So long as woman’s economic and social welfare was bound up with marriage, indissoluble marriage undeniably offered her a certain kind of protection. It did not, as I have remarked, protect her from cruelty and infidelity on the part of her husband; but it generally assured her of a living and a respected position in society--that is, so long as she violated none of the conventional taboos against her sex. Even now the chivalrous man often feels that he must endure an unhappy marriage rather than cause his wife to incur the economic and social consequences of divorce. He generally feels that her chance of finding another husband to support her would be considerably worse than his of getting another wife to support; a feeling which, considering the relative desirability of supporting and being supported, will be justified so long as it is considered tolerable for women to be an economic dead weight on the shoulders of men. III The sanctions of monogamic marriage have been enforced on women only. The Christian Church, after some indecision, finally decided that indissoluble monogamy was the only allowable form of marriage; and in theory it exacted from man and woman the same faithfulness to the marriage-vows. Practically, of course, it did no such thing. Being dominated by men, it eventually came to condone the sexual irregularities of men, if it did not sanction them; but sexual irregularity in the subject sex continued to be both theoretically and practically intolerable. Woman became the repository of morality in a society which regarded morality as chiefly a matter of sex. But since she was at the same time the means of satisfying those sexual needs which Christianity disparaged, she also bore the brunt of social displeasure at violation of the ascetic creed. Womankind, as I have already remarked, was divided into two classes: the virtuous wives and cloistered virgins who embodied Christian morals; and those unfortunate social outcasts who sold their bodies to gratify un-Christian desires. The prostitute, the “companion” of the Greeks, who had been in the Greek world the only educated woman, the only woman who enjoyed comparative freedom, became in the Christian world a social outcast, reviled and persecuted, a convenient scapegoat for man’s sins of the flesh, who atoned vicariously by her misery for his failure to live up to the Christian ideal of sexual purity. Nothing reflects more discredit upon the dominance of the male under Christianity than the fact that he took advantage of the economic helplessness which forced millions of women to sell their sex for a living, and then persecuted them outrageously because he had outrageously mistreated them. For prostitution, however much it may reflect upon the morality and, more especially, upon the taste, of men, has nothing whatever to do with the morality of women. It is, with women, a question of economics, purely and simply. The man who buys gratification of his sexual desire has at