their
organization, may easily accept it, for others it involves the
most difficult psychic sacrifices. The unmarried girl, who has
become nervously weak, cannot be advised to seek relief in
marriage, for she must be strong in order to "bear" marriage,
while we urge a man on no account to marry a girl who is not
strong. The married woman who has experienced the deceptions of
marriage has usually no way of relief left but by abandoning her
virtue. "The more strenuously she has been educated, and the more
completely she has been subjected to the demands of civilization,
the more she fears this way of escape, and in the conflict
between her desires and her sense of duty, she also seeks
refuge--in neurosis. Nothing protects her virtue so surely as
disease." Taking a still wider view of the influence of the
narrow "civilized" conception of sexual morality on women, Freud
finds that it is not limited to the production of neurotic
conditions; it affects the whole intellectual aptitude of women.
Their education denies them any occupation with sexual problems,
although such problems are so full of interest to them, for it
inculcates the ancient prejudice that any curiosity in such
matters is unwomanly and a proof of wicked inclinations. They are
thus terrified from thinking, and knowledge is deprived of worth.
The prohibition to think extends, automatically and inevitably,
far beyond the sexual sphere. "I do not believe," Freud
concludes, "that there is any opposition between intellectual
work and sexual activity such as was supposed by Moebius. I am of
opinion that the unquestionable fact of the intellectual
inferiority of so many women is due to the inhibition of thought
imposed upon them for the purpose of sexual repression."

It is only of recent years that this problem has been realized
and faced, though solitary thinkers, like Hinton, have been
keenly conscious of its existence; for "sorrowing virtue," as
Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox puts it, "is more ashamed of its woes
than unhappy sin, because the world has tears for the latter and
only ridicule for the former." "It is an almost cynical trait of
our age," Hellpach wrote a few years ago, "that it is constantly
discussing the theme of prostitution, of police control, of the
age of consent, of the 'white slavery,' and passes over