There is only one remedy for prostitution, and that remedy is economic freedom--freedom to labour and to enjoy what one produces. When women have this freedom there will be no more prostitution; for no woman will get a living by doing violence to her deep-rooted selective instinct when opportunities are plentiful and a little labour will yield an ample living. There may still be women who are sexually promiscuous; but there is a vast gulf between promiscuity and prostitution: the sexually promiscuous woman may choose her men; the prostitute may not. It is the abysmal gulf between choice and necessity. IV Marriage, illegitimacy and prostitution are so closely related, as social problems, that it is impossible to draw firm lines of demarcation between them. The unlegalized union--which is betrayed by illegitimate birth--may be a marriage in all but law; the legalized marriage may be merely a respectable form of prostitution; prostitution may take the form of a more or less permanent union which may even assume the dignity of a true marriage. Illegitimacy, marriage, and prostitution do not exist independently; they exist in relation to one another and are often confused in people’s minds--as when it is assumed that all mistresses are essentially harlots. They are the three faces of mankind’s disastrous attempt to impose arbitrary regulation upon the unruly and terrifying force of sex; they form a triptych of which the central panel is institutionalized marriage and the other panels the two chief aspects of its failure. The title might appropriately be “The Martyrdom of Woman.” Experience has amply proved that as individualism progresses, it becomes increasingly difficult to impose upon people more than an appearance of conformity in sexual matters. Society can not really regulate anything so essentially personal and private in its nature as the sexual relation: it can only take revenge upon its natural result--and thereby encourage the prevention of that result by artificial means. For every unmarried mother who is persecuted by society, there are ten unmarried women who escape the social consequences of an unauthorized sexual relation. For every faithful husband there is another who deceives his wife with other women; nor are wedded wives by any means always faithful to their marriage vows. There are people who live together in the sexual uncleanness of loveless marriages; and there are those who live purely in extra-legal union. The sexual impulse is too variable and too imperious to be compressed into a formula.