y making women into the chief pillars of
the Church, began by regarding them as the "Gate of Hell." Again, later,
when in the Middle Ages this masculine moral order approached the task of
subjugating the barbarians of Northern Europe, men were horrified at the
licentiousness of those northern women at whose coldness they are now
shocked.

That, indeed, was, as Montaigne had seen, the central core of conflict in
the rule of life imposed by men on woman. Men were perpetually striving,
by ways the most methodical, the most subtle, the most far-reaching, to
achieve a result in women, which, when achieved, men themselves viewed
with dismay. They may be said to be moved in this sphere by two passions,
the passion for virtue and the passion for vice. But it so happens that
both these streams of passion have to be directed at the same fascinating
object: Woman. No doubt nothing is more admirable than the skill with
which women have acquired the duplicity necessary to play the two
contradictory parts thus imposed upon them. But in that requirement the
play of their natural reactions tended to become paralysed, and the
delicate mechanism of their instincts often disturbed. They were
forbidden, except in a few carefully etiquetted forms, the free play of
courtship, without which they could not perform their part in the erotic
life with full satisfaction either to themselves or their partners. They
were reduced to an artificial simulation of coldness or of warmth,
according to the particular stage of the dominating masculine ideal of
woman which their partner chanced to have reached. But that is an attitude
equally unsatisfactory to themselves and to their lovers, even when the
latter have not sufficient insight to see through its unreality. It is an
attitude so unnatural and artificial that it inevitably tends to produce a
real coldness which nothing can disguise. It is true that women whose
instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold. Far
from it. But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and
the insight and skill of the right man. In the erotic sphere a woman asks
nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the
higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act
of love. Therein her silent demand is one with Nature's. For the
biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human
range, are the erotic rights of women.

The social