The Psychology of Sex (Vol. 1-6). Havelock Ellis

antiquity an observation which in English has received its classical expression from Chaucer, who, in his "Wife of Bath's Prologue," has:—

      "He sayde, a woman cast hir shame away,

       When she cast of hir smok."

      I need not point out that the analysis of modesty offered above robs this venerable saying of any sting it may have possessed as a slur upon women. In such a case, modesty is largely a doubt as to the spectator's attitude, and necessarily disappears when that doubt is satisfactorily resolved. As we have seen, the Central Australian maidens were very modest with regard to the removal of their single garment, but when that removal was accomplished and accepted, they were fearless.

[34] The same result occurs more markedly under the deadening influence of insanity. Grimaldi (Il Manicomio Moderno, 1888) found that modesty is lacking in 50 per cent, of the insane.

[35] For some facts bearing on this point, see Houssay, Industries of Animals, Chapter VII. "The Defence and Sanitation of Dwellings;" also P. Ballion, De l'Instinct de Propreté chez les Animaux.

[36] Thus, Stevens mentions (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, p. 182, 1897) that the Dyaks of Malacca always wash the sexual organs, even after urination, and are careful to use the left hand in doing so. The left hand is also reserved for such uses among the Jekris of the Niger coast (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, p. 122, 1898).

[37] Lombroso and Ferrero—who adopt the derivation of pudor from putere; i.e., from the repugnance caused by the decomposition of the vaginal secretions—consider that the fear of causing disgust to men is the sole origin of modesty among savage women, as also it remains the sole form of modesty among some prostitutes to-day. (La Donna Delinquente, p. 540.) Important as this factor is in the constitution of the emotion of modesty, I need scarcely add that I regard so exclusive a theory as altogether untenable.

[38] Das Weib, Ch. VI.

[39] For references as to a similar feeling among other savages, see Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 152.

[40] See e.g., Bourke, Scatologic Rites, pp. 141, 145, etc.

[41] Crawley, op. cit., Ch. VII.

[42] S, Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, p. 172.

[43] Tertullian, De Virginibus Velandis, cap. 17. Hottentot women, also (Fritsch, Eingeborene Südafrika's, p. 311), cover their head with a cloth, and will not be persuaded to remove it.

[44] Wellhausen, Reste Arabischen Heidentums, p. 196. The same custom is found among Tuareg men though it is not imperative for the women (Duveyrier, Les Touaregs du Nord, p. 291).

[45] Quoted in Zentralblatt für Anthropologie, 1906, Heft I, p. 21.

[46] Or rather, perhaps, because the sight of their nakedness might lead the angels into sin. See W. G. Sumner, Folkways, p. 431.

[47] In Moruland, Emin Bey remarked that women are mostly naked, but some wear a girdle, with a few leaves hanging behind. The women of some negro tribes, who thus cover themselves behind, if deprived of this sole covering, immediately throw themselves on the ground on their backs, in order to hide their nakedness.

[48] E.g., Letourneau, L'Evolution de la Morale, p. 146.

[49] Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 683.

[50] J. R. Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, 1728, p. 395.

[51] Westermarck (History of Human Marriage, Ch. IX) ably sets forth this argument, with his usual wealth of illustration. Crawley (Mystic Rose, p. 135) seeks to qualify this conclusion by arguing that tattooing, etc., of the sex organs is not for ornament but for the purpose of magically insulating the organs, and is practically a permanent amulet or charm.

[52] Iliad, II, 262. Waitz gives instances (Anthropology, p. 301) showing that nakedness is sometimes a mark of submission.

[53] The Celtic races, in their days of developed barbarism, seem to have been relatively free from the idea of proprietorship in women, and it was probably among the Irish (as we learn from the seventeenth century Itinerary of Fynes Moryson) that the habit of nakedness was longest preserved among the upper social class women of Western Europe.

[54] A. B. Ellis, Tshi-Speaking Peoples, p. 280.

[55] Burnet, Life and Death of Rochester, p. 110.

[56] L'Année Sociologique, seventh year, 1904, p. 439.

[57] Tallemont des Réaux, who began to write his Historiettes in 1657, says of the Marquise de Rambouillet: "Elle est un peu trop délicate … on n'oscrait prononcer le mot de cul. Cela va dans l'excès." Half a century later, in England, Mandeville, in the Remarks appended to his Fable of the Bees, refers to the almost prudish modesty inculcated on children from their earliest years.

[58] In one of its civilized developments, this ritualized modesty becomes prudery, which is defined by Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, Fifth ed., p. 125) as "codified sexual morality." Prudery is fossilized modesty, and no longer reacts vitally. True modesty, in an intelligent civilized person, is instinctively affected by motives and circumstances, responding sensitively to its relationships.

[59] Memoires de Madame d'Epinay, Part I, Ch. V. Thirty years earlier, Mandeville had written, in England, that "the modesty of women is the result of custom and education."

[60] Goncourt, Histoire de la Société Française pendant le Directoire,