Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/223

 wrong, for if there are to be two worlds, the man's and the woman's, and if all their work and their thinking are to be done apart, and if men are all the same to go on arranging the lives of women, with whom they have no relations but physical relations of sex, there will be less and less of that understanding, without which there can never be peace. Men who say greedily, "This world is ours, and we will give you just so much of it as we please, and it is for you to be thankful," are blaspheming. The world is not theirs to give, and although woman cannot fight man with physical force, let man not think that to give woman her liberty is to confer a favour upon her. It is only to do his duty, as a man is bound to do.

The men who are afraid women will not see eye to eye with them on the matter of men's temptations, use a double-edged argument, when they declare that there must be a double standard of sexual morality. It is sometimes based upon the physiological fact that a man can "have" a hundred children in the time that it takes a woman to "have" one. But this is to misuse words. A man does not have a child, nor does a woman: a man and woman together have a child. And, if we even conceded that promiscuity in a man would not be wrong, provided he could be promiscuous by himself, how can anyone defend promiscuity in a man, if it infallibly involves the corruption of women? Those who wish to defend promiscuity must find a better weapon than the double standard;