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These facts are evidence that the passive attitude of woman is not innate and are not based on her physical structure and her inherent function of motherhood. Her role as mother is not responsible for feminine passivity or for her obligation to be pure and chaste. Neither are special sexual privileges a necessary consequence of man’s capacity to procreate an unlimited number of children. The notion that modesty and morality are strictures upon only one sex has its origin in social conditions which produce certain conceptions of the “correct” sexual behavior. The following episode may illustrate the fact that sexual behavior depends merely upon social conventions.
It is said that Napoleon, when in Egypt, once walked through a little Arabian village. Entering a hut unexpectedly, he found himself confronted by several Arabian women. Immediately upon noticing the intruder, they excitedly lifted their skirts to cover their faces. To expose their genitals meant very little, but to show their faces to a man was unthinkable.
Evidently, then, social customs and traditions are responsible for modes of living which our generations, with their emphasis on natural science, like to trace to biological and physiological demands. People living under matriarchate find as many good reasons for their habits as we do in our patriarchal society.
There are matriarchal communities where a woman who has had no lover has only a slim chance to marry. After having had many affairs she becomes more desirable. If no one has loved her before, something must be wrong with her. While in the masculine culture a woman with illegitimate children has less chance of finding a husband than a girl not so encumbered, under matriarchal conditions a girl who has proved her fertility before marriage is definitely preferred.
In our present culture, which until recently was strictly patriarchal, customs have differed from those under matriarchate where adultery was often forbidden only to man. For him, it could mean death. Our women have been expected to wait passively and innocently until a man should condescend to choose. Virginity was demanded of women, because any sexual experience before marriage was the privilege of man. It is hard to believe that until quite recently; however gifted or skillful or good-hearted and considerate she was nothing could help a girl if she had not preserved just one small membrane: her “honor.” No man cared to marry her. Women who defied this social tradition became outcasts. There is little doubt that man, at the same time, had the social right to sexual license and unfaithfulness, in contrast to existing religious, moral, and even legal precepts. Men, indulging in sexual pleasures outside of wedlock, were hardly in danger of losing social status. Only recently has a change occurred. Today, this right of man is questioned but not yet fundamentally disputed, while twenty or fifty years ago the average man could enjoy his privileges without challenge.
The Decline of Man’s Superiority
A radical change during the last hundred years is quite obvious. Masculine superiority is disappearing. The status of women is slowly but continually improving. Political rights of women already approach those of men. Women have new social and economic rights. They enjoy their own individual social status and practice almost every profession. It even happens that men become dependent upon their wives, socially or financially. Women take sexual liberties previously denied to them. How did all this happen?
Around the middle of the last century began the development of woman’s rights as part of the social and economic transformation in the structure of our society. Just as the era of private property influenced the position of women and often ended matriarchal conditions, so again economic changes influenced the status of women. In the ascendancy of capitalism, each individual could acquire full civic rights and privileges by possessing the necessary amount of money. The new social structure evaluated an individual in terms of dollars and cents. This led to an end of feudalism with its exclusive recognition of inherited nobility and to the establishment of human rights.
The ensuing liberalism gave every individual, at least theoretically, a fair chance to attain a socially accepted position. The idea of equal birthrights led to the liberation and emancipation of previously oppressed groups. Laborers, colored people, children, and women began to be regarded as human beings with their fundamental human rights acknowledged. Thereafter, man’s power over woman decreased. In Europe, World War I accelerated this development. Replacing men, women gained access to professions formerly closed to them and earned new social recognition. With their new economic independence, they assumed new sexual freedom-a development hastened by the shortsighted conceit of man. For the new situation offered man a chance to satisfy his sexual desires with girls of his own social level without paying the price previously asked, namely, marriage. Now he could obtain a mistress who would demand neither payment nor surrender. He had neither to assume the full responsibility nor to give up his much coveted freedom. In suiting himself, however, he gave to his woman companion also the liberty of sexual expression and extramarital relationships. Thus his privileges began to evaporate.
