At this final point in our discussion of sexual morality we may perhaps be able to realize the immensity of the change which has been involved by the development in women of moral responsibility.  So long as responsibility was denied to women, so long as a father or a husband, backed up by the community, held himself responsible for a woman’s sexual behavior, for her “virtue,” it was necessary that the whole of sexual morality should revolve around the entrance to the vagina.  It became absolutely essential to the maintenance of morality that all eyes in the community should be constantly directed on to that point, and the whole marriage law had to be adjusted accordingly.  That is no longer possible.  When a woman assumes her own moral responsibility, in sexual as in other matters, it becomes not only intolerable but meaningless for the community to pry into her most intimate physiological or spiritual acts.  She is herself directly responsible to society as soon as she performs a social act, and not before.

In relation to the fact of maternity the realization of all that is involved in the new moral responsibility of women is especially significant.  Under a system of morality by which a man is left free to accept the responsibility for his sexual acts while a woman is not equally free to do the like, a premium is placed on sexual acts which have no end in procreation, and a penalty is placed on the acts which lead to procreation.  The reason is that it is the former class of acts in which men find chief gratification; it is the latter class in which women find chief gratification.  For the tragic part of the old sexual morality in its bearing on women was that while it made men alone morally responsible for sexual acts in which both a man and a woman took part, women were rendered both socially and legally incapable of availing themselves of the fact of masculine responsibility unless they had fulfilled conditions which men had laid down for them, and yet refrained from imposing upon themselves.  The act of sexual intercourse, being the sexual act in which men found chief pleasure, was under all circumstances an act of little social gravity; the act of bringing a child into the world, which is for women the most massively gratifying of all sexual acts, was counted a crime unless the mother had before fulfilled the conditions demanded by man.  That was perhaps the most unfortunate and certainly the most unnatural of the results of the patriarchal regulation of society.  It has never existed in any great State where women have possessed some degree of regulative power.

It has, of course, been said by abstract theorists that women have the matter in their own hands.  They must never love a man until they have safely locked him up in the legal bonds of matrimony.  Such an argument is absolutely futile, for it ignores the fact that, while love and even monogamy are natural, legal marriage is merely an external form, with a very feeble power