, and the tendency
to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of
barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage
bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity--all these conditions of
developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible,
diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on
the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus
established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly
generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and
interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over
the bodies of women.

The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and
erotic rights of women were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
only that we are here concerned.

No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic
aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good
faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests.
Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly
benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to
exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general
consent, on the erotic side.

Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them,
of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain
important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the
erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of
woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of
the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of
reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the
female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of
Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But
the marriage order which had become established led to the indirect
result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was
regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted
pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be
devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be
not their o