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[257] 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