The political emancipation of women is likely to lead to a comparatively
stringent enforcement by law of sexual morality (that is why so many of
us dread it); and this will soon compel us to consider what our sexual
morality shall be. At present a ridiculous distinction is made between
vice and crime, in order that men may be vicious with impunity.
Adultery, for instance, though it is sometimes fiercely punished by
giving an injured husband crushing damages in a divorce suit (injured
wives are not considered in this way), is not now directly prosecuted;
and this impunity extends to illicit relations between unmarried persons
who have reached what is called the age of consent. 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. When Liberalism enfranchises them
politically, and Socialism emancipates them economically, they will no
longer allow the law to take immorality so easily. Both men and women
will be forced to behave morally in sex matters; and when they find that
this is inevitable they will raise the question of what behavior really
should be established as moral. If they decide in favor of our present
professed morality they will have to make a revolutionary change
in their habits by becoming in fact what they only pretend to be
at present. If, on the other hand, they find that this would be
an unbearable tyranny, without even the excuse of justice or sound
eugenics, they will reconsider their morality and remodel the law.