Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/111

Rh of a Messalina, of whom Juvenal says that she was wont to return home from the haunts of lust "worn out but not satisfied." If, on the ground of their sensual capacity, men would establish a right to have "conjugal relations" with several women at the same time, they have an opportunity to become convinced by Parisian Messalinas that women could insist on the right to have fifty husbands, where a man would ask but for five wives.

But, on the other hand, they could be convinced by the example of noble women who have given themselves up to love in full freedom without regard for the judgment of the world, that it is not a need of the feminine sex to have several men at their disposal at the same time. Ninon, George Sand, and others have not been content with one love relation, but they have never loved two men at the same time; i.e., they have never stood in conjugal relations with two men at once. They kept every relationship pure until it had outlived itself, and then entered into a new one, i.e., into a new marriage. And they would surely have confined themselves to a single man,shad they found one who had possessed the qualities that could have interested such extraordinary women and made them happy for life.

We can, therefore, consider it as an established fact that the woman, just as she does not crave several husbands at the same time, will also not