There are
other matters, such as notification of contagious disease and
solicitation, in which the hand of the law has been brought
down on one sex only. Outrages which were capital offences within
the memory of persons still living when committed on women outside
marriage, can still be inflicted by men on their wives without
legal remedy. At all such points the code will be screwed up by
the operation of Votes for Women, if there be any virtue in the
franchise at all. The result will be that men will find the more
ascetic side of our sexual morality taken seriously by the law. It
is easy to foresee the consequences. No man will take much trouble
to alter laws which he can evade, or which are either not enforced
or enforced on women only. But when these laws take him by the
collar and thrust him into prison, he suddenly becomes keenly
critical of them, and of the arguments by which they are
supported. Now we have seen that our marriage laws will not stand
criticism, and that they have held out so far only because they
are so worked as to fit roughly our state of society, in which
women are neither politically nor personally free, in which indeed
women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as
existing solely for the use of men.
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