nothing can disguise.  It is true that women whose instincts are not perverted at the roots do not desire to be cold.  Far from it.  But to dispel that coldness the right atmosphere is needed, and the insight and skill of the right man.  In the erotic sphere a woman asks nothing better of a man than to be lifted above her coldness, to the higher plane where there is reciprocal interest and mutual joy in the act of love.  Therein her silent demand is one with Nature’s.  For the biological order of the world involves those claims which, in the human range, are the erotic rights of women.

The social claims of women, their economic claims, their political claims, have long been before the world.  Women themselves have actively asserted them, and they are all in process of realisation.  The erotic claims of women, which are at least as fundamental, are not publicly voiced, and women themselves would be the last to assert them.  It is easy to understand why that should be so.  The natural and acquired qualities of women, even the qualities developed in the art of courtship, have all been utilised in building up the masculine ideal of sexual morality; it is on feminine characteristics that this masculine ideal has been based, so that women have been helpless to protest against it.  Moreover, even if that were not so, to formulate such rights is to raise the question whether there so much as exists anything that can be called “erotic rights.”  The right to joy cannot be claimed in the same way as one claims the right to put a voting paper in a ballot box.  A human being’s erotic aptitudes can only be developed where the right atmosphere for them exists, and where the attitudes of both persons concerned are in harmonious sympathy.  That is why the erotic rights of women have been the last of all to be attained.

Yet to-day we see a change here.  The change required is, it has been said, a change of attitude and a resultant change in the atmosphere in which the sexual impulses are manifested.  It involves no necessary change in the external order of our marriage system, for, as has already been pointed out, it was a coincident and not designed part of that order.  Various recent lines of tendency have converged to produce this change of attitude and of atmosphere.  In part the men of to-day are far more ready than the men of former days to look upon women as their comrades in the every day work of the world, instead of as beings who were ideally on a level above themselves and practically on a level considerably below themselves.  In part there is the growing recognition that women have conquered many elementary human rights of which before they were deprived, and are more and more taking the position of citizens, with the same kinds of duties, privileges, and responsibilities as men.  In part, also, it may be added, there is a growing diffusion among educated people of a knowledge of the primary facts of life in the two sexes, slowly dissipating