but she is as fleet and as skilful as he is, cannot be captured unless she
wishes to be captured, and in addition, as among the Kirghiz, she may be
armed with a formidable whip; so that "marriage by capture," far from
being a hardship imposed on women is largely a concession to their modesty
and a gratification of their erotic impulses. Even when the chief part of
the decision rests with masculine force courtship is still not necessarily
or usually excluded, for the exhibition of force by a lover,--and this is
true for civilised as well as for savage women,--is itself a source of
pleasurable stimulation, and when that is so the essence of courtship may
be attained even more successfully by the forceful than by the humble
lover.

The evolution of society, however, tended to overlay and sometimes even to
suppress those fundamental natural tendencies. The position of the man as
the sole and uncontested head of the family, the insistence on paternity
and male descent, the accompanying economic developments, and the tendency
to view a woman less as a self-disposing individual than as an object of
barter belonging to her father, the consequent rigidity of the marriage
bond and the stern insistence on wifely fidelity--all these conditions of
developing civilisation, while still leaving courtship possible,
diminished its significance and even abolished its necessity. Moreover, on
the basis of the social, economic, and legal developments thus
established, new moral, spiritual, and religious forces were slowly
generated, which worked on these rules of merely exterior order, and
interiorised them, thus giving them power over the souls as well as over
the bodies of women.

The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and
erotic rights of women were all diminished. It is with the erotic rights
only that we are here concerned.