ABSTRACT
The emancipation of women has changed the conditions of marriage. So real is the change that even official theories have had to be adapted to it and modified. Marriage was at first crudely regarded as an economic arrangement; later it was said to be a sacrament. The impossibility of enforcing the observance of any coercive sexual morality is not solely due to the violence of biological urges. It is due to the impossibility of standardizing human outlooks, human nature, and the reactions of human life. Laws for the coercive suppression of murder are righdy retained; laws for the coercive suppression of opinions have perforce had to be abandoned by despotic powers anxious to enforce them. Coercive sex laws are laws for the enforcement of tabus by coercion. The traditional habit of relying upon coercion leads to the assumption that the only alternative to coercive patriarchal marriage is promiscuity.
