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 difficulty by educating women in a sense of grievance. Indeed, it seems to many of us that Feminist writers have at times gone far beyond legitimate grievances and set up fictitious and mischievous standards. This is a very common development of propagandist movements which meet with a prolonged resistance. The first generation of agitators says the obvious and just things in regard to the reform: the next generation must revive the jaded sentiment with stimulating novelties and exaggerations. It seems to me one of these morbid exaggerations to speak of marriage as “legalised prostitution”; to imagine that one is “selling one’s body” to a man, or receiving payment for ministering to his “lust.” One Feminist writer of some influence, and some pretension to knowledge of science, has actually compared the human male very unfavourably with all other male animals in the world, on the ground that the latter are content with a restricted period of “rut”!

This mixture of ancient Puritanism and advanced sociology is as incongruous as it is mischievous. A woman who sincerely regards sex-pleasure in the way generally implied by the use of the word “lust”—a woman who has not the same healthy desire of it as her partner—has no right to marry: except, of course, to marry a man with similarly antique views. A wife of such a kind may very well consider that she is being “paid” to surrender her body. The normal wife is not paid for that at all. She is paid—if there is any paying—to care for the home