ll.

To me it seems manifest that sexual matters may be discussed generally
in at least three permissible and valid ways, of which the consideration
of the world as a system of births and education is only the dominant
chief. There is next the question of the physical health and beauty
of the community and how far sexual rules and customs affect that, and
thirdly the question of the mental and moral atmosphere in which sexual
conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is
alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of
women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that
without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a
real wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of
morbid states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies
from which we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our
lives, draw mysterious elements from sexual attraction, and depend and
hesitate upon our conception of the liberties and limits we must give to
that force.

3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.

The individual attitudes of men to women and of women to men are
necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of
relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important
and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women
as citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and
grouped in positions of at least material dependence to individual men.
Our decision in that direction will affect all our conduct from the
larger matters down to the smallest points of deportment; it will affect
even our manner of address and determine whether when we speak to a
woman we shall be as frank and unaffected as with a man or touched with
a faint suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not wish to be
suspected of wanting to steal the milk.

Now so far as that goes it follows almost necessarily from my views upon
aristocracy and democracy that I declare for the conventional equality
of women, that is to say for the determination to make neither sex nor
any sexual characteristic a standard of superiority or inferiority, for
the view that a woman is a person as important and necessary, as much
to be consulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action as a man. I
admit that this decision is a choice into which temperament enters,
that I cannot produce compelling