theory of chivalry is scarcely invoked in the present day save in the interests of one particular form of weakness—viz. the woman as the muscularly weaker sex, and here it has acquired an utterly different character.[1]
Chivalry, as understood by Modern Sentimental Feminism, means unlimited licence for women in their relations with men, and unlimited coercion for men in their relations with women. To men all duties and no rights, to women all rights and no duties, is the basic principle underlying Modern Feminism, Suffragism, and the bastard chivalry it is so fond of invoking. The most insistent female shrieker for equality between the sexes among Political Feminists, it is interesting to observe, will, in most cases, on occasion be found an equally insistent advocate of the claims of Sentimental Feminism, based on modern metamorphosed notions of chivalry. It never seems to strike anyone that the muscular weakness of woman has been forged by Modern Feminists into
- ↑ As regards this point it should be remarked that mediæval chivalry tolerated (as Wharton expressed it in his "History of Poetry") "the grossest indecencies and obscenities between the sexes," such things as modern puritanism would stigmatise with such words as "unchivalrous," "unmanly" and the like. The resemblance between the modern worship of women and the relations of the mediæval knight to the female sex is very thin indeed. Modern claims to immunity for women from the criminal law and mediæval chivalry are quite different things.
