One would think that the suspicions of even the most uncritical might be aroused by the rigidly absolute and impersonal nature of women’s sex ideals. The notion of purity as lying in the abstention from a particular act except under carefully prescribed circumstances has all the marks of a primitive taboo and none of the characteristics of a rational moral principle. The ideals of woman’s honor and chastity have without doubt been built up in answer to human wants--the defense which is invariably given of customs, good or bad. Probably those sociologists are not far wrong who hold that they have developed as a response, in early times, to the sentiments of man as a property owner; later, in response to masculine vanity and jealousy, though these motives have, of course, been idealized beyond all recognition. We need not be surprised, then, to find that they bear no relation to an interest in woman’s spiritual welfare and growth, an interest to which society is only now giving birth with pitiable pains of labor. To follow an ideal which almost entirely excludes sex interest as something evil is to condemn one of the richest elements in personal experience. And this ideal has regulated not only woman’s sex experience but has demanded and received incalculable sacrifices in all the phases of her life, mercilessly limiting the sphere of her activities, smothering interests of value and nourishing others to an unnatural state of development, and warping her character to satisfy its most exacting demands. Because she must first of all conform to an unpolluted archetype, and because society must be secure in the knowledge that she is indeed so conforming, she has never been able to meet life freely, to make what experience she could out of circumstances, to poke about here and there in the nooks and crannies of her surroundings better to understand the world in which she lives. We find here a more subtle but more deadly limitation than exclusion from institutions of learning or from political privileges. And under this limitation woman has labored in the service of a paltry ideal.