My own experience
of discussing this question leads me to believe that the one point
on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the
existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the
obligation to become the servant of a man. Adoption, or the
begging or buying or stealing of another woman's child, is no
remedy: it does not provide the supreme experience of bearing the
child. No political constitution will ever succeed or deserve to
succeed unless it includes the recognition of an absolute right to
sexual experience, and is untainted by the Pauline or romantic
view of such experience as sinful in itself. And since this
experience in its fullest sense must be carried in the case of
women to the point of childbearing, it can only be reconciled with
the acceptance of marriage with the child's father by legalizing
polygyny, because there are more adult women in the country than
men. Now though polygyny prevails throughout the greater part of
the British Empire, and is as practicable here as in India, there
is a good deal to be said against it, and still more to be felt.
However, let us put our feelings aside for a moment, and consider
the question politically.
MONOGAMY, POLYGYNY AND POLYANDRY
The number of wives permitted to a single husband or of husbands
to a single wife under a marriage system, is not an ethical
problem: it depends solely on the proportion of the sexes in the
population.
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