the woman
is not, I am sure, a true or necessary incitement to love. Love, as I
see it, is a breaking down of the boundaries of oneself, the casting
aside of reserve and defences, with a necessary throwing off of every
concealment.

In our restricted society, where the sexual instincts are at once both
unnaturally repressed and unnaturally stimulated, this openness may
not be possible. Concealments and evasions may be an aid at one stage
of sex evolution. Just as the half-concealed body is often a more
powerful sensual stimulus than nudity; the less one sees, the more
does the imagination picture. But the need of such artificial
excitants speaks of the poverty of love and not of its fullness. For
most of us the strain of sensuality in our loves is very strong. To
have lived in the bonds of slavery makes us slaves, and the price that
woman has paid is the sacrifice of her purity. The feeling of shame in
love, like chastity, arose in the property value of the woman to her
owner; it is no more a part of the woman's character than of the
man's. Woman must capture her mate because the race must perish
without her travail; she is fulfilling Nature's ends, as well as her
own, whatever means she uses.

So I am certain that, as woman's right of selection is given back to
her to exercise without restraint, we shall see a freer and more
beautiful mating. With greater liberty of action she will be far
better armed with knowledge to demand a finer quality in her lovers.
Her unborn children importuning her, her choice will be guided by the
man's fitness alone, not, as now it is, by his capacity and power for
work and protection. We are only awakening to the terrible evils of
these powerful economic restraints, which now limit the woman's range
of choice. It is this wastage of the Life-force that, as I believe,
above all else has driven women into revolt.

The free power of Selection in Love! Yes; that is the true Female
Franchise. It must be regained by woman, to be used by her to ennoble
the sex relation and thereby to cleanse society of the unfit. The
means by which this most important end can be attained will be brought
about by giving woman such training and education and civic rights, as
well as the framing of such laws and changes in the rights of property
inheritance, as shall render her economically independent. Existing
marriage is a pernicious survival of the patriarchal age. The
"patriarch's" wife was significantly re