Sexual Morality Marriage and Morality - From Studies in the Psychology of Sex - Volume 6

Sexual Morality

From Studies in the Psychology of Sex - Volume 6

By Havelock Ellis

An Early 20th Century Study

• Marriage and Morality
• Practical Morality Based on Custom
• Trial Marriage
• The Theory of the Matriarchate
• The Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman
• The Ambiguous Influence of Christianity
• Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism
• The Vanishing Subjection of Woman
• Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer
• The Growth of Moral Responsibility in Women
• The Increase of Women Who Work
• Invasion of the Modern Industrial Field by Women
• The Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences
• The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women
• Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the State

It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question in so far as it constitutes a social problem. If we look at prostitution from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which it would fall to pieces. This will probably be fairly clear to all who have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena. There is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prostitution to-day, as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is itself in certain respects a form of prostitution.