The modern woman, made independent financially by her non-sexual activities, can remove from her love all taint of even mild commercialism, returning favors in kind, or accepting presents, no longer as a bribe, but as a token of affection on the part of a man she loves.
The Abettor of Ethical Sins. The old fashioned wife was in many more cases than superficial thinking would cause us to imagine, a more dangerous corrupter of public and private morality than the prostitute.
Numerically the wife predominates. The prostitute constitutes a very small minority of the population of large cities and does not thrive in small town, villages or farming communities.
Louis Berman, who is generally very indifferent to psychology, makes a very valuable remark in his book on glands: "Consider," he writes, "the unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the mate and then the mate's career."
Which means that the woman who takes up wifehood as a profession has no social morality. Her husband is her oyster and the world must in turn be her husband's oyster. She knows only one thing: that she must support her mate in anything he does so long as his activities, be they even immoral or criminal, provide food and shelter for her and her children. She cares not what he does as long as he "succeeds."
She founds her estimate of success upon visible accomplishment. Getting "theirs," to her is preferable to getting "there." She, in short, is a foe to the world, as the world is the foe her mate has set out to capture and rob.
She willingly sells his ethics to buy success and, at the same time, is loud in her denunciation of public, self-confessed prostitutes. She would not prostitute herself but she lightheartedly prostitutes her mate.
The modern woman can in an emergency help her husband financially and thus enable him to follow the dictates of social ethics. She will thereby earn deeper love and respect from him than by any willingness to stand by him in crooked deals.
Health Versus Sickness. To the old fashioned wife, weakness and sickness were invaluable assets. Sickness excused laziness and capriciousness. Sickness was a bait for petting and at the same time, a protection against unwelcome physical intimacies. Her menstruation became a mysterious, offensive, painful process which debarred her from many careers she never thought of entering, saved her from duties she was only too glad to shirk. Undismayed by the sight of professional women, singers, actresses, dancers, divers, etc., who not only never seemed disabled by the "dreaded" period but also held a distinct fascination to males "in spite" of their lack of neurotic femininity, she prided herself in living up to Michelet's asinine description of woman, "an invalid twelve times unclean."