wn pleasure but men's. A "life of pleasure," in that sense or
in any other sense, was not what more than a small minority of women ever
desired. The desire of women for courtship is not a thing by itself, and
was not implanted for gratification by itself. It is naturally
intertwined--and to a much greater degree than the corresponding desire in
men--with her deepest personal, family, and social instincts, so that if
these are desecrated and lost its charm soon fades.

The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to
men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the
actions and the feelings of women. There is no sphere which we regard as
so peculiarly women's sphere as that of love. Yet there is no sphere which
in civilisation women have so far had so small a part in regulating. Their
deepest impulses--their modesty, their maternity, their devotion, their
emotional receptivity--were used, with no conscious and deliberate
Machiavellism, against themselves, to mould a moral world for their
habitation which they would not themselves have moulded. It is not of
modern creation, nor by any means due, as some have supposed, to the
asceticism of Christianity, however much Christianity may have reinforced
it. Indeed one may say that in course of time Christianity had an
influence in weakening it, for Christianity discovered a new reservoir of
tender emotion, and such emotion may be transferred, and, as a matter of
fact, was transferred, from its first religious channel into erotic
channels which were thereby deepened and extended, and without reference
to any design of Christianity. For the ends we achieve are often by no
means those which we set out to accomplish. In ancient classic days this
moral order was even more severely established than in the Middle Ages.
Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, declared that "marriage is a devout
and religious relationship, the pleasures derived from it should be
restrained and serious, mixed with some severity." But in this matter he
was not merely expressing the Christian standpoint but even more that of
paganism, and he thoroughly agreed with the old Greek moralist that a man
should approach his wife "prudently and severely" for fear of inciting her
to lasciviousness; he thought that marriage was best arranged by a third
party, and was inclined to think, with the ancients, that women are not
fitted to make friends of. Montaigne has elsewher