Page:Lesbia Newman - Dalton - 1889.djvu/124

 a marrying girl, Lesbie; you may be fit for the higher life—virginity is the higher life in women, I admit—but I am not, and I look to annexing a husband some day, to love, honour, and obey me. And most certainly I should never consent to my husband having any other wife beside me. I may spare him for a few liasons and irregularities upon occasion, and I might claim a few myself; but I would have no one to be practically a rival wife, either upon the premises or elsewhere. And you will find, if you inquire, that women who cohabit with a man outside legal marriage have also this monogamic instinct. It is easy enough to see why. A harem of concubines is a drove of domestic animals, the toys of their owner. Look at King Solomon, the man of wisdom, who, notwithstanding his wisdom and his multitudinous wives and concubines, could declare that all things under the sun are vanity and vexation of spirit. He could not, then, have felt much more respect for his women than a huntsman feels for his hounds. It is a truth which happily the world is more alive to in these latter days, that formally to attach a plurality of women in any sense or manner to one man, is a direct negation of woman’s dignity. The opposite—polyandry—would be far more natural, even upon physical grounds, and it would moreover have this advantage upon moral grounds, that a man has no dignity of that sort to lose. But I do not propose to enter upon further discussion of that question. The point I am now contending for is that the puritanical code of morality which you and I feel inclined to kick against, is no proof that women are puritanical and bigoted at heart; it is only a proof that the brutality of men has obliged women to resort to defensive measures.

‘Men at large still refuse or neglect to do their duty by the female community, and their sin recoils upon their own heads in the shape of a distorted, pinched, uncomfortable, unsound society, making discontent, jealousy, and bitterness