their responsibility.  We have had, as Madame Juliette Adam has put it, the rights of men sacrificing women, followed by the rights of women sacrificing the child; that must be followed by the rights of the child reconstituting the family.  It has already been necessary to touch on this point in the first chapter of this volume, and it will again be necessary in the last chapter.

The question as to the method by which the economic independence of women will be completely insured, and the part which the community may be expected to take in insuring it, on the ground of woman’s special child-bearing functions, is from the present point of view subsidiary.  There can be no doubt, however, as to the reality of the movement in that direction, whatever doubt there may be as to the final adjustment of the details.  It is only necessary in this place to touch on some of the general and more obvious respects in which the growth of woman’s responsibility is affecting sexual morality.

The first and most obvious way in which the sense of moral responsibility works is in an insistence on reality in the relationships of sex.  Moral irresponsibility has too often combined with economic dependence to induce a woman to treat the sexual event in her life which is biologically of most fateful gravity as a merely gay and trivial event, at the most an event which has given her a triumph over her rivals and over the superior male, who, on his part, willingly condescends, for the moment, to assume the part of the vanquished.  “Gallantry to the ladies,” we are told of the hero of the greatest and most typical of English novels, “was among his principles of honor, and he held it as much incumbent on him to accept a challenge to love as if it had been a challenge to fight;” he heroically goes home for the night with a lady of title he meets at a masquerade, though at the time very much in love with the girl whom he eventually marries.[303] The woman whose power lies only in her charms, and who is free to allow the burden of responsibility to fall on a man’s shoulder,[304] could lightly play the seducing part, and thereby exert independence and authority in the only shapes open to her.  The man on his part, introducing the misplaced idea of “honor” into the field from which the natural idea of responsibility has been banished, is prepared to descend at the lady’s bidding into the arena, according to the old legend, and rescue the glove, even though he afterwards flings it contemptuously in her face.  The ancient conception of gallantry, which Tom Jones so well embodies, is the direct outcome of a system involving the moral irresponsibility and economic dependence of women, and is as opposed to the conceptions, prevailing in the earlier and later civilized stages, of approximate sexual equality as it is to the biological traditions of natural courtship in the world generally.