periods, she again acquired equal rights with her husband.[281]

In Egypt the position of women stood highest at the end, but it seems to have been high throughout the whole of the long course of Egyptian history, and continuously improving, while the fact that little regard was paid to prenuptial chastity and that marriage contracts placed no stress on virginity indicate the absence of the conception of women as property. More than three thousand five hundred years ago men and women were recognized as equal in Egypt. The high position of the Egyptian woman is significantly indicated by the fact that her child was never illegitimate; illegitimacy was not recognized even in the case of a slave woman's child.[282] "It is the glory of Egyptian morality," says Amélineau, "to have been the first to express the Dignity of Woman."[283] The idea of marital authority was altogether unknown in Egypt. There can be no doubt that the high status of woman in two civilizations so stable, so vital, so long-lived, and so influential on human culture as Babylonia and Egypt, is a fact of much significance.

Among the Jews there seems to have been no intermediate stage of subordination of women, but instead a gradual progress throughout from complete subjection of the woman as wife to ever greater freedom. At first the husband could repudiate his wife at will without cause. (This was not an extension of patriarchal authority, but a purely marital authority.) The restrictions on this authority gradually increased, and begin to be observable already in the Book of Deuteronomy. The Mishnah went further and forbade divorce whenever the wife's condition inspired pity (as in insanity, captivity, etc.). By A.D. 1025, divorce was no longer possible except for legitimate reasons or by the wife's consent. At the same time, the wife also began to acquire the right of divorce in the form of compelling the husband to repudiate her on penalty of punishment in case of refusal. On divorce the wife became an independent woman in her own right, and was permitted to carry off the dowry which her husband gave her on marriage. Thus, notwithstanding Jewish respect for the letter of the law, the flexible jurisprudence of the Rabbis, in harmony with the growth of culture, accorded an ever-growing measure of sexual justice and equality to women (D. W. Amram, The Jewish Law of Divorce).

Among the Arabs the tendency of progress has also been favorable to women in many respects, especially as regards inheritance. Before Mahommed, in accordance with the system prevailing at Medina, women had little or no right of inheritance. The legislation of the Koran modified this rule, without entirely abolishing it, and placed women in a much better position. This is attributed largely to the fact that Mahommed belonged not to Medina, but to Mecca, where traces of matriarchal custom still survived (W. Marçais, Des Parents et des Alliés Successibles en Droit Musulman).

It may be pointed out—for it is not always realized—that even that stage of civilization—when it occurs—which involves the subordination and subjection of woman and her rights really has its origin in the need for the protection of women, and is sometimes even a sign of the acquirement of new privileges by women. They are, as it were, locked up, not in order to deprive them of their rights, but in order to guard those rights. In the later more stable phase of civilization, when women are no longer exposed to the same dangers, this motive is forgotten and the guardianship of woman and her rights seems, and indeed has really become, a hardship rather than an advantage.

Of the status of women at Rome in the earliest periods we know little or nothing; the patriarchal system was already firmly established when Roman history begins to become clear and it involved unusually strict subordination of the woman to her father first and then to her husband. But nothing is more certain than that the status of women in Rome rose with the rise of civilization, exactly in the same way as in Babylonia and in Egypt. In the case of Rome, however, the growing refinement of civilization, and the expansion of the Empire, were associated with the magnificent development of the system of Roman law, which in its final forms consecrated the position of women. In the last days of the Republic women already began to attain the same legal level as men, and later the great Antonine jurisconsults, guided by their theory of natural law, reached the conception of the equality of the sexes as a principle of the code of equity. The patriarchal subordination of women fell into complete discredit, and this continued until, in the days of Justinian, under the influence of Christianity, the position of women began to suffer.[284] In the best days the older forms of Roman marriage gave place to a form (apparently old but not hitherto considered reputable) which amounted in law to a temporary deposit of the woman by her family. She was independent of her husband (more especially as she came to him with her own dowry) and only nominally dependent on her family. Marriage was a private contract, accompanied by a religious ceremony if desired, and being a contract it could be dissolved, for any reason, in the presence of competent witnesses and with due legal forms, after the advice of the family council had been taken. Consent was the essence of this marriage and no shame, therefore, attached to its dissolution. Nor had it any evil effect either on the happiness or the morals of Roman women.[285] Such a system is obviously more in harmony with modern civilized feeling than any system that has ever been set up in Christendom.

In Rome, also, it is clear that this system was not a mere legal invention but the natural outgrowth of an enlightened public feeling in favor of the equality of men and women, often even in the field of sexual morality. Plautus, who makes the old slave Syra ask why there is not the same law in this respect for the husband as for the wife,[286] had preceded the legist Ulpian who wrote: "It seems to be very unjust that a man demands chastity of his wife while he himself shows no example of it."[287] Such demands lie deeper than social legislation, but the fact that these questions presented themselves to typical Roman men indicates the general attitude towards women. In the final stage of Roman society the bond of the patriarchal system so far as women were concerned dwindled to a mere thread binding them to their fathers and leaving them quite free face to face with their husbands. "The Roman matron of the Empire," says Hobhouse, "was more fully her own mistress than the married woman of any earlier civilization, with the possible exception of a certain period of Egyptian history, and, it must be added, than the wife of any later civilization down to our own generation."[288]

On the strength of the statements of two satirical writers, Juvenal and Tacitus, it has been supposed by many that Roman women of the late period were given up to license. It is, however, idle to seek in satirists any balanced picture of a great civilization. Hobhouse (loc. cit., p. 216) concludes that on the whole, Roman women worthily retained the position of their husbands' companions, counsellors and friends which they had held when an austere system placed them legally in his power. Most authorities seem now to be of this opinion, though at an earlier period Friedländer expressed himself more dubiously. Thus Dill, in his judicious Roman Society (p. 163), states that the Roman woman's position, both in law and in fact, rose during the Empire; without being less virtuous or respected, she became far more accomplished and attractive; with fewer restraints she had greater charm and influence, even in public affairs, and was more and more the equal of her husband. "In the last age of the Western Empire there is no deterioration in the position and influence of women." Principal Donaldson, also, in his valuable historical sketch, Woman, considers (p. 113) that there was no degradation of morals in the Roman Empire; "the licentiousness of Pagan Rome is nothing to the licentiousness of Christian Africa, Rome, and Gaul, if we can put any reliance on the description of Salvian." Salvian's description of Christendom is probably exaggerated and one-sided, but exactly the same may be said in an even greater degree of the descriptions of ancient Rome left by clever Pagan satirists and ascetic Christian preachers.

It thus becomes necessary to leap over considerably more than a thousand years before we reach a stage of civilization in any degree approaching in height the final stage of Roman society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at first in France, then in England, we find once more the moral and legal movement tending towards the equalization of women with men. We find also a long series of pioneers of that movement foreshadowing its developments: Mary Astor, "Sophia, a Lady of Quality," Ségur, Mrs. Wheeler, and very notably Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women.[289]

The main European stream of influences in this matter within historical times has involved, we can scarcely doubt when we take into consideration its complex phenomena as a whole, the maintenance of an inequality to the disadvantage of women. The fine legacy of Roman law to Europe was indeed favorable to women, but that legacy was dispersed and for the most part lost in the more predominating influence of tenacious Teutonic custom associated with the vigorously organized Christian Church. Notwithstanding that the facts do not all point in the same direction, and that there is consequently some difference of opinion, it seems evident that on the whole both Teutonic custom and Christian religion were unfavorable to the equality of women with men. Teutonic custom in this matter was determined by two decisive factors: (1) the existence of marriage by purchase which although, as Crawley has pointed out, it by no means necessarily involves the degradation of women, certainly tends to place them in an inferior position, and (2) pre-occupation with war which is always accompanied by a depreciation of peaceful and feminine occupations and an indifference to love. Christianity was at its origin favorable to women because it liberated and glorified the most essentially feminine emotions, but when it became an established and organized religion with definitely ascetic ideals, its whole emotional tone grew unfavorable to women. It had from the first excluded them from any priestly function. It now regarded them as the special representatives of the despised element of sex in life.[290] The eccentric Tertullian had once declared that woman was janua Diaboli; nearly seven hundred years later, even the gentle and philosophic Anselm wrote: Femina fax est Satanæ.[291]

Thus among the Franks, with whom the practice of monogamy prevailed, a woman was never free; she could not buy or sell or inherit without the permission of those to whom she belonged. She passed into the possession of her husband by acquisition, and when he fixed the wedding day he gave her parents coins of small money as arrha, and the day after the wedding she received from him a present, the morgengabe. A widow belonged to her parents again (Bedollière, Histoire de Mœurs des Français, vol. i, p. 180). It is true that the Salic law ordained a pecuniary fine for touching a woman, even for squeezing her finger, but it is clear that the offence thus committed was an offence against property, and by no means against the sanctity of a woman's personality. The primitive German husband could sell his children, and sometimes his wife, even into slavery. In the eleventh century cases of wife-selling are still heard of, though no longer recognized by law.

The traditions of Christianity were more favorable to sexual equality than were Teutonic customs, but in becoming amalgamated with those customs they added their own special contribution as to woman's impurity. This spiritual inferiority of woman was significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham, 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 Mâcon, 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 Mâcon.

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 mediæval 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 mediæval 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 Clavière, 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 £200, 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 Sénancour (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 preëminence 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 (Beiträge zur Ætiologie 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 Gérard 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 zoölogical, 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 until they have safely locked him up in the legal bonds of matrimony. Such an argument is absolutely futile, for it ignores the fact that, while love and even monogamy are natural, legal marriage is merely an external form, with a very feeble power of subjugating natural impulses, except when those impulses are weak, and no power at all of subjugating them permanently. Civilization involves the growth of foresight, and of self-control in both sexes; but it is foolish to attempt to place on these fine and ultimate outgrowths of civilization a strain which they could never bear. How foolish it is has been shown, once and for all, by Lea in his admirable History of Sacerdotal Celibacy.

Moreover, when we compare the respective aptitudes of men and women in this particular region, it must be remembered that men possess a greater power of forethought and self-control than women, notwithstanding the modesty and reserve of women. The sexual sphere is immensely larger in women, so that when its activity is once aroused it is much more difficult to master or control. (The reasons were set out in detail in the discussion of "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in volume iii of these Studies.) It is, therefore, unfair to women, and unduly favors men, when too heavy a premium is placed on forethought and self-restraint in sexual matters. Since women play the predominant part in the sexual field their natural demands, rather than those of men, must furnish the standard.

With the realization of the moral responsibility of women the natural relations of life spring back to their due biological adjustment. Motherhood is restored to its natural sacredness. It becomes the concern of the woman herself, and not of society nor of any individual, to determine the conditions under which the child shall be conceived. Society is entitled to require that the father shall in every case acknowledge the fact of his paternity, but it must leave the chief responsibility for all the circumstances of child-production to the mother. That is the point of view which is now gaining ground in all civilized lands both in theory and in practice.

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