e spoken with insight of
women's instinctive knowledge of the art and discipline of love and has
pointed out how men have imposed their own ideals and rules of action on
women from whom they have demanded opposite and contradictory virtues;
yet, we see, he approves of this state of things and never suggests that
women have any right to opinions of their own or feelings of their own
when the sacred institution of marriage is in question.

Montaigne represents the more exalted aspects of the Pagan-Christian
conception of morality in marriage which still largely prevails. But that
conception lent itself to deductions, frankly accepted even by Montaigne
himself, which were by no means exalted. "I find," said Montaigne, "that
Venus, after all, is nothing more than the pleasure of discharging our
vessels, just as nature renders pleasurable the discharges from other
parts." Sir Thomas More among Catholics, and Luther among Protestants,
said exactly the same thing in other and even clearer words, while untold
millions of husbands in Christendom down to to-day, whether or not they
have had the wit to put their theory into a phrase, have regularly put it
into practice, at all events within the consecrated pale of marriage, and
treated their wives, "severely and prudently," as convenient utensils for
the reception of a natural excretion.

Obviously, in this view of marriage, sexual activity was regarded as an
exclusively masculine function, in the exercise of which women had merely
a passive part to play. Any active participation on her side thus seemed
unnecessary, and even unbefitting, finally, though only in comparatively
modern times, disgusting and actually degrading. Thus Acton, who was
regarded half a century ago as the chief English authority on sexual
matters, declared that, "happily for society," the supposition that women
possess sexual feelings could be put aside as "a vile aspersion," while
another medical authority of the same period stated in regard to the most
simple physical sign of healthy sexual emotion that it "only happens in
lascivious women." This final triumph of the masculine ideals and rule of
life was, however, only achieved slowly. It was the culmination of an
elaborate process of training. At the outset men had found it impossible
to speak too strongly of the "wantonness" of women. This attitude was
pronounced among the ancient Greeks and prominent in their dramatists.
Christianity again, which ended b