art 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 he