ent.
Puritanism is essentially an intense effort to rouse in the mind the
liveliest repulsion for certain vices and pleasures, and a violent
dread of them; and Rome made use of it to check and counterbalance the
liberty of woman, to impede and render more difficult the abuses of
such liberty, particularly prodigality and dissoluteness.

It is therefore easy to understand how this puritanism was a thing
serious, weighty, and terrible, in Roman life; and how from it could be
born the tragedies we have to recount. It was the chief means of
solving one of the gravest problems that has perplexed all
civilizations--the problem of woman and her freedom, a problem earnest,
difficult, and complex which springs up everywhere out of the
unobstructed anarchy and the tremendous material prosperity of the
modern world. And the difficulty of the problem consists, above all,
in this: that, although it is a hard, cruel, plainly iniquitous thing
to deprive a woman of liberty and subject her to a regime of tyranny in
order to constrain her to live for the race and not for herself, yet
when liberty is granted her to live for herself, to satisfy her
personal desires, she abuses that liberty more readily than a man does,
and more than a man forgets her duties toward the race.

She abuses it more readily for two reasons: because she exercises a
greater power over man than he over her; and because, in the wealthier
classes, she is freer from the political and economic responsibilities
that bind the man. However unbridled the freedom that man enjoys,
however vast his egoism, he is always constrained in a certain measure
to check his selfish instincts by the need of conserving, enlarging,
and defending against rivals his social, economic, and political
situation.

But the woman? If she is freed from family cares, if she is authorized
to live for her own gratification and for her beauty; if the opinion
that imposes upon her, on pain of infamy, habits pure and honest,
weakens; if, instead of infamy, dissoluteness brings her glory, riches,
homage, what trammel can still restrain in her the selfish instincts
latent in every human being? She runs the mighty danger of changing
into an irresponsible being who will be the more admired and courted
and possessed of power--at least as long as her beauty lasts--the more
she ignores every duty, subordinating all good sense to her own
pleasure.

This is the reason why woman, in periods commanded by