In the fourth year of War, the Prussian Protestant State-Church declared that "immorality among German women has attained such a degree that the very foundations of Society are threatened." This and kindred developments in other War-ridden countries are not due to women having changed their natures, but are the outcome of conditions so altered as to have released them from the wholesome disciplinary exercise of their accustomed duties, relaxing thus the salutary curbs of habit and convention. Child of Nature that she is, woman is a born rebel; for ever in revolt against the law and order and restraints which man has imposed as indispensable to Progress. Whereas men abhor, women exult in crises and upheavals. Because these serve for outlet to their restive emotionalism and supply scope for exotic sensation, while at the same time giving them temporary mastery over the male—who is always at a disadvantage in exhibitions of feeling.
And this temperamental erraticism is valuably disciplined by the masculine bent for rule and method, and normally finds admirable safety-valves in wifely, housewifely, and motherly functions.
II
To advocate a moral standard higher for women than for men is regarded now as reactionary and regressive.
Nevertheless, it is certain that beyond all the other virtues, personal purity is essentially the highest, and is racially the most valuable of all the Woman-qualities. Lapses in the other sex are in no way comparable, as regards moral, biological, or sociological significance, with kindred lapses in woman. Because of her native non-conformability, once she has deviated from the monogamous code, she is dangerously likely never after to conform to it. (It is a truism that The woman who has one, has many lovers.) Her non-conformity requires, accordingly, to be protected by a social ordinance more rigid than is that of man. Man being less complex of psychology, moreover, that which in him is merely biological is vice in woman. The fact alone that the male is able to employ the sex-function as a weapon of brutality (as in violation) proves him totally dissimilar to woman in this relation.
Man disperses; Woman absorbs. And the consistency of Nature is such that these two diametrically-opposite biological modes in reproduction are reflected on the planes of mind and impulse. The diametrical difference of the modes disposes outright of the Feminist demand for identical moral codes for the sexes; the sex-functions of the two being so intrinsically contrary in method and inherence, with correspondingly signal differences in moral impulse and significance.
Biologically, the masculine function concludes with its fulfilment. Whereas the feminine function begins mainly therewith, and continues thence onward to operate in an ever-deepening, broadening, and intensifying tide of issues; biological and psychological. And so potent and subtle is Nature's consistency with regard to this primary and vital function of woman in Life, that whether or not biological issue results, psychological issues do inevitably. Woman's mode and mood of receptiveness in this mysterious union so operate that, in her surrender, she admits to the inmost sanctuary of her being an alien presence—which remains with her till death. Fade as it may from her consciousness, it remains, nevertheless, impressed for ever after on the vibrant records of her sensitive Subconsciousness, as vitally as in the hour of her surrender. And underlying mind and character and conduct ever after, it for ever after contributes its quota to these.
Because of the vivifying potence of her creative womanhood—the function whereof is to engender Life—the stranger admitted to her citadel becomes endued with Life, and takes up his abode with her to the end of her natural term. For this reason, the adulterous woman is adulterous in a sense impossible to man—adulterous in both a vital and an intrinsic psychical sense that is revolting.
With the increasing intensification in the male, with advancing evolution, of his inherited Woman-traits, he has become ever further endowed with Woman's Sub- and Supra-conscious faculties. So that the function which was, in its primal moral, but brief and cursory, ending summarily with its biological fulfilment, has become increasingly endued in him with the vital emotionalism, and accordingly with the moral significance inherent to the Woman-nature. If his experiences fade more quickly from his consciousness than hers do, they remain nevertheless (in the degree of his psychical development) potent still in his Subconsciousness—as possibly adulterating and debasing factors. But since his Subconscious emotionalism is an acquired and not an inherent part of his male mentality, it is a medium vastly less sensitised and operative in him than it is in her; of whom it is the very basis of her being.
This is no apology, of course, for masculine aberration, but a counsel of feminine virtue—a counsel making indirectly, therefore, but none the less surely for masculine virtue also. The reasons for chastity in the one sex differ diametrically from those which should be the motive thereof in the other, however.