Creative power of any kind is, of course, the obverse of an equal power for destruction. No one can put an engine out of action so deftly as the man who designs engines. Woman’s power of fostering growth in human life implies, therefore, an equal power of hindering it. We must accept both sides of the hypothesis, and in doing so we find fresh proof that it is true. If the average man sees woman alternately as an angel and a devil, it is because she exercises both a creative and a destructive influence upon his inner life. He would neither fear nor reverence her so intensely if she were merely an inferior counterpart of himself. Nor would he lay upon her such peculiar disabilities. These disabilities are not only of the kind that would suffice to keep an inferior class in subjection. Inferior classes, whether actually enslaved or not, are kept in their place by being excluded from the sources of external power, such as the possession of wealth, the command of armies, the exercise of political rights. Certain moral and religious sanctions always rise to reinforce the law on these points, for the springs of human conduct lie in the unconscious, and morality and religion deal directly with the emotions of unconscious life. The ruling class seeks therefore to impose a morality consonant with its own interests, and fears a new religion more than a revolution. But it is always conscious of the expediency of the conventional morality it imposes on inferiors, and attaches no ultimate value to it. The model subordinate, obedient and loyal, is not reverenced or idealised: he is not regarded by his superiors as a type of perfect manhood, but only as a perfect subordinate. He may be a bad man provided that he is a good servant. The position of women in a men’s State does not correspond exactly to this. True, if we substitute the function of motherhood in its narrow interpretation for the function of servitude, the correspondence is exact up to a point. The wife and mother is excluded from independent access to the sources of external power: and she is expected to be obedient and loyal to her marriage contract. Moral and religious sanctions are called in to transform her marriage contract into a vow. The stock moral virtue required of her is chastity; she must have sexual relationships only within the pale of marriage. All women, because they are potential wives, must copy her virtues and avoid what is forbidden to her. So far this is only another aspect of the fact that men restrict the function of women to physical motherhood, and define their own responsibilities by the institution of marriage. Women are treated exactly as an inferior class with a definite function, that of child-bearing. But the correspondence stops here. The disabilities imposed upon women by conventional morality cut deeper still. The sexually good woman must be not only good but ignorant: whole tracts of human experience are withheld from her knowledge.