No doubt in its erotic aspects, as well as in its legal and economic
aspects, the social order thus established was described, and in good
faith, as beneficial to women, and even as maintained in their interests.
Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and
protection of women. It was not so often explained that they greatly
benefited and protected men, with, moreover, this additional advantage
that while women were absolutely confined to the home, men were free to
exercise their activities outside the home, even, with tacit general
consent, on the erotic side.

Whatever the real benefits, and there is no occasion for questioning them,
of the sexual order thus established, it becomes clear that in certain
important respects it had an unnatural and repressive influence on the
erotic aspect of woman's sexual life. It fostered the reproductive side of
woman's sexual life, but it rendered difficult for her the satisfaction of
the instinct for that courtship which is the natural preliminary of
reproductive activity, an instinct even more highly developed in the
female than in the male, and the more insistent because in the order of
Nature the burden of maternity is preceded by the reward of pleasure. But
the marriage order which had become established led to the indirect
result of banning pleasure in women, or at all events in wives. It was
regarded as too dangerous, and even as degrading. The women who wanted
pleasure were not considered fit for the home, but more suited to be
devoted to an exclusive "life of pleasure," which soon turned out to be
not their own pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or
in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever
desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and
was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally
intertwined--and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in