special modesty of women usually tends to diminish, though not to disappear, with the complete gratification of the sexual impulses.  This may be noted among savage as well as among civilized women.  The comparatively evanescent character of modesty has led to the argument (Venturi, Degenerazioni Psico-sessuali, pp. 92-93) that modesty (pudore) is possessed by women alone, men exhibiting, instead, a sense of decency which remains at about the same level of persistency throughout life.  Viazzi ("Pudore nell ’uomo e nella donna,” Rivista Mensile di Psichiatria Forense, 1898), on the contrary, following Sergi, argues that men are, throughout, more modest than women; but the points he brings forward, though often just, scarcely justify his conclusion.  While the young virgin, however, is more modest and shy than the young man of the same age, the experienced married woman is usually less so than her husband, and in a woman who is a mother the shy reticences of virginal modesty would be rightly felt to be ridiculous. ("Les petites pudeurs n’existent pas pour les meres,” remarks Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii, p. 5.) She has put off a sexual livery that has no longer any important part to play in life, and would, indeed, be inconvenient and harmful, just as a bird loses its sexual plumage when the pairing season is over.

Madame Celine Renooz, in an elaborate study of the psychological sexual differences between men and women (Psychologie Comparee de l’Homme et de la Femme, 1898, pp. 85-87), also believes that modesty is not really a feminine characteristic.  “Modesty,” she argues, “is masculine shame attributed to women for two reasons:  first, because man believes that woman is subject to the same laws as himself; secondly, because the course of human evolution has reversed the psychology of the sexes, attributing to women the psychological results of masculine sexuality.  This is the origin of the conventional lies which by a sort of social suggestion have intimidated women.  They have, in appearance at least, accepted the rule of shame imposed on them by men, but only custom inspires the modesty for which they are praised; it is really an outrage to their sex.  This reversal of psychological laws has, however, only been accepted by women with a struggle.  Primitive woman, proud of her womanhood, for a long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always represented.  And in the actual life of the young girl to-day there is a moment when, by a secret atavism, she feels the pride of her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot understand why she must hide its cause.  At this moment, wavering between the laws of Nature and social conventions, she scarcely knows if nakedness should or should not affright her.  A sort of confused atavistic memory recalls to her a period before clothing was known, and reveals to her as a paradisaical ideal the customs of that human epoch.”