rtue," it was necessary that the whole of sexual morality should
revolve around the entrance to the vagina. It became absolutely essential
to the maintenance of morality that all eyes in the community should be
constantly directed on to that point, and the whole marriage law had to be
adjusted accordingly. That is no longer possible. When a woman assumes her
own moral responsibility, in sexual as in other matters, it becomes not
only intolerable but meaningless for the community to pry into her most
intimate physiological or spiritual acts. She is herself directly
responsible to society as soon as she performs a social act, and not
before.

In relation to the fact of maternity the realization of all that is
involved in the new moral responsibility of women is especially
significant. Under a system of morality by which a man is left free to
accept the responsibility for his sexual acts while a woman is not equally
free to do the like, a premium is placed on sexual acts which have no end
in procreation, and a penalty is placed on the acts which lead to
procreation. The reason is that it is the former class of acts in which
men find chief gratification; it is the latter class in which women find
chief gratification. For the tragic part of the old sexual morality in its
bearing on women was that while it made men alone morally responsible for
sexual acts in which both a man and a woman took part, women were rendered
both socially and legally incapable of availing themselves of the fact of
masculine responsibility unless they had fulfilled conditions which men
had laid down for them, and yet refrained from imposing upon themselves.
The act of sexual intercourse, being the sexual act in which men found
chief pleasure, was under all circumstances an act of little social
gravity; the act of bringing a child into the world, which is for women
the most massively gratifying of all sexual acts, was counted a crime
unless the mother had before fulfilled the conditions demanded by man.
That was perhaps the most unfortunate and certainly the most unnatural of
the results of the patriarchal regulation of society. It has never existed
in any great State where women have possessed some degree of regulative
power.

It has, of course, been said by abstract theorists that women
have the matter in their own hands. They must never love a man
until they have safely locked him up in the legal bonds of
matrimony. Such an argumen