In the new century, women's arguments against the Double Moral Standard which allowed men their sexual peccadillos but insisted that a woman's virtue and honor was defined by sexual chastity could be presented as not just a private issue but one with repercussions for the nation and the 'race'. Given the increasing emphasis on the importance of motherhood to the nation, women could and did point out that women were rendered infertile or bore sickly children as a result of diseases which were the consequence of male vice. 'These beastly men, they give you their foul diseases’. Suffragettes saw syphilis as promoted by the sexual system including centuries of control of prostitutes now called sex workers. It was a central issue in which they were fighting that continues today in many countries.
The African TV soap operas of AIDS have long replaced the suffragette novels of syphilis. The social change now is the forced return to mutual monogamy during our epoch when marriage as a devote institution is collapsing. It’s monogamy or infection.