TABOO AND GENETICS 187 



ancient as those which have shaped the family- 

 institution. In the struggle between man's 

 instinctive needs and his mystical ideal of 

 womanhood, there has come about a division of 

 women into two classes. — the good and the bad. 

 It is a demarcation as sharp as that involved in 

 the primitive taboos which set women apart as 

 sacred or unclean. In building up the Madonna 

 concept and requiring the women of his 

 family to approximate this mother-goddess ideal, 

 man made them into beings too spiritual to 

 satisfy his earthly needs. The wife and mother 

 must be pure, as he conceived purity, else she 

 could not be respected. The religious forces 

 which had set up the worship of maternity had 

 condemned the sex relationship and caused a 

 dissociation of two elements of human nature 

 which normally are in complete and intimate 

 harmony. One result of this divorce of two 

 biologically concomitant functions was the 

 institution of prostitution. 



Prostitution is designed to furnish and 

 regulate a supply of women outside the mores 

 of the family whose sex shall be for sale, not for 

 purposes of procreation but for purposes of 

 indulgence. In the ancient world, temple pros- 

 titution was common, the proceeds going to the 

 god or goddess ; but the sense of pollution in 

 the sex relation which came to be so potent an 

 element in the control of family life drove the 



