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closed and limited in its expressions as is the peasant world of southern
Italy. All factors seem to conspire to make sex the obsession of southern
men. First there is the fact that in a society in which active participation
in the political, social, economic, and even cultural life of the nation
is impossible, sex is the only outlet for man's energies. Sex-life, further–
more, is limited to its most brutal, physiological aspects, since neither
the male nor the female is permitted to develop his personality normally.
Not only is the wife "protected" by custom from contact with the
world, the man also lives in a world by himself: outside the home
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contact between the sexes exists, and even within the home there are
occasions when the wife is kept separate from the "world of man."
During my visits to peasant homes no woman ever joined us in a meal.
This, of course, was due not only to the conviction that a woman's
place is in the kitchen but also to the desire of the man to protect her
from possible dangers.
The unhealthy separation of the sexes, making friendships between
men and women, and even participation of the wife in the friendships
of the husband, almost impossible, creates in the man an attitude
toward the woman not based on a precise knowledge of the partner's
personality but on the emotional elaboration of her into a fantastic
being upon whom his drives now concentrate. The woman-like the
Family or the Nation-takes on a symbolic meaning. This becomes most
strikingly evident in attitudes toward virginity-symbol of symbols-in
which the elements of precariousness, of possession, and of dignity
are
clearly present. A peasant family regards a marriageable girl as an in–
valuable possession despite the fact that in the strictly material sense
she represents a loss rather than an asset. The whole "honor" of the
family, the whole psychological foundation of security, is based on her
"virtue." In a society in which the essentials of freedom and security
are lacking, to dispose of a daughter is the family's only expression of
freedom.
On the other hand, the strong sense of modesty which the great
majority of women in Lucania and Calabria exhibit is more than a
defensive device in a society in which frequently all members of the
family, male and female, are forced to live together in one room. What–
ever the original motives, there can be no doubt that her modesty, the
particular form of the woman's dignity, has become an autonomous
human value. The precariousness of her social position, instead of lead–
ing to artificial forms of dignity, has been fully absorbed and sanctified
by real dignity, at least so far as her modesty is concerned. Only when
this modesty is compared with the demoralized condition of many a
