The married couple should understand how to impose on themselves a certain restraint in the matter of marital intercourse, without, however, going so far as on altogether trifling grounds to refuse the husband access to his wife. In this respect also, the opinions that have recently come to prevail concerning the rights of women have had an influence. _W. Acton_ relates a case that came under his observation in which the wife refused to allow her husband any voice in determining when and how often intercourse should take place; the wife, she maintained without hesitation, since she had to bear the consequences of intercourse, was fully justified, whenever she thought fit, in refusing her husband’s embraces. The dangers to the sexual life of woman which are involved by the modern woman’s rights agitation are seen already in the changes which the emancipation of women in North America has produced in the functions of woman as wife and mother. In that part of the world, everything possible has been done “to transform” (to quote the words of a brilliant journalist) “the doll into an independent existence, to enable the helpless woman to earn her own subsistence, and the result of these endeavors has been most striking. The American woman has obtained the right to enter every profession and to follow every kind of occupation which have hitherto been reserved for men; she is physician, lawyer, merchant, professor; her boudoir has become an office, often connected with the stock exchange by a private wire. Legally, also, she now possesses the same rights as man; in many States she has both the suffrage and the right of entering the house of representatives; she has fully emancipated herself from her former condition of tutelage, and in her shrillest tones can cry to heaven ‘I am free, I am independent, I am emancipated, I am myself!’ And observe, as the result of all these attempts at the conversion of woman into man, that in the matter of marriage also she acts as if she were no longer woman. The American woman no longer marries; perhaps, indeed, because she no longer has the capacity. So long and so eagerly has she given herself up to masculine occupations, that her inward feminine nature has also perhaps undergone transformation, so that she has become affected with a kind of neutral lack of desire. Unquestionably, the desire for marriage on the part of this modern ‘emancipated’ woman has vanished in the most alarming manner, there is a notable fall in the birth-rate, and the indigenous (white) population actually threatens to disappear.” The wife acts wisely, not on hygienic grounds alone, in not always acceding at once and unconditionally to her husband’s demand for the repetition of intercourse. Her modest reluctance enhances her desirability in the eyes of her amorous husband. Thus, _Shakespeare_ makes Posthumus exclaim (Cymbeline, Act II., Sc. 5, l. 9):