or starved—­is a convenient but most cruel illusion.  People often tell me, and nearly always unconsciously assume, that women have no sex hunger—­no sex needs at all until they marry, and that even then their need is not at all so imperious as men’s, or so hard to repress.  Such people are nearly always either men, or women who have married young and happily and borne many children, and had a very full and interesting outside life as well!  Such women will assure me with the utmost complacency that the sex-instincts of a woman are very easily controllable, and that it is preposterous to speak as if their repression really cost very much.  I think with bitterness of that age-long repression, of its unmeasured cost; of the gibe contained in the phrase “old maid,” with all its implication of a narrowed life, a prudish mind, an acrid tongue, an embittered disposition.  I think of the imbecilities in which the repressed instinct has sought its pitiful baffled release, of the adulation lavished on a parrot, a cat, a lap-dog; or of the emotional “religion,” the parson-worship, on which every fool is clever enough to sharpen his wit.  And all these cramped and stultified lives have not availed to make the world understand that women have had to pay for their celibacy!

  “The toad beneath the harrow knows
    Exactly where each tooth-point goes. 
  The butterfly beside the road
    Preaches contentment to that toad.”

Modern psychology is lifting the veil to-day from the suffering which repression causes.  It is a pity that its most brilliant exponents should ascribe to a single instinct—­however potent—­all the ills that afflict mankind, for such one-sidedness defeats its own object; but, at least, the modern psychologist is trying to show us “exactly where each tooth-point goes” in the repression of the sex-instinct among women as among men.  Nor does the fact that the tabu of society has actually in many cases enabled a woman to inhibit the development of her own nature, obviate the fact that she does so at great cost, even when she least understands what she does.

I affirm this, and with insistence, that the normal—­the average—­woman sacrifices a great deal if she accepts life-long celibacy.  She sacrifices quite as much as a man.  In those cases—­too frequent even now—­where she is not educated or expected to earn her own living or to have a career, I maintain that she loses more than a man who is expected to work.  I do not say, and I do not believe, that passion in a woman is the same as in a man, or that they suffer in precisely the same way.  I believe indeed that if men and women understood each other a little better they would hurt each other a good deal less.  But I am persuaded that we shall not even begin to reach a wise morality so long as we persist in basing our demands on the imbecile assumption that women suffer nothing or little by the unsatisfaction of the sex side of their nature.