. Gautier puts
into the mouth of a dutiful wife of the Age of Chivalry the following
soliloquy:

"I will love no one but my husband. Even if he loves me no longer, I
will love him always. I will be humble and as a servitor. I will call
him my sire, or my baron, or domine..."[6]

The modern feminine ideal combines the traits demanded by the worship of
the madonna and the virtues imposed by the institutional taboos which
surround the family. She is the virgin pure and undefiled before
marriage. She is the protecting mother and the obedient, faithful wife
afterward. In spite of various disrupting influences which are tending
to break down this concept, and which will presently be discussed, this
is still the ideal which governs the life of womankind. The average
mother educates her daughter to conform to this ideal woman type which
is the synthesized product of ages of taboo and religious mysticism.
Home training and social pressure unite to force woman into the mould
wrought out in the ages when she has been the object of superstitious
fear to man and also a part of his property to utilize as he willed.
Being thus the product of wholly irrational forces, it is little wonder
that only in recent years has she had any opportunity to show what she
in her inmost soul desired, and what capabilities were latent within her
personality.

In sharp contrast to the woman who conforms to the standards thus
created for her, is the prostitute, who is the product of forces as
ancient as those which have shaped the family institution. In the
struggle between man's instinctive needs and his mystical ideal of
womanhood, there has come about a division of women into two
classes--the good and the bad. It is a demarcation as sharp as that
involved in the primitive taboos which set women apart as sacred or
unclean. In building up the Madonna concept and requiring the women of
his family to approximate this mother-goddess ideal, man made them into
beings too spiritual to satisfy his earthly needs. The wife and mother
must be pure, as he conceived purity, else she could not be respected.
The religious forces which had set up the worship of maternity had
condemned the sex relationship and caused a dissociation of two elements
of human nature which normally are in complete and intimate harmony. One
result of this divorce of two biologically concomitant functions was the
institution of prostitution.

Prostitution is designed to furnish and regu