Page:The Way of a Virgin.djvu/138

Rh for a woman than for a man to be continent. The same view is widely prevalent among authors, and there is an Arabic saying that 'The longing of the woman for the penis is greater than that of the man for the vulva.'

"The early Christian Fathers clearly show that they regard women as more inclined to sexual enjoyment than men. That was……the opinion of Tertullian (De Virginibus Velandis), and it is clearly implied in some of St. Jerome's epistles.

"Notwithstanding the influence of Christianity, among the vigorous barbarian races of mediaeval Europe the existence of sexual appetite in women was not considered to be, as it later became, a matter to be concealed or denied. Thus in 1068 the ecclesiastical historian, Ordericus Vitalis (himself half Norman and half English), narrates that the wives of the Norman knights who had accompanied William the Conqueror to England two years earlier sent over to their husbands to say that they were consumed by the fierce flames of desire, and that if their husbands failed to return very shortly they proposed to take other husbands. It is added that this threat brought a few husbands back to their wanton ladies.

"During the mediaeval period in Europe, largely in consequence, no doubt, of the predominance of ascetic ideals set up by men who naturally regarded women as the symbol of sex, the doctrine of the incontinence of woman became firmly fixed.……Humanism and the spread of the Renaissance movement brought in a spirit more sympathetic to women. We begin to find attempts at analysing the