Note 141:1 — Chapter VII · THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE MOVEMENT

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.