Growth of a Specific Sexual Morality and the Evolution of Moral
Ideals—­Manifestations of Sexual Morality—­Disregard of the Forms of
Marriage—­Trial Marriage—­Marriage After Conception of Child—­Phenomena in
Germany, Anglo-Saxon Countries, Russia, etc.—­The Status of Woman—­The
Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Equality of Women with Men—­The Theory
of the Matriarchate—­Mother-Descent—­Women in Babylonia—­Egypt—­Rome—­The
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—­The Historical Tendency
Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman—­The Ambiguous Influence of
Christianity—­Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism—­Chivalry—­Woman
in England—­The Sale of Wives—­The Vanishing Subjection of
Woman—­Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer—­The Growth of Moral
Responsibility in Women—­The Concomitant Development of Economic
Independence—­The Increase of Women Who Work—­Invasion of the Modern
Industrial Field by Women—­In How Far This Is Socially Justifiable—­The
Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences—­The Alleged Moral
Inferiority of Women—­The “Self-Sacrifice” of Women—­Society Not Concerned
with Sexual Relationships—­Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the
State—­The Supreme Importance of Maternity.

It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question in so far as it constitutes a social problem.  If we look at prostitution from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which it would fall to pieces.  This will probably be fairly clear to all who have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena.  There is, however, more than this to be said.  Not only is prostitution to-day, as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is itself in certain respects a form of prostitution.  This has been emphasized so often and from so many widely different standpoints that it may seem hardly necessary to labor the point here.  But the point is one of extreme importance in relation to the question of sexual morality.  Our social conditions are unfavorable to the development of a high moral feeling in woman.  The difference between the woman who sells herself in prostitution and the woman who sells herself in marriage, according to the saying of Marro already quoted, “is only a difference in price and duration of the contract.”  Or, as Forel puts it, marriage is “a more fashionable form of prostitution,” that is to say, a mode of obtaining,