[58] The writer has known one case in which it lasted for years. Sometimes, in extreme cases, where the girl is too decent to be sacrificed for a lifetime, there is a nullity suit, and the man produces doctors who declare that he is perfectly normal. Of course he is perfectly normal! What is wrong about him is the whole of his upbringing and the effects of absurdly Puritanical notions about sex, acting upon a peculiarly sensitive nature. For such men are usually extremely desirable and acutely sensitive. They cannot, however, overcome the ridiculous prejudices that prevailed regarding sex in the atmosphere in which they have been reared. [59] It should be noted that this does not apply to working-class women. The men of the working classes may be coarser and more brutal than the men of the wealthier classes, but they are also very much more normal, easy, natural, and gifted in the matter of sex, and from this point of view generally make excellent husbands. They may sometimes strike their wives, but they also know how to love them. The nullity suits and the bad lovers are to be found in the so-called “upper” classes. [60] August Strindberg, in a letter written in the autumn of 1888, refers to England as “a nation of bigots that has delivered itself up into the hands of its women,” and later on speaks of “England’s trousered women.” [61] I mean here, by “male characteristics,” only such traits as can be safely emulated and acquired by the female without the sacrifice or impairment of her reproductive functions, or of the instincts and virtues that derive from them (see chapter X). [62] See _Journal Anthropological Institute_, Feb., 1892, p. 307. See also Bancroft, quoting Heame (_Native Races_), Vol. I, p. 117, where a North American Indian Chief of some nomadic tribe, speaking of the women said: “There is no such thing as travelling any considerable distance in this country without their assistance.” Evidently here too it was an advantage to the race for the women to be as nearly masculine in their characters as possible. Australian women, like Cuban women, used to fight beside their men and were very formidable. The former, when on the march, are said to have hardly troubled to halt for so slight a performance as child-birth. The newly-born infant was wrapped in skins, and the mother marched on with the rest. [63] I shall deal with other standpoints in the chapter on the Old Maid.