Motherhood and the Relationships of the Sexes
And the action of this double standard of sexual morality, with its concealed element of lying hypocrisy, has brought, and rightly brought, into discredit legal monogamous marriage; it has led on the one side to the setting up of an ideal of marriage conduct which, as many in fact actually do not follow it, tends to become an outward form, and this on the other side leads to a concealed laxity in practice, which results only too frequently in irresponsible unions, hidden diseases and blasted motherhood, the most terrible of the evils in our disordered sexual life of to-day.