woman. It is love itself that is
exalted; a husband wishing to honour his lost wife says: "she was
sweet as a palm tree in her love," he does not tell us if she were
beautiful.[262] I cannot follow this question further. Yet it is clear
that danger lurks for woman and her freedom, when to safeguard her
independence, she has no other resources than the seduction of her
beauty to gain and to hold the love she is able to inspire. Sex
becomes a defensive weapon, and one she must use for self-protection,
if she is to live. It seems clear to me that this economic use of sex
is the real cancer at the very root of the sexual relationship. It is
but a step further and a perfectly logical one, that leads to
prostitution. At a later period of Hellenic civilisation we find
Aristotle warning the young men of Athens against "the excess of
conjugal tenderness and feminine tyranny which enchains a man to his
wife."[263] Can any surprise be felt; does one not wonder rather at
the blindness of man's understanding? That such warning against women
should have been spoken in Egypt is incredible. Woman's position and
liberty of action was in no way dependent on her power of
sex-fascination, not even directly on her position as mother, and this
really explains the happy working of their domestic relationships.
Nature's supreme gifts of the sexual differences among them were freed
from economic necessities, and woman as well as man was permitted to
turn them to their true biological ends--the mutual joy of each other
and the service of the race. For this is what I want to make clear; it
is men who suffer in quite as great a degree as women, wherever the
female has to use her sexual gifts to gain support and protection from
the male. It is so plain--one thing makes the relations of the sexes
free, that both partners shall themselves be free, knowing no bondage
that is outside the love-passion itself. Then, and then only, can the
woman and the man--the mother and father, really love in freedom and
together carry out love's joys and its high and holy duties.

The conditions that meet us when we come to examine the position of
women in historic Greece are explained in the light of this valuation
of the sexual relationship. We are faced at once by a curious
contrast; on one hand, we find in Sparta, under a male social
organisation, the women of AEolian and Dorian race carrying on and
developing the Homeric traditions of freedom, while the Athenian