consumed in the
first act of intercourse and can never be recovered. That is a notion
which has survived into civilization, but it belongs to barbarism and not
to civilization. So far as it has any validity it lies within a sphere of
erotic perversity which cannot be taken into consideration in an
estimation of moral values. For most men, however, in any case, whether
they realize it or not, the woman who has been initiated into the
mysteries of love has a higher erotic value than the virgin, and there
need be no anxiety on this ground concerning the wife who has lost her
virginity. It is probably a significant fact that this anxiety for the
protection of women by the limitation of divorce is chiefly brought
forward by men and not by women themselves. A woman at marriage is
deprived by society and the law of her own name. She has been deprived
until recently of the right to her own earnings. She is deprived of the
most intimate rights in her own person. She is deprived under some
circumstances of her own child, against whom she may have committed no
offence whatever. It is perhaps scarcely surprising that she is not
greatly appreciative of the protection afforded her by the withholding of
the right to divorce her husband. "Ah, no, no protection!" a brilliant
French woman has written. "We have been protected long enough. The only
protection to grant women is to cease protecting them."[354] As a matter
of fact the divorce movement appears to develop, on the whole, with that
development of woman's moral responsibility traced in the previous
chapter, and where divorce is freest women occupy the highest position.

We cannot fail to realize as we grasp the nature and direction of the
modern movement of divorce that the final tendency of that movement is to
efface itself. Necessary as the Divorce Court has been as the inevitable
corollary of an impossible ecclesiastical conception of marriage, no
institution is now more hideous, more alien to the instinctive feelings
generated by a fine civilization, and more opposed to the dignity of
womanhood.[355] Its disappearance and its substitution by private
arrangements, effected on their contractive sides, especially if there are
children to provide for, under legal and if necessary judicial
supervision, is, and always has been, the natural result of the attainment
of a reasonably high stage of civilization. The Divorce Court has merely
been a phase in the history of modern marriage,