CHAPTER XIII

THE DANGER OF SECRET DISEASES

“The abolition of prostitution and the suppression of venereal

diseases would be almost tantamount to the solution of the

entire sexual problem.”—IWAN BLOCH.

So far in writing of marriage and of the irregular partnerships entered

into outside of marriage I have ignored the question of venereal diseases

and of prostitution, so intimately connected with them, but to continue

to do this would be to make my inquiry useless, as, properly speaking,

they constitute the central problem of the sexual relationships. There

are no other factors of the same importance to motherhood and to the life

and health of the race.

Without doubt the subject is eminently complicated, while the problems

involved are so immense, far-reaching and perilous, linking themselves

with the deepest interests of the race, that I hesitate almost in

making an attempt to discuss so wide a subject briefly, and necessarily

inadequately, in the short space at my disposal. Yet it is clearly

impossible to take the easy way and pass these matters over in silence.

On the question of prostitution I have written already in my earlier

book, _The Truth about Woman_, where I stated as truthfully as I could

some facts I had come to know about the prostitute class, as well as my

own opinions on this very complex social phenomenon. I shall, therefore,

now as far as possible leave this side of the problem without further

comment. It must, however, be remembered that the problem of prostitution

and the problem of venereal diseases are inseparably interconnected, the

former evil being the chief cause of the latter. Indeed, if prostitution

could be ended venereal diseases would of themselves disappear.

And here we touch at once the grave difficulty of the position. These

diseases are set apart from all other sicknesses of our bodies. Moral

considerations become confused with practical values. I do not see that

this in itself can be wrong. For there can be no greater ideal than that

of removing the poisonous sting that with such abundant activity has

worked evil in our midst.

There is, however, danger in too much and wrongly directed moral

enthusiasm. It is of vital importance that a contagious disease should

be isolated and cured, and if moral condemnation acts to defeat these

objects, it cannot but be a danger. A contagious disease that must be

kept secret cannot be properly dealt with and healed.

I hope I made my own position clear when I wrote on prostitution,

where I tried to avoid a purely moral and idealistic treatment of the

subject.[99] I shall follow the same plan here. I shall limit myself to

the aspects of the question that to me seem to be of special importance,

choosing by preference facts about which I have some little personal

knowledge, or a fixed opinion of my own. In this way I may be able to

contribute a word or two of worth to this difficult question.

The Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease brought the

subject before a reluctant and apathetic public. It was time. According

to the Commission one-tenth of the city population is infected by

syphilis. The number of those affected by gonorrhœa is much larger. The

latter disease is the more terribly injurious to women and children,

because it is often considered a triviality by men. Syphilis serves as

the origin of many functional and organic diseases, and its hereditary

influence is truly disastrous. Blindness, deafness and insanity, as well

as a weakened nervous resistance, are the inheritance handed to the

children of the syphilitic. Gonorrhœa is the chief source of sterility in

women, probably accounting for one-half of all cases.

At a time when infant life is of such supreme value to the nation as it

is to-day, it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of these facts.

We have to realise that could we act strongly and wisely so that in one

generation we grappled with this great evil and cured it, we could make

good the suffering and waste of life caused by the war.

Is it not worth while to do this? It can be done. There was a time when

syphilis did not exist in our civilisation. It cannot be traced with any

certainty in Europe before the fifteenth century, although its origin is

involved in some controversy. The attempt to suppress venereal diseases

by proper treatment is of less than twelve years’ duration. Three

men—Wassermann, Ehrlich and Noguchi—have supplied the knowledge and given

the means whereby the evil may be attacked. Up to the present little

use has been made of the effective means of diagnosis and cure that

we now possess. The cure has been left to private doctors. No general

hospital would treat these diseases, and the special hospitals are few

in number. Benefit societies and insurance commissioners have refused

to grant the usual benefits to patients suffering from these diseases.

The inoculations are very expensive, and many patients, even among the

wealthy, have not used them, as they have feared to discover the truth.

The desire for concealment has done everything to make cure difficult.

I must emphasise constantly the danger of secrecy. We have to face the

facts as they are, not as we wish them to be. And for this reason,

because the results are what we now know them to be, we must demand the

clearing away of the moral stigma that has been placed as a ban upon the

infected. It is so plain. Until every one attacked by these diseases

seeks the best remedies, there can be no cure; and they will not seek the

remedies while the presence of the diseases is considered as evidence of

sin. In the past we have relied on fear as a deterrent and ignorance as a

safeguard. They have failed. Let us now try practical cures. A pharisaic

attitude is so highly mischievous that it becomes immoral.

The Government has taken prompt and fine action. It has removed one great

difficulty, and effected all that can be done without fresh legislation.

A comprehensive scheme of free diagnosis and treatment in general

hospitals is to be organised by local authorities, who are to receive a

grant from the Imperial Exchequer amounting to 75 per cent. of the cost.

It is to be hoped that this admirable action will counteract the evils

due to the increase of venereal disease certain to accompany the war.

The chief recommendations of the Commission other than those connected

with direct immediate cure, which the Government has been able to carry

out by an administrative Act, are as follows—

(1) The presence of infective venereal disease should be a cause for the

prevention or annulment of marriage; further, the process of annulment

should be made available for all persons, however poor.

(2) A communication made by a medical practitioner to a parent, guardian,

or other person directly interested in the welfare of a woman or man

in order to prevent or delay marriage with a person in an infectious

condition should be a “privileged communication.” It should not, in such

circumstances, be libel or slander to state that an intending husband

cannot safely marry.

(3) It is further strongly recommended that better instruction be given

on sexual subjects. “The evils which lead to the spread of venereal

diseases are in great part due to want of control, ignorance and

inexperience, and the importance of wisely conceived educational measures

can hardly be exaggerated.”

There should be no delay in dealing with the last recommendation. A

strong President of the Board of Education could, by an order of his pen,

give instruction in an afternoon, and start arrangements which could

introduce such teaching in all schools. It is, however, another matter

whether there would be teachers capable to give the instruction. It is

doubtful also whether sex teaching, introduced in this way as something

apart from the usual educational course, could ever safeguard from sin.

I need, however, say little in this chapter on the important and

difficult question of sexual education, as the whole of the last section

of my book deals with that subject. I shall there try to show that the

greater number of the evils connected with marriage and motherhood are

due to false ideals and wrong methods of training in early life. I am,

in particular, convinced of the mistakes we have been making in the

education of girls—mistakes which prevent them as young women from having

any clear aim to guide their lives, and act, as I believe, disastrously

on their whole nature as well as spoiling their happiness. This public

recommendation for a recognition of the sexual life and the problems

connected with it as being of vital importance in the training of the

young generation fills me with strong hope. But everything will depend

on how such instruction is going to be given. Unwisely undertaken, it

may easily lead to more harm than good. To be really efficacious it will

need a sweeping change in the home and a revolution in the school. Now is

the appointed time to act; if the opportunity be allowed to pass, it may

not come again. The force of tradition and the convention of silence has

been broken as it has not been broken before. We are all convinced that

the time to change has come and to do something; when so many are agreed

upon what ought to be done, the danger lies chiefly in the dispersion of

energy by the weariness brought on by endless discussions on the way to

give the education—a subject which unfortunately lends itself to much

talking and disagreement.

But to return to the Royal Commission Report. Recommendations (1) and

(2) cannot be carried out without special legislation. To obtain the

support of the House of Commons for measures which would necessarily

be opposed by some persons in every constituency, which have no

vote-catching value and have not been chewed to pulp by long-continued

party platform oratory, is a difficult task. The ordinary member of

Parliament feels afraid to have convictions which are unsupported by

powerful organisations; convictions which may cost him much opposition

at election times. Probably such a measure to safeguard marriage could

be more easily initiated by a vigorous and fearless member of the House

of Lords. The House of Commons at the present time, even apart from

the Great War and its urgency, is often busy for months with intricate

Government measures, which take up nearly all the time available.

Marriage laws cannot be dealt with in half an hour on a Friday evening.

This need not discourage us too much. It will not serve to leave matters

to official action alone. If the victory against venereal diseases is

to be won, strong signs of general interest must be shown. More even

than this is necessary. The interest shown must be of an enlightened

character. I feel it is urgent to emphasise this need for wise, and

not hasty, action. Women have of late been taking a quite new concern

in sexual questions, in particular in venereal diseases, so intimately

connected with their interests. This is as it should be. But I have been

forced to the knowledge that this interest, unbacked by wide knowledge

and still more by experience of the facts of life, often leads them into

folly. The possession of the vote by women has been expected to achieve

immediate magical effects; it has been forgotten that women voters would

be neither united in their aims nor possessed of the political capacity

which would enable them infallibly to gain all for which they wished.

Women ought not to hope to solve the ancient, fierce enigmas which have

vexed mankind in every modern civilised society.

In my opinion, the greatest cause of error in women’s judgment arises

from the tendency (doubtless due to what their sex has suffered) to throw

the whole blame for sexual sins on men. Some women carry sex antagonism

like a flag, which they flourish in every wind. These are, of course, a

small minority; but the majority of women fail to take a wide, sane view

of both the question of prostitution and that of venereal diseases.

Let me give an illustration. I recently attended a meeting where a paper

was read on the Report of the Venereal Disease Commission. The reader

of the paper, being a woman doctor, took the wise view that the most

important matter was the cure of the disease. In the discussion that

followed, it was plainly evident that few of the audience agreed with

her. These were women who had read about, and to some limited extent

thought and studied these questions. Yet the general view was that _the

men ought to be punished_. One speaker, who stated that she was married,

said that _no true woman could or ought to forgive a husband who had

become infected with venereal disease_.

Now, it is this view, here so crudely expressed, that I am writing to

combat. Such an attitude of blame and unforgiveness has to be changed,

or no legislation or public action will effect a real cure. _Women are

really responsible for the secrecy of these diseases._ And what is the

result? _Because these infectious diseases are secret they are largely

uncured._

I hasten to say that I am not taking an unfair view of the position. It

is, of course, easy to understand the attitude taken up by women. Blame

is not easily avoided. I would, however, ask them very earnestly to

consider whether there is not some confusion in their minds.

The sin that the man commits against his wife is being unfaithful. Having

caught the venereal disease is a misfortune. The effect must not be

blamed by itself. Let me illustrate this point of view by considering

a different case. Your child gets scarlet fever by an act of direct

disobedience or sin. He goes to play at a house he has been forbidden

to enter. Would you, because of his sin, refuse to pity and nurse him?

Rather would you not forget his disobedience and desire only to help and

to heal him?

Do you see what I mean now? It is not that I uphold immoral conduct in

the husband or in the lover that I plead thus for pity and understanding

on the part of women.

Few men are intentionally evil. They do not even act foolishly in this

question of infectious disease because they are wantonly careless. Often

they are fully alive to the danger that may result to their wives from

their own infection. I repeat they are not necessarily bad men, and they

may love their wives and children; but they are cowards. All men are

cowards when it comes to facing their wives with their own wrong doings.

If they cannot rely on the pity of their wives, few men will dare to tell

the truth. If they cannot tell the truth, they cannot avoid infecting

their wives. This may lead to the birth of infected children, and who may

say that in this case the crime is the man’s alone? It is to prevent this

crime against the child and against life, that I urge upon women a wiser

and more tolerant attitude.

For greater clearness, I may state the matter thus: there are three

attitudes that may be adopted towards sexual disease. First, that of

the pure moralist, who says only, “This is a sin to be punished.” On

the opposite side is the purely utilitarian, who says, “This is only a

disease to be cured.” But both attitudes may be alike wrong, or, more

correctly, the truth lies midway between the two. The disease, as a

disease, needs to be cured. This is the first step with which nothing

should interfere. But far different and much more complex is the

treatment required to alter the actions that lead to the disease.

As a first step, public opinion ought to condemn too late marriage,

instead of recommending it on economic grounds. The mania for making

economics the centre of life should now surely cease: the falsity of this

view has been exposed by many great writers, but much stronger is the

condemnation that must be given to it by all who can understand the evils

that it has wrought in our sexual lives. Late marriages must be one of

the causes contributing to men’s use of prostitutes before marriage. This

subject has been dealt with already in Chapter XII.

A natural division of the subject here presents itself. The problems of

venereal infection are different before and after marriage. A practical

knowledge of the physical facts of sex should be the possession of

every girl some years before the age of marriage. Sex must cease to be

a subject on which it is not decent for a girl to speak. Until this has

been achieved, it will be impossible to have that frankness between

lovers which will make certain an acknowledgment being made of infection,

if it is or ever has been present in the man, so as to do away with the

dangers of concealment and further disease. In my opinion, this openness

is of necessary importance to the wise choice on the part of girls of the

men they are to marry.

Our whole attitude towards youth in relation to sex is mistaken. And

some of our worst mistakes take a direction not usually recognised. We

often over-emphasise the possibilities of romantic love and chivalrous

devotion, or we leave our children to gain this false attitude from

the books they read. This is bad for both boys and girls. To personify

all inspiration and nobility as Woman often but acts to make unknown

vice attractive to youth. The unknown is almost always desirable. It

is probable that times and places where excessive respect for women

has been expressed in poetry and romance have been distinguished by

looseness of sexual habits; just in the same way and for the same reason

that extremely vulgar behaviour between the sexes is compatible with the

strictest physical chastity.

In the case of girls, the evil that may be done by over-exalting romantic

love is a different one. To idealise the male virtues of courage,

adventurousness and self-confidence comes near, in many cases, to

teaching the girls admiration for the calm, reckless Don Juan. This is

the man who is likely to have been infected by venereal diseases.

In the story of the _Beauty and the Beast_ we have material out of which

part of the great sex difficulty can be explained. In the fairy story,

the husband before marriage looks like a beast, after marriage he becomes

a prince. In real life, the story is inverted. There is a deluding force

in the mere skin and limbs of those of the opposite sex at the time

when maturity is reached which may give princely attributes to those

who would be seen as beasts at other times. The prince seen as a beast

after marriage is a tragedy into which the romantic, ignorant girl must

beware of drifting. The man who most boldly plays up to the romantic part

expected of him—reciprocating to the perhaps unconscious encouragement

of the girl—is not the man who will be the most agreeable to live with.

I believe there is real danger in the sentimental view of love that is

common to most girls. They do not know the poverty of feeling that loudly

expressed sentiment may hide. The defect of many unfaithful lovers is not

sensuality, but sentimentality. The lower types of lovers are strangely,

almost incredibly, sentimental. Such teaching as this about the danger of

an over-romantic view of love will not safeguard from all evils, but it

will at least give knowledge that may protect in some time of peril.

The problem of the wife infected by a husband, who becomes diseased

after marriage, is one that is different and more complicated. I have

spoken already of the urgent need on the part of the wife that she should

feel pity for the husband, even if she does this as the only means of

protecting herself and her children. Without this pity, men will not dare

to tell the truth. And even against their judgment and their wish, they

will have sexual intercourse with their wives to prevent suspicion.

There is a further question that must be placed before women, and it is

necessary for me to speak plainly. There is a question which I would ask

the wife whose husband has become infected since marriage with one or

other of the two forms of venereal disease: What is it that sends the man

who is married to seek sexual satisfaction with the prostitute? It will

not do to dismiss this question with the old, unreasoning condemnation

of the male and his brute passions. In the case of the man of average

decency, it is not deliberate choice that first sends him to dissipation.

Let us look at the matter a little closer and with greater truth. In

marriage the woman dominates more often than usually is known. She has

the children on her side. Undeniably the greatest function of any man in

the life of the average woman is to be the father of her child. All other

things that he means to her are secondary to this. For this reason, after

the birth of her children she frequently ceases physically to desire her

husband. Thus the position arises that many husbands, after some years

of marriage, find themselves in a condition of loneliness in their own

homes. And the cleavage is wider than the physical needs, and extends

to the mental and spiritual plains. The woman’s life is filled with her

children; she ceases to belong to her husband as completely as he belongs

to her. She holds back more and more of herself—the vital part that he

wants. The man feels that he is losing, and, after some bluster and

conflict, he begins not to care.

This, I believe, is the history of many marriages that started with love.

The result in the end is almost certain. The lower types of husband from

time to time will break away and seek distraction in wild love. Other men

of more refinement will suffer much more, till they seek to find love

with some woman in a permanent union outside marriage.

It may, and I expect will, be said that I am looking at this question

from the man’s side only. This is not because I do not feel the woman’s

position, but because the facts I am trying to state are so often

neglected, in particular by women themselves. Women have been taught to

believe, and do really feel, that by sexual unfaithfulness a husband does

them the cruellest possible wrong that a man can do to a woman. But is

the man ever wholly to be blamed? After all, he has given away only what

his wife has shown him she does not want for herself. Most English wives

always are acquiescent rather than passionate in the sexual embrace. Even

when in love they are unresponsive, hiding what they feel, and rarely

showing their husbands that they want them with any real desire. After

a few years of marriage, his embraces are suffered as a duty. And here

I would re-state an opinion given in an earlier chapter: I do hold that

man is by his nature faithful. If he has once loved a woman, he does not

cease to desire her until after she has ceased to desire him.

This brings me to the last question I want to consider. Why does the

desire of the wife so often cease towards her husband? It is a difficult

question to answer. One reason has been given already in the false

attitude of the woman, which in so many cases makes her ashamed of

expressing openly the passion that she feels. Yet there is, I think,

another and much deeper part of the truth that is fairly clear. Each man

is able to enforce his sexual desire upon his wife at a time when she

feels no desire, whereas she cannot gain her desire unless he gain his.

We may perhaps trace back to this cause the feeling of disharmony and

waning of desire which injures the woman’s power to love. Of course, this

disharmony is not always conscious even to herself, and the man is quite

unaware of the evil. But his acceptance of the woman’s subordination,

however gladly given, does exhaust the passion in her.

This difference in the power for sexual sacrifice between the two sexes

is, I have frequently thought, one of the gravest causes of our misery.

It will take very long to overcome it. Only as we advance in refinement

and knowledge of love can this antagonism in the sex act lessen, as the

woman gains in frankness and the man comes to know how to arouse and keep

aflame her desire.

And there is here a question I would put to those husbands who are

suffering to-day from the sexual coldness of their wives. I would ask

them: Have they taken sufficient trouble to understand, both on the

physical and psychical side, the sexual nature of woman, which is much

more complex and difficult than their own? The art of love is not

understood by Western people. If we paid more attention to this subject

marriage would be freed from the greatest cause that brings it to

disaster. Greater openness and sexual confidence between the husband and

the wife is the first necessary step. But we shall never have this until

we have rooted out of our moral conscience the idea of “the body as the

prison of the soul.” I have often asked myself if this misconception of

love is not the real cause of all sex trouble.

And the remedy? Yes, that is the difficult matter. We cannot alter these

evils by any cut-and-dried plan. The expression of sex is a question

of refinement, and its regeneration must begin with a movement towards

consciousness.

It may seem that we have reached no very definite conclusion. We have not

solved the problem of venereal diseases. There is nothing to be gained

by denying the difficulties that visit us in our sexual lives, or in

talking, as many do, as though there were an easy way out. There is not.

I hold preaching on all these complicated questions to be quite useless.

No platitudinous formulæ, no recrimination of one sex against the other

sex, will do any good. The wrong is deep down in our attitude towards

love, in our system of education, and in the very prevalent vulgarity of

our surroundings. It is there that we must seek for it and destroy it.

I dare to think of a regeneration of our sexual lives through education

and a fuller understanding of the meaning of love. By education must be

understood all that influences the desires and imaginations, so that our

children shall be turned to seek health and clean living.

Yet it were unwise to be too hopeful. We cannot be architects of life.

Our sons and our daughters will make new mistakes, even should they

escape our follies. We can see a very short way along the path of life,

and often we are confused. The wisest amongst us are only as bricklayers,

and the best can but lay two or three bricks in a lifetime. Our work is

to do that if we can. We can guess very feebly at the whole design. Many

mistakes must be made by us, as they have been made by those before us.

And it may be the duty of a new generation to pull down the work that in

sorrow we have toiled to build up.

PART V

SEXUAL EDUCATION

_Wendla._ I have a sister who has been married for two and a half years,

I myself have been made an aunt for the third time, and I haven’t the

least idea how it all comes about. Don’t be cross, Mother dear, don’t

be cross! Whom in the world should I ask but you! Please tell me, dear

Mother. I am ashamed for myself. Please, Mother, speak! Don’t scold me

for asking you about it. Give me an answer—How does it happen? How does

it all come about? You cannot really deceive yourself that I, who am

fourteen years old, still believe in the stork.

_Frau Bergmann._ Good Lord, child, but you are peculiar! What ideas you

have! I really can’t do that!

_Wendla._ But why not, Mother? Why not? It can’t be anything ugly if

everybody is delighted over it!

_Frau Bergmann._ O—O God protect me! I deserve—— Go get dressed, child,

go get dressed.

_Wendla._ I’ll go. And suppose your child went out and asked the chimney

sweep?

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIV

THE MOTHER AND THE CHILD

A tragedy of childhood—_The Awakening of Spring_, by Frank

Wedekind—How we have ignored the need of the young for sexual

enlightenment—The old method of silence a fatal mistake—Our

fear of sex—The question of the sexual education of the

child—Conflicting opinion—The twin causes of our civilisation

prudery and prurience—The manner in which parents shirk and

evade the natural inquiries of their children about birth

and the facts of sex—The inevitable harm of this action—The

early activity of the child’s intelligence—Foolish stories

and lies—Stimulate instead of quiet curiosity—Sex knowledge

gained from servants and vicious companions—This danger from

servants greater in the case of boys—Many young boys seduced

by women—The duty of the mother to instruct her children—The

difficulties that hinder parents—The child and the sexual

impulse—The teaching of Freud—The danger from mistakes in the

early training of the child—No age too young for education

to begin—Mistakes that may be made—Our unconscious teaching

stronger than anything we say—The mistake of set lessons—Sex

not a subject to be taught like arithmetic—What is necessary

is to tell the child the truth—Its questions must be answered

as soon as they are put—The importance of not arousing

curiosity—The child, not the mother, to be the guide—Cases in

which we must be prepared to fail—The mother cannot always

help her child—Recapitulation—The real difficulty in sexual

education arises from our treatment of sex as something apart

from the rest of life—We are afraid—Nothing worth doing can be

done until this is changed.

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOTHER AND THE CHILD

“The child at its mother’s knee is not too young to hear from

her lips the sacred facts concerning his own origin; in a few

years, indeed, he will be too old, for he will have learnt

those facts from a worse source, perhaps in the gutter; and

instead of being beautiful to him, as they might and could be,

they will be merely dirty.”—HAVELOCK ELLIS.

The quotation I have placed before these three chapters on Sexual

Education, which form the fifth and final section of my book, is taken

from the play, _The Awakening of Spring_, by Frank Wedekind; he calls

it a tragedy of childhood, and dedicates the work to parents and to

teachers. The play deals with a group of school children, just entering

the age of puberty, and consists mainly of their conversations one with

another. These imaginative young souls speculate about the mysteries of

birth and sex in a manner that is typical of all children, not mentally

inert. Herein rests the great value of the work: we come to realise the

terrible darkness surrounding the sexual life of the great majority of

boys and girls, with the resulting tragedies that may, and often do,

destroy health and even life. Unable to explain the forces germinating

in their nature, these children are hindered and crushed by the sham

decencies and complacent morality that greet their blind gropings. Never

was a more powerful indictment made against the sham of our educational

system as a preparation for life.

The manner in which, up to the present time, we have ignored the need of

the young for enlightenment and guidance in questions of such elemental

importance to health and well-being is at once remarkable and difficult

to understand. Under the influence of the idea of the sinfulness and

radically evil nature of the sexual life, we have stood helpless, as

if we were faced with a mysterious and malignant power; we have left

the development even of our own children to the blind hazard of chance.

Those among us who were wiser were not heeded. Celebrated pedagogues of

a hundred years ago, such as Rousseau, Salzmann, Jean Paul and others,

expressed themselves strongly in favour of the early sexual enlightenment

of youth, and gave many valuable suggestions as to the methods of such

teaching. Their wise recommendations remained for the most part without

practical results. Only in recent years, in connection with the question

of the protection of motherhood and the campaign against prostitution,

has interest in the matter been reawakened. A heightened sense of

responsibility has been quickened amongst us. An increased knowledge,

gained by the patient work of investigation of the sexual impulse, is

proving the immense importance of its right direction in the individual

life. This would seem to be forcing us to act.

To-day it is conceded, even by many who are conservative in their

attitude to sex, that the old plan of silence and leaving this matter to

chance, has been a fatal mistake: we are coming to understand that every

child has a sacred claim to wise training in sex knowledge.

There can be no doubt of our past guilt. The proof rests in unnumbered

and needless disasters in the lives of almost all of us—sufferings

unendurable and maiming; hurts to our deepest selves, that we have come

to understand only when our thoughts have been liberated by knowledge.

From our fear of sex, we have become the victims of sex.

What can save us? It is women—the mothers who hold the future in their

keeping. The answer rests with them. Liberation from the manifold

problems of our disordered sexual life depends largely on a right

transmission of knowledge to our children, so that they without harm may

become wise. Such teaching must be given first by the mother. In this

way only, through a trained and wiser motherhood, making possible the

unhampered unfoldment of the children of the future, can humanity come

into its heritage.

This is my firm conviction, my profound belief. And for this reason, in

my book on Motherhood, I have placed the question of sexual education

last, because I hold it to be the most important of all—the foundation

necessary before other changes or reforms can be of any avail.

There is much that gives me hope. This question of the sexual education

of her children has begun to stir in the conscious thought of countless

mothers. The days of folded hands are happily over. Mothers of all

classes desire knowledge for their children because they want to save

them from suffering and from falling into the mistakes that they, through

want of knowing, have themselves made.[100]

While, however, mothers, as well as the great mass of educationalists and

reformers, recognise more and more the need for this knowledge for all

children, they are yet uncertain as to how and when sex teaching should

be given.[101] There is too much hesitating so that often cowardice

prevents any action being taken. And the question, “What shall we teach

our children and at what age ought we first to speak?” is one to which

few have as yet found a certain answer.

The truth is, the vast majority of mothers and teachers are themselves

amazingly and perilously ignorant on the whole subject of sex. The ban

of silence has worked untold evil in our thoughts, and what makes the

difficulty even worse is that we are so very much afraid of sex it is

impossible for us to learn. Hence we go about seeking mysteries and

hunting lies, and completely lose sight of what should be as clear as

daylight—the need of the little child.

The twin curses of our civilisation that fetter the spirit, prudery

and prurience, acting together, have drawn sex into the darkest,

unwholesomest corners of our minds, so that few of us mention the subject

even to our own children without a feeling of shame. So pitifully afraid

are we of the facts of life that we invent fables and lie to them as to

how they were born.

Parents shirk and evade the natural inquiries of their children; very

often no kind of answer is given to their young searchings for the truth.

In other cases foolish fictions that outrage even a child’s intelligence

are repeated, and falsehood piled upon falsehood. For it is one condition

of a lie that it can never stand alone; and when a mother has lied to her

child once, she is compelled to weave a network of falsehood to sustain

her first false statement. She must go on from one foolish evasion to

worse untruths to keep up appearances. Every story which, like that of

the stork or the gooseberry bush, rests upon a lie, is an outrage to the

child. And the mother’s authority stands upon a veritable quicksand,

for the day will come when the child will not believe her. A careless

word may be spoken by a servant, a companion, or some other, and, if the

mother has not saved herself in time, she will be discovered by her child

as a liar. The whole structure of her pretence and shameful evasions will

totter and fall to ruin. And with it must go her power to influence her

child. Barriers of doubts and silence are raised which, as time goes on,

more and more will separate the child from the parent. And such barriers

once set up can hardly ever be broken through. An embarrassing sense of

shame, rising like a poisonous gas between mother and child, will work

death to any confidence. How many mothers have been forced in bitterness

to cry, “I lied to my child. I concealed the truth year after year. Now

my child turns from me, and no longer has faith in me or in my words.”

And this failure of duty on the part of the mother works unknown harm

to the child. That is the essential point. Do our children remain in

ignorance of the facts of sex which we, in our fear, fail to teach them?

No, they do not. Girls and boys in tens of thousands take the course of

action threatened by the child Wendla—they go and learn from others what

their mothers have refused to tell them. Few children fail to discover,

either through their own intelligence or by some information they gain at

school or from servants, some kind of sexual information. Thus too often

they glean their first knowledge of sex from the vulgar, ignorant lips of

the prurient.

I marvel at the blindness of parents, who seem unable to approach this

question with even common understanding. Nine children out of ten gain

information upon the relations of the sexes in the worst possible

way. Fortunate is the child who escapes the contamination of ignorant

indecency.

It should be remembered that in children the activity of the intelligence

begins to work at an early age. Curiosity is very prominent: all children

want “to find out.” And their activity will certainly tend to manifest

itself in an inquisitive desire to know many elementary facts of life,

which are dependent upon sex. The primary and most universal of these

desires is the wish to know where babies come from. The degree of

curiosity differs, of course, in different children; I do not think it is

absent from any normal child. If they do not question their elders, they

certainly will talk with one another. And the shy child, or the child

who is kept from other companions, is not saved from these curiosities:

I am inclined to think that the interest is strengthened and made more

dangerous by repression.

Many foolish stories are told by mothers, in their blindness and lack of

faith, to put off the child’s natural desire to learn its origin. There

is a curious illusion that children accept these fables, and really

believe that the baby is found in the garden under the gooseberry tree,

or brought by the stork, or by the doctor in his bag. But the child’s

perception is more acute than is believed, and very rarely is any one

deceived. And the mother forgets that by puzzling the child’s mind with

these foolish stories she defeats very surely the object for which they

are invented. The greater the mystery about sex matters the more will

childish curiosity be aroused. We cannot escape from this. _The child

thinks much less of what it knows and is sure of than of what it does not

know, but wants to find out._

And the same objection, of stimulating instead of quieting curiosity,

applies to the plan adopted by many parents of telling the child when it

asks these questions that it is too young to understand and must wait

until it is older. This postponement is better than inventing foolish

fables and telling lies, but I am sure it is unwise. The mother thinks

the child is satisfied and forgets. Very rarely is this the case; the

child puzzles alone, its curiosity only quickened by the hurt that has

been given to its sensitive young intelligence. A wide experience has

taught me that the only children who do not talk or think much about the

origin of babies are the children who know how babies are born.

The silly stories told by parents are supplemented by equally absurd

and often seriously injurious conversations with other children. Many

servants of both sexes are addicted to idle and irreverent, even if not

vicious, talk upon this subject, and by this means the views of many

children, and even their whole future outlook, upon sex are distorted and

besmirched. This is particularly the case with boys, where any intimacy

with servants is much more dangerous than a similar intimacy in the case

of girls.

I must follow this question a little, though it leads me aside from the

main subject of this chapter. Young boys at school and elsewhere are in

constant danger. It is rarely that girls are placed in a position of

intimacy with an adult male, except their father or their brothers. The

very reverse is the case with boys: they are tended, and when young are

washed and bathed, by women servants, their clothes are looked after by

women, in sickness they are nursed by women, and in innumerable cases

they are brought into much more intimate relations with women than girls

are ever brought into with men.

I would like to say a great deal more about this danger. The part played

by servants in the sexual initiation of boys carelessly left in their

charge, and often when they are still children, is much larger than

usually is credited. It is folly to close our eyes to the evils that

may, and often do, arise. Perhaps in no other matter has the ignorance

of mothers worked greater evils or been more culpable than it has been

here. Nor is it servants alone that have to be feared in this connection:

many boys have been seduced by women, who would be least suspected of

such an act. I could give cases from my own knowledge: men, at least,

will know that I speak the truth. The facts are ugly, but they may not be

overlooked. No mother should be ignorant on these matters. For myself I

would trust my little adopted son—he is twelve years old—with no servant

and with very few women. This may seem a hard saying, but it is based on

a wide knowledge of what happens to many boys. We expose our children to

manifold dangers which only now are we coming to understand. We have to

accept these things unless we are ready to act.

Even if no such great evil happens, much harm may be done by vulgar

speech. Beautiful and sacred emotions, marvellous processes of nature,

legitimate and essential longings, become associated in the tender

expanding mind of the healthy boy with the unseemly, the shameful, and

the unclean. Where the child should learn to wonder, he is taught to

know shame and to deride. The results are terrible in many cases.

It is the mother’s duty and privilege unceasingly to watch her child, but

this she can do only if she has knowledge and is wise.

It must not be thought that I am unmindful of the many and great

difficulties that hinder the actions of parents. Under our present

conditions of almost universal concealments, the sexual education of our

children is, indeed, so difficult a problem that I am conscious of all

manner of obstacles as I attempt to suggest a solution. Of one thing only

am I certain: we can no longer leave this matter safely to the hazard of

chance.

I know well that there are many parents who, fully recognising the

importance of safeguarding their children, yet hold back in fear of what

they think may be the danger of bringing the sex impulses too early into

the child’s focus of consciousness. It is also thought, though less

often said, that in previous generations boys and girls got on very well

without this fad of sex-instruction. But the question is whether they

really did. The widespread prevalence of sexual troubles (which are only

now beginning to be understood and to gain the attention that for so long

they have claimed) is to a large extent the corollary of our hypocritical

or cynical attitude as adults to the difficulties of youth. We ourselves

have “muddled through,” and we placate our consciences with the whisper,

“What we have done, the youngsters can do also. Let them alone, it’s a

beastly awkward subject to tackle.”

It would be waste of time to answer such arguments. I would point out

only one result of such criminal and cold-blooded indifference: it is

generally the most promising children who are destroyed through sex

struggles. The coarser-fibred children may escape and come through

without great hurt: it is the sensitive children—who fight and recoil and

thus suffer—who are sacrificed by the total lack of appreciation on the

part of their elders of their difficulties and blind gropings for light,

sacrificed sometimes to the slaying of the body and the soul.

The first objection needs more careful consideration. Here, as I have

pointed out already, the greatest difference of opinion arises in

connection with the questions as to when and how sexual instruction

should be given to children. Some, like myself, plead for the

enlightenment to be as early as possible, in the first years of the

child’s life, so that never may there be a conscious period in which the

child _does not know_. There are, however, many who disagree and hold

it better, for the reasons I have shown, to defer sexual instruction

till the child is older, to the onset of puberty, or even later. Perhaps

the attitude common to most parents is one of hesitation, that may be

expressed in the question: For how long can we safely leave this matter

alone?

No one will wisely give a dogmatic answer to this question. Yet I think

we can come to a better understanding if we at once put out of our minds

any idea of formal instruction. Sex is not something outside of life—a

subject that we can teach or not teach to our child, like arithmetic, for

instance. This has been our great mistake. And we shall see our folly

more clearly, if for a little time we focus our attention on the child,

and stop our rather useless discussions.

Now it is part of the popular belief about the sexual impulse that it

is absent in childhood, and first appears in the period of life known

as puberty. This is a serious error and one that has brought many evil

consequences, not the least of which has been our failure to understand

the nature of the child. We are now reaping our mistakes and finding out

that the exact opposite of this is the truth. The remarkable work of

Freud, that has opened up a whole new field of inquiry, has shown us that

the sexual instinct is never absent in the normal child. “In reality,”

he states, “the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the

world, sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and

childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual activities

and feelings before the period of puberty.”[102]

Possibly there is some little exaggeration in this view, for the basis

of our knowledge is still very narrow; but it seems certain we must

accept Freud’s view as in the main right, as, indeed, any one of us

who has had any experience of children may prove for ourselves by our

own observation. Have you ever considered the games of your young

children—the way in which they imitate father and mother, play the game

of the family, and delight in being the parents of their dolls? Your

child is being taught by Nature, and the first appearance of sex in its

heart occurs as simply as the fall of the dew upon the flowers. It is we,

their elders, who in our blundering too often break in and sully this

beautiful unfolding. Sex is not something to be escaped from. This never

can be done. We have, even if against our will, to accept its presence.

Freud—and his opinion may not be put aside—holds that in all young

children there is present a sexual life more or less subconscious, which

may be exaggerated and even perverted by any carelessness, neglect, or

repression. It is believed that certain manifestations of infantile

activity, notably the excretory functions and feeding, as also the common

habit of thumb-sucking and biting of the nails, are closely connected

with the sexual impulse.

In normal children the sexuality of this infantile period, which lasts

until the third or fourth year, then passes into more or less complete

oblivion. There follows a happy play period during which sex is latent,

and this lasts until puberty approaches. It is during this period of

sexual latency that the psychic forces of the child develop—forces

which, in later years, act as inhibitions on the sexual life and narrow

and direct its expression like dams. But in nervous children, where

frequently there is sexual precocity, this order is very likely to be

disturbed. And the danger may be increased by the over-fondling of an

unwise and voluptuous mother, by an ignorant nurse, or the suggestion

of an older and vicious child, with very detrimental results. A wrong

direction may most easily be given to the child’s sexual development in

its earliest years. Neurotic manifestations such as hysteria, obsessions,

and many sexual perversions, are traced back by Freud to the influence

of the wrongly directed or repressed erotic experiences of childhood.

It seems to be quite clear that any repression of the instinctive and

subconscious infantile sexuality makes for evil; that the only safe

course to follow is the culture of a healthy and right expression.

Freud goes the length of saying that obsessions are in every case

transformed reproaches which have escaped from the attempted repression

and are always connected with some pleasurable sexual feeling aroused in

childhood.

Now, before I go on further to point out the line of action, and the

change in our attitude to this question, that must follow inevitably

from our knowledge of the early existence in the child of the sexual

impulse, I would wish to underline as strongly as I am able the facts

that we have learnt: (1) _Every child is born with a sexual nature_; (2)

_this infantile sexuality furnishes the groundwork of the later sexual

life_; (3) _and the individual’s sexual conduct and health will depend,

in part at least, on the peculiarities of this early period of infancy

and childhood_; (4) _therefore, the sexual desires and instincts with

which the child is born cannot safely be left alone; they must be dealt

with in some way_; (5) _for a wrong direction to these instincts may most

easily be given by any mistake or neglect on the part of the mother or

those connected with the child_; (6) _lastly, and most important of all,

repression of sex is always dangerous; any efforts made in this direction

are very likely to lead to evil in the later life of the child_.

We have found now the answer to the question we were seeking: _the sexual

education of the child should begin in its earliest years, since there is

no age too young for harm to be done by our neglect or mistakes_.

The first teacher must, therefore, be the mother, who is with the child

and should watch over and direct its unfolding nature, by unceasing and

selfless care, in these early years when care counts for most. And I

would state in passing, that here is another reason—and I hold it the

strongest reason of all—why no mother, who is not forced to do so, should

leave her home to work and have thus to delegate her sacred duty of

caring for her child to another.

But again we are faced with difficulties many and various that will have

to be overcome. For while every one must agree that a wise mother is

incomparably the child’s best teacher, it is equally true that the unwise

mother may do incalculable harm. And when we face, as I am attempting to

do, the conditions of the ordinary home, as we all know it to be under

the present guidance of ignorance and prejudice in these questions, it

seems certain that few mothers can wisely carry out this teaching. Not

much hope for the child until this is changed. Thus, it is clear that the

sexual education of the child will have to begin with changed conditions

in the home and sexual education of the mother.

This is going to be a very difficult task, and I speak here of good

mothers, not of bad ones. It is a painful fact that many mothers, who are

keenly conscious of their responsibility and most anxious to train their

children aright, are too shy to be of much direct use to them in their

sexual education. They cannot free themselves, even when they wish to do

this, from the vulgarisation of the idea of sex that has resulted from

their own training.

There can be nothing gained by pretending that this question of sexual

education is going to be an easy matter. It may be so in theory, it

will not be easy in practice. Sometimes, indeed, I am so filled with

doubts and sadness, that, if doing and saying nothing were working well,

I might be tempted to think that to establish sexual training under

present conditions was even a worse course than to go on leaving the

matter alone. But I know that all is not well. By continuing our policy

of negligence and cowardice we are holding open the way to disasters in

the future, the far-reaching evils of which we are only now beginning to

understand.

It is obvious that sex instruction may be given blunderingly even with

the greatest good-will; I am, indeed, exceedingly doubtful of the

efficacy of any kind of formal teaching. Certainly set lessons, or even

“arranged talks,” should not be given to young children. All children

harbour curiosities regarding their bodily structure and the basis of

life. In an atmosphere of trust, sooner or later they will express

these natural curiosities in a tentative, haphazard way. This is the

psychological moment for the mother’s teaching. The question asked must

be answered truthfully and in terms simplified to the comprehension

of the child. The reply must have the air of being both candid and

confidential: that is to say, it must satisfy curiosity and at the same

time leave the impression that such subjects are to be avoided in general

conversation, not because they are “nasty,” but because they are so

sacred and intimate that they should be mentioned only to those the child

loves and respects. The ideal must ever be to educate through love, to

avoid always repressive measures, and to aid the expression of the normal

sex instincts: let the child establish its own psychic individuality.

Our unconscious example must always be far stronger in its result on

the child’s mind than anything we can say. Of what use can our teaching

be, if, through our own want of purity, the concealments that breed

curiosity and shame, are evident in all our attitude to our bodies and

to the physical facts of our being? The child is not shown the duty of

reverence for himself; he is not taught the beauty of all the processes

of his young life; the sex organs are left without proper names, and the

child is told that it must not speak of these parts. We are continuously

careless in our conversations and in our acts before our children. We

take them to see picture plays and allow them to read books and tell them

stories in which love is vulgarised, and all kinds of false statements

are allowed. In these and in numerous other ways, weeds are caused by our

folly to spring up in the child’s mind. We can never undo by any teaching

a sense of shame in sex and love that our actions and thoughtless words

have revealed to the quick intelligence of the child.

It is entirely false to think that the facts of sex plainly and simply

told will shock and seem strange to the young child. It is to the

prurient only that there is anything ugly or disillusioning in birth and

love. The child will receive your information with wonder and guileless

delicacy. The mother need have no fear of her child, only of herself. The

error in all these cases is the error of our own impurity of thought;

the hateful idea that the facts of sex are ugly and disillusioning. Here

we have the key to the whole problem: it explains the utter helplessness

and weakness of our attitude. It will be very long before this can be

changed; the evil is rooted so deeply in almost all of us.

A child of four and even younger will begin to ask questions of its

mother. As soon as the questions are put they should be answered in

such a manner that the child’s curiosity is satisfied. And this brings

me to what I hold to be more important than all else. In this difficult

question of sexual enlightenment, _it is the child who must be the guide

of the parent_. I regard this as the most urgent rule for every mother.

_Never arouse sexual curiosity in the child, either directly by offering

instruction on the subject or indirectly by careless speech or action,

but always be ready to satisfy such curiosity at once when it is present

in the child’s consciousness._

This is, of course, to say that every question of the child must be

answered by the truth. It goes without saying, that the mother must

give her answer just as if she were talking on any other subject, or

explaining the function of any other organ of the body. This course can

be adopted only where adults are able to talk of these subjects without

shame. There must be no hushed voices, no special manner in speaking.

Any hint of such feeling or hesitancy on the part of the mother will

communicate itself at once to the quick consciousness of the child. Here

again I am driven back to the difficulty of our own fear of sex: this is

the stumbling-block that hinders the right teaching of our children.

I know there are many parents who will fear this openness of speech and

action, holding that it is dangerous to break through the mystery and

reserve with which we have surrounded the physical facts of love. This

danger is felt to be specially great in the case of girls. I am certain

this is a very deep mistake. Show the child that the mystery of sex

rests in its sacredness: teach it that, for this reason, we do not speak

of the subject lightly, holding it in too great reverence for common

speech; but never let it be thought of as a subject tabooed, one on

which openness of thought is not nice, for thus it will become shameful,

and uncleanness and not mystery will keep it in the dark places of the

child’s consciousness.

But here I would give a further word of warning to the mother. She

must not expect or desire from her child a continued attention to her

teaching, nor must she force by over-emphasis or any kind of moral

warnings a false sentiment in her teaching. I believe this to be very

important. The child, at the age when such questions first will be

asked and should be answered, will tire very quickly of any information

that the mother gives. It will break off to run away and play, or will

interrupt the most beautiful and carefully prepared lesson. But if the

mother is wise, she will never go beyond the interest of the child.

Facts communicated in this way and at such natural opportunities are

subconsciously noted and swiftly dismissed from the consciousness of

the child, who soon becomes interested in something else after the

disconnected discursive fashion of childish thinking. And, when so

treated, it will be found that children are not inordinately interested

in these questions; they will break off from what they are asking you

about birth or the procedure of the sexual act to talk about toy soldiers

or dolls. This very carelessness in attention is, indeed, the immense

value of this form of teaching: the child has the information and yet

does not trouble about it, and ignores it when it is not to the point.

Such can never be the case when the information is given in the form of a

set lesson and interconnected with moral teaching. So important is this

that I think it better and safer for the mother to err on the side of

saying too little than saying too much. All that is essential is that the

truth should be told.

Now this is not going to be easy. Above all else, it is necessary to

establish, as far as is possible, feelings of openness and sympathy

between the mother and her child. And for this it is essential that the

mother must herself have the most absolute faith in the purity of sex,

and in her own physical relationship to her child and to its father.

Without this nothing that is worth gaining can be gained from any form

of teaching. The slightest doubt or uncertainty on the mother’s part is

fatal; then, at once, shame will begin to creep in to hurt the young and

sensitive life.

There is another matter that must be considered. It is often stated,

by the most careful parents as well as by those who are careless, that

complete and perfect sympathy exists between them and their children.

“My child tells me everything” has been the thought to bring comfort

to many mothers. But is this true? For myself I have wondered if such

an ideal can ever be attained fully. Nor am I certain, if we think of

the child only, whether it is an ideal really to be desired. We have to

remember that we—the parents—belong to one generation and the child to

another. And this barrier of age is felt in nothing more strongly than

it is in sex. The intense and complicated forces that have moulded us

are but awakening in the young life. We can, at best, hope only to guide

our children; we can give to them some little knowledge gained by the

experience of our mistakes, but we cannot give them the knowledge they

can gain only from life, nor can we save them from making their own

mistakes.

Idle curiosity is banished by simple honest teaching, and much evil is

thereby prevented. But the boundless curiosity of the child is not and,

indeed, should not be satisfied. The boy or the girl, as he or she grows

older, will have to experiment, to find out for himself or herself.

To ignore this need is, I am certain, to blind ourselves to the facts

of life. We must be prepared that, with all our care, our most loving

efforts to gain the confidence of our children will be met by refusals.

And although this failure may, and, indeed, must sadden us as we watch

the child of our love passing out of the protective circle of our power

to help, we need to know that this is a natural process—a step forward

that should be taken by the boy or girl; we even fail in our duty do we

try to hold them back and refuse to loosen the cords of guidance. The

child is fulfilling his or her own needs in turning from us. Age cannot

always help youth. In the early years the child desires and should have

the very individualised and binding relation with its parents, but when

he is older he ought to free himself from the old bindings—from the

covering protection of the mother and father—if he is to establish his

own character and suitably adapt himself to the world outside the home.

Our children will turn away from us in their search for knowledge and

experience. All that any mother can do is to establish a relationship of

openness and confidence in her child’s early years, for if it is not done

then hardly ever can it be done later. But even when this has done, there

will still be needed the utmost care that what has been gained may not be

used for the mother’s own satisfaction and against the good of the boy or

the girl.

All the wisdom and patience and tenderness and sacrifice of the parents

will be needed after the epoch of puberty and in the difficult years of

adolescence, to know when it is wise to give advice and claim confidence,

or when the harder duty must be done of pushing the boy or the girl away

to experiment and live upon their own responsibility.

Here, again, I would give warning: in these later adolescent years it is

always the child—boy or girl—and not the parents who must be the guide.

The mother and the father must be ready at all times, but their task is,

I think, one of very patient and loving waiting: it is the child who must

desire to give the confidence. It is true that the wise parent may create

opportunities of confidence; to these the boy or the girl will respond

readily; at least this will be so when the early training of the child

has been without any hateful sense of shame.

* * * * *

Such are the facts as they present themselves to me.

The real failure in sexual education arises from our treatment of sex as

something apart from the rest of life. We have got to change this, if we

are to help our children. Sex must cease to be a forbidden subject. Label

any natural function as improper, not to be spoken about and repellent,

and at once you set up an abnormal curiosity, and open a way for almost

every evil. We must cease to be afraid.

There is, of course, a very deep reason for this fear of sex. The sex

impulses are not often realised and understood in the conscious life of

men and women, and although they can be caught up and fused into all

that is best in the individual character, they remain in most of us

unrecognised and untamed. You will see what I mean. The sex instinct has

retained its wildness, and we must, I think, face the fact that there is

in all of us a volcanic element in sex, underlying and influencing all

the rest of our nature, and, for that very reason, shaking the individual

character from its foundations with tremor, if not with catastrophe. This

distrust of the dynamic force, which so often we have found difficult to

control in ourselves, causes us to fear for our children. We are afraid

that many growths we do not like may spring up in them. And the immediate

result in us is an inhibitory awkwardness—largely an effort of hiding—in

the face of everything that comes within hailing distance of the sex

passion.

Until we have cleared our thoughts from this confusion of fear, very

little good can be done. Let us purify ourselves and re-establish our

own faith. When once we come to understand, we cannot go on leaving

our children to be sullied, and in some cases—and those not a few—even

crushed and destroyed by our mock modesty, sham decencies and complacent

blindness.

It is my firm conviction that most of the perversions of sex, a whole

list of diseases, the almost countless number of unhappy marriages, many

of the existing social evils—may be traced back to this cause. It is

unsafe to prophesy, yet I think much of the misery would be remedied,

if once we could dispel the unwholesome mystery with which we, in our

timidity and uncleanness of mind, have enveloped the facts of birth and

the relations between the sexes. Such mystery is really nothing but

shame; much of it may be dispelled by the wholesome light of simple and

wise teaching. So only can we hope to guide our children’s natural and

beautiful unfolding. We must inculcate in them from their earliest years

respect for their own bodies and for the reproductive act.

Reverence for sex as something holy should be part of every child’s

education. The eternal hymn of Love is the noblest strain in the

universe, and the young should be taught to heed it reverently. There

must be no false valuation of the impulse which unites men and women, if

we wish our daughters and our sons to fulfil worthily the high duties

of parenthood. We cannot teach unless our faith is great and we also

practise. We must plant deep in our children’s fresh natures a desire for

beauty, not alone in outside things, but in all thought and in every deed

relating to the Life force, which is Love.

You will see now the scope of the claim I am making for sexual education:

it is to be the means whereby concealments are to be broken through and

shame in sex is to be destroyed.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XV

SEXUAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

Our very limited powers—Our children have to experiment and

to learn life for themselves—The theoretical teacher who

reforms the world on paper—The hindrances placed in the way

of the sex emotions—We educate girls and boys as if they were

sexless neuters—The folly of this denial of sex—The origin

of our fear—An attempt to express the psychological meaning

of the combination of the man and the woman—The differences

between the boy and the girl—An attempt to follow this

dissimilarity—The evils arising from the modern tendency to

ignore sex differences—This the real weakness in the position

of the modern girl—She has a profound distrust of herself

as a woman—Our schools and educational system founded on

the needs of boys—This a great evil—The development of the

girl at puberty more difficult than the development of the

boy—Every girl lives a hidden life of her own—The conflict in

the sensitive soul of the adolescent—This the age of romance

and idealism—The danger of sudden and wrong knowledge of the

physical facts of sex—Full instruction of girls more necessary

even than the instruction of boys—The immense danger of

repression—The transformation of puberty—Painful experiences

of youth act harmfully in the later years—Our deadly silences

and sham presentation of life—The injury we do to the girl

by ignoring her sexual life—Induces sexual coldness—This the

great cause of unhappiness in marriage—Our fear and denial of

love—This what is wrong with life.

CHAPTER XV

SEXUAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE ADOLESCENT GIRL

“But, alas! a hindrance ever lurketh in our way; it is the

leaven in the dough, the deadly flies that invert the sweetness

of the fragrant wine; … Thus … the wrongful thoughts ferment.

Evil plougheth in and urgeth as a task-master. He wasteth and

destroyeth, and, lo! we are taken captive in this thraldom;

he giveth over the innocent and pure to death; defilement

spreadeth, and of joy there is naught left.”—(Eng. trans.,

_Jewish Prayer for the Day of Atonement_.)

Now, because I desire sexual enlightenment for all children, and, in

particular, for all girls, and seek as a reformer the re-shaping of

education in the home and in the school, it does not follow that I am so

over-presumptuous as to believe it possible in this way quickly to remedy

all sexual mistakes, or that I do not realise how our policy of muddle

and leaving these matters alone has not always been as disastrous as,

indeed, we might expect. I know that in many cases and among numerous

young people the sexual life follows a healthy and beautiful unfolding,

in spite of anything we may do or may leave undone. And it needs but a

cursory view to see that all is not confused and an aimless conflict

of waste, but that the wonderful beauty of youth often will triumph

over the meanness of our fears, our subterfuges and blind blunderings.

One perceives something that goes on, something that is continually

working in the child to make order out of our muddle, beauty out of our

defacements: to force light, frankness and purity in place of our shams

and our lies.

Doubtless to the theoretical teacher eager to reform the world on paper,

it seems a very easy matter to lay down rules for mothers and teachers

regarding sexual instruction—new finger-posts to conduct, whereby

the young generation may be guarded from making the mistakes that we

ourselves have made. But can we do this? For in sex we have as yet learnt

very little, and I doubt sometimes if we can ever learn very much, except

each one of us for ourselves out of our own experience. We of an older

generation cannot save our children very far, or hold them back from

life. And it may be well that at once we realise and acknowledge the very

narrow limits of our power.

But this is not to say that we are to shirk and continue to act as if

all were well when we know that it is not so. The manner in which, up

to the present day, we have completely ignored the very fact of sex in

our educational system is almost incredible. There has been in many

directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in our treatment of

youth.

No other emotion is so hindered, opposed, and loaded with material and

moral fetters. We know how education makes a beginning in this way,

and how life continues the process. Perhaps some of these hindrances

are inevitable; but many are the direct result of our adult stupidity,

and the way we have failed in training the young. How can you expect

the primitive powerful sex impulse not to suffer? The sex emotions are

among the deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature; they exercise an

influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or another,

direct the entire being of the individual. We know this. And all the

time we continue to educate girls and boys as if they were sexless

neuters. Could folly be greater?

By our teaching and our example we are destroying for the young the

harmony of Nature. We ourselves are shame-faced because we are still

savages in sex. If not, why this awe and funk, these taboos and

mysteries, all the secretive cunning with which we hide from the young

facts that we all know, but pretend that we don’t know?

And it cannot be overlooked that this fear of sex is of very ancient

origin, which makes it the more difficult to eradicate. We have, I

believe, to allow for an ages-old, and therefore strongly rooted, sense

of separation, causing an often unconscious antagonism between the

two sexes. We see its unchecked action in many examples in the animal

kingdom, though not in all—it is quite absent, for instance, in the

family life of certain insects and in the perfect loves of many birds,

whose life-histories we examined in the first section of this book. We

see the same antagonism acting continually among primitive peoples in

the elaborate and sacred system of taboos which separate the two sexes.

Indeed, the beginnings of the marriage system can be traced back to a

primitive conception of danger attaching to the sexual act. I am not very

hopeful that this sex separation that is a kind of antagonism can ever be

wholly eliminated; I am not even sure that it is well that it should be

eliminated. May it not be that love itself would be withered did we take

it away? I am not certain at all; I know, however, that this fear of sex

has led us into great folly.

What is the psychological meaning of the combination of man and woman?

It is the union between opposites, which, perhaps, I may try to explain

further as the union between consciousness and unconsciousness. The man

is essentially conscious, the woman essentially unconscious; the man is

concentrated in his intellect, the woman is concentrated in her senses.

These, at least, are the nearest words in which I am able to express it.

And of one thing I am certain: the modern way of mixing the qualities

of the two sexes acts directly for unhappiness and in harm to the race.

I did not always think this: I did not want to think it. I have come

slowly to be convinced and against my own will. And I am glad to take

the opportunity now, as I near the end of my book on Motherhood—the

subject which ever has been deepest in my heart—to state this as my later

opinion, which has been made clear to me by the experiences of my life.

There is no use in saying there is no difference between the girl and the

boy when human nature keeps asserting that there is. There is even, as

I have been forced into accepting, a natural tendency between boys and

girls to draw away from each other. You may see this separation in every

co-education school where the children, led by deeper instincts than we

have understood, bring our wisdom to foolishness. They unconsciously feel

that separation which we have been trying to pretend does not exist. Each

sex, at the very dawn of the teens and before, is unfolding interests,

tastes, plays and ambitions of its own.

It would be interesting to follow this dissimilarity as far as it could

lead us. Sometimes it would seem that we had got to the bottom—to what

is common to the girl as to the boy; the qualities that both sexes

share as human beings, where the ties of similarity seem to link their

characters. But wait! deeper than this we must seek for the truth. Even

in this likeness there is an all-pervading unlikeness. And it is just

this: the differences, which cannot, I think, be expressed, but which

do exist—differences in souls, in minds and in bodies—as well as a

separation in the habits, the desires, and attitude to life, that makes

for such harmony in the elemental depths.

The influence of sex extends in mysterious ways that as yet we do not

understand. And the variation between the girl and the boy is far

greater, I believe, than has ever in modern times been recognised. The

longer I live, and the more life teaches me, the more strongly I am

convinced of this fact: you do not make the girl into the boy by ignoring

her special functions; you do not lessen sexuality by pretending it is

not there.

From the start of puberty this difference between the girl and the boy

should be faced; great is the harm that follows from our pretending it

is not there. And the hurt suffered in my opinion, is almost always more

serious to the girl than to the boy.

Many women are blindly prejudiced on this question as, indeed, I myself

once was. The reason of such mistake is plain. This breaking down or

lessening of the differences between the two sexes may be, and is,

possible. By means of education and the action of habit a child may be

impressed with characteristics normally foreign to its sex, qualities

and tendencies are thus developed which ordinarily appear only in a

child of the opposite sex. I would refer the reader back to the early

section of this book for examples, most curious and suggestive, of such

complete transposition of the female and male characters.[103] Things are

not quite so obviously plain in the human world, but they are not less

fateful, less significant.

We touch here the real weakness in the position of the modern girl: the

profound distrust that she has of herself. I do not mean, of course,

intellectually or as a worker, but a distrust of herself as Woman. I

believe it results directly from educational influences. All our effort

is directed to repress from the consciousness of the girl the realities

of her own sexual nature; and what we do is to hinder her deepest

instincts so that often they fail in finding a healthy expression.

In our schools the educational system is founded on the needs of boys

and not on the needs of girls. I regard this as a great crime. For one

thing, the development of the girl is more obscure and difficult than

the development of the boy; in her sex-life there are finer balances,

which opens up the way to greater evils. There is every possibility of

morbid disturbance from any mistakes in the training. The girl has more

that she needs to learn to establish her health and sexual happiness

than has the boy; the pubescent period lasts longer with her and is more

unsettling; while the greatest difficulty of all, perhaps, arises from

the fact that her conduct is more ruled by deep unconscious instincts.

Every girl lives a hidden life of her own, and it is within this shrine

of her individuality that the primitive and fierce instincts of her sex

struggle to find expression; and though always unacknowledged and often,

indeed, unrecognised, alike by the girl herself as well as by her elders,

it is these instincts that direct her growth and are the determining

influence of her life, far more important than the actions directed by

her conscious self, which is occupied in learning lessons, in play, and

all the outward interests of the daily life.

And it is this deeper ego that suffers from our educational system and

the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life are hidden and

glossed over. Girls in our schools, and also in our homes, are trained

to become secretive about themselves, treating their special sexual

functions as a mystery and a shame. Truth-telling is inculcated in

all matters except sex, and here there is an unceasing evasion, which

prepares disharmonies at the very dawn of sexual consciousness.

Let us understand what harm we are doing. Do we know? Do we care? We

have, I suppose, a certain vague ideal as to what Woman should be, but as

far as I can see we give no kind of training to help a girl in any way to

live healthily and fully her life as a woman. As it is, one is tempted

to say that it is rather in spite of than by means of her education that

any modern girl arrives at any conception of her womanly nature and her

tasks. We really seem to be proclaiming a sense of injury because there

is such a fact in the girl’s nature as sex.

Again I assert that our crime is manifest. We have set up an educational

system that is blind to the needs of girls and the facts of their

sexual life. How many among us women of this generation have suffered

hurt—thousands of women defrauded of happiness and of health, bearing

with them year after year the mark of lost instincts, stifled desires,

and natures in part murdered. Do I write strongly? Yes, I do; but I write

of what I know to be true.

Mothers, wrapped in the long trance of complacent living, remain

indifferent, or are themselves too ignorant and dead to life to give

help. As their daughters come to consciousness, as they begin to suffer

their own fulfilment, they can do nothing and they cast them off. Hard

shut down and silent in themselves, how many girls suffer the anguish of

youth reaching out for the unknown ideal that they can’t grasp, can’t

even distinguish or conceive. What we call education helps them not at

all, for how can any educational system succeed when it runs contrary

to nature? All the larger intimate problems that encompass life are

neglected, while the intellect is crammed with a store of quite useless

facts. Real education would lead to emancipation, but instead we prepare

girls for examinations.

And what we have to fear is a deadening of physical and spiritual

response that must tend to follow from this suppression. For what is

a girl’s life? She works and rests from work, eats, and sleeps, and

plays, and all the while she remains wrapped in the closest egoism, her

strongest instincts smouldering beneath the dull weight of an education

that is not an education, but an unstimulating and conforming pretence,

and not fitted to the needs, of living. Even when she is free and is

turned out at last, apathetic and obliterated, she carries with her

vague dreads of positive acts and new ideas. How seldom does she succeed

in urging out of herself the inmost vital part she has stifled. She is

compacted of numbed faculties and inhibited desires.

The inmost Self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its

due share in the ever-creating life. But the confidence and possession of

the Self has been destroyed; the ego is left alone with its dread, with

the distrust of desires not understood and instincts thrust back within.

And do you not see the result of this conflict to the sensitive soul of

the adolescent? The terrible evil of disharmonies first started during

these pregnant and inceptive years that should be the infancy of the

higher powers of womanhood? Robbed of a just confidence and pride in her

sex, her own stifled instincts become to a girl hateful and as something

of which she should be ashamed; she begins to chafe against her womanhood

and spurn it, bemoaning the limitations of her sex. She lapses into boy’s

ways, methods of work and ideals; she comes to live gaily enough and to

laugh carelessly, not knowing what she has lost; to care nothing to be

herself—content to choke the vision in her own life.

So it has been with you, with me, with all of us. Are we content that

this blighting shall be suffered by our daughters?

The evil is happening for want of a generous guidance from us who have

gone before. I write of what I know. Great and unending is the misery

that we make possible by our folly, sickness of body and soul, so that

the repressed nature rots away and doubt eats into natural faith. Nature

is violated at every step, and _after we have educated her_, in nine

cases out of ten, the girl emerges a mere residuum of decent minor

dispositions. There is need to change.

Much that is said or done, both consciously and unconsciously, by the

adult will torture the adolescent’s sensitiveness much more than is

conceivable to any one who has no insight to the curious psychology of

girls in these difficult years. There is as a rule at this period of life

a painful dualisation of the soul; thus, while seeking to know about

sex, many girls will turn violently from the truth, so that any guidance

we may give now will be very likely to arouse anger and disgust. And I

know of no safeguard except a full knowledge of the physical facts of

sex—of begetting and of birth, that has been gained earlier in the play

period of childhood, in years when such knowledge can be assimilated

unconsciously and its deep significance causes no response of personal

disturbance.

We have to remember that these are the years of romance and idealism,

when the always strong tendency among girls to sublimate and spiritualise

love is at its highest. Sex knowledge could not possibly be given at a

worse time than now, when the young soul is passing through its difficult

birth and the conscious self seethes and teems with emotional ferment.

If at this period the physical side of love is brought for the first

time into notice there will be a withdrawal of the girl’s ever-sensitive

confidence, and worse, an ebb of the nerves, caused by distrust

liberating the demon of fear; an almost certain reaction of incredulity

and disillusionment will follow, with after results that may prove to be

deep and far-reaching in their danger to healthy life.

We find then, contrary to the usual opinion, that an early and full

instruction in the physical facts of sex is more necessary for girls

even than it is for boys. The dangers of ignorance, or of sudden and

too late knowledge, are greater. For any primary reaction of aversion,

which is rarely absent, will in many cases strengthen into disgust and

a curious horror that is partly fear and partly strengthened desire.

For at the same time there will very likely be a strong attractive

element in the form of intensely excited curiosity, which may be active

and experimenting, but more often and with even greater danger is kept

hidden, but yet spies and clutches for new evidence. Such unhealthy

curiosity, remaining for long unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied,

almost necessarily sets up morbid reactions, causing many sexual evils.

You may say, of course, that I am mistaken; that these things do not

happen—at least, not in the case of your daughter or of any nice girls.

I can answer only, that it is you—the mother or the teacher—who, I fear,

are wrong, living in the paradise of the fool. I am not exaggerating at

all. I have tried to show how serious is the shock and how severe the

disillusionment that may follow to the adolescent on a too sudden meeting

with the physical facts of sex. It is time for us to cease pretending. We

must realise that the mutilating or slaying of sex is followed always by

disaster.

Instincts which have been prevented from their natural expression must

tend to escape and find expression in abnormal forms that may, and often

do, give rise to greater devastation. We have to face these things: there

is no use in turning from them because they are horrid and in fear of

giving offence.

Let me take but one fact. Masturbation is of very frequent occurrence

among girls and among women, and this form of erotic indulgence acts

directly in lowering sexual sensibility, and not only limits the desire

for love, but prevents a right physical response so that satisfaction may

be gained from the normal sexual act.

Is it not time that we women began to be frank? We have pretended to

ourselves, and argued away from these questions far too long. Love cries

out against our denials. Extreme passion may work ill, but the opposite

extreme of the sacrifice of healthy natural instincts is as great an evil.

I am driven back always to this: the immense danger of repression. For

our hindrances lead inevitably to repressions, always dangerous; and

these tend to set up deep indwelling disharmonies, and then the way is

opened up to manifold evils that may be traced into many by-paths of

the after sexual life. And though I know there are many among my readers

impatiently exclaiming that I am constantly dragging sex into everything,

I assert that I do not drag it in: it is there. And for this reason alone

it is certain that to formulate a system of education which ignores sex

must lead to disaster.

I would call attention again to the fact noted in the previous chapter

that the sex impulse is never absent in any child, however young. The

transformation of puberty is really a co-ordination of the individual

sex-life that already exists. With the development of the bodily

structure and the marked changes in the sexual organs, there takes place

a psychic growth which causes a perfectly natural seeking out of the

young soul for experience and love. There is every possibility of morbid

disturbance should this new order of development be hindered and not

take place. And if this beautiful natural transformation is to succeed

there must be no forcing back of the nature upon itself. The period of

adolescence should crown and complete every organ and every faculty. No

over-emphasis can be laid on the fateful issues that may follow to each

girl from any mistakes in training at this period of adult birth, when

the nature must find its new expression in the right direction of health

or in the wrong direction of the abnormal.

We are deceived so often by the outside appearance of things. The painful

experiences of youth may disappear from the conscious memory, but they

do not thereby cease to act as an influence directing the after life.

Every mother and every teacher ought to understand this. Any hurt now

done by our folly can never be undone. No experience is entirely lost.

What seems to have vanished from the consciousness has really passed

into a sub-consciousness, where it lives on in an organised form as real

as if it were still part of the conscious personality; and although

any experience may lie dormant, unknown to the conscious self, it may,

and almost certainly will at some time, cause emotional reactions that

continue without a known reason to excite and direct the outward ordinary

life.

Our easy, complacent and devastating folly in ignoring the special

physical nature of girls, and the elaborate ingenuity with which

the facts of life are hidden from them or glossed over by unhealthy

sentiment, is the true cause of the physical and spiritual etiolation

of womanhood. There is, I allege, murder to the girl’s power to be

herself—to fulfil her woman’s destiny—in our evasions, our deadly

silences, and sham presentation of life, conditioned in all cases by

theory and never by the act of living.

It is because I believe this that I am writing with all the power that I

have against our schools which show the most coarse lack of understanding

of the nature of the girl. I want new schools fitted to the needs of

girls. The aim of education should be a general cohesion in all the

different elements of the personality. And if the method is right, it

will prove a way to greater happiness and fulness of growth. No longer

will sex be held as a hindrance to life. I believe that almost everything

in the future depends upon this.

Life would be liberated. An instinct that continually is hindered and

denied cannot easily develop for health; and often, owing to these

hindrances, the sexual life is stunted; then later the right and simple

impulse to the performance of the sex act and its final consummation and

enjoyment may be interfered with for ever and even prevented. Will you

think what this means. In plain words, we are, by our false ideals and

the wrong attitude towards the sexual life which conditions our system

of education for girls, doing all that we can to prevent them from being

women. I am not exaggerating; I am trying to make you see what it is that

is wrong with life.

Every one who refuses to blink facts knows that the vast majority of

marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. It is certain

that sexual anæsthesia to-day is present in many women, and there would

seem, indeed, to be an increasing diminution of the strength of the

sexual impulse. Any number of women are unable to give themselves up to

the sex act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the

gladness and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The

evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule

they do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold are

sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women,

probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to

the man. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They want response

to their own desire in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid

of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable them to give such

response. The woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her

his child, but when she turns from him she leaves him unsatisfied.[104]

The drama and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed,

intrudes itself on every hand. We are, by our wrong ideals, inducing an

entirely perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of

which women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself

degrading and even disgusting—the nasty side of love; something to be

submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children, or for the sake of the

loved man, whose passions must be allowed, but not for the health and

desire, the delight and perfectment of the woman herself. This false

view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still is, the

destroyer of woman, and through her, equally the destroyer of man.

And this fear and denial of love, this separation between the sexes, is

the serious side of the problem of marriage. For the hideous disguises

and constant lying often made necessary to the husband, owing to the

wife’s entire failure to realise the physical necessities of love,

makes domestic life an organised hypocrisy. We fight, and fight to be

free, yet ever anew the antagonism lays fresh hold, it crops up in many

and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying love—the deep,

deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied men against women. The need for love will

not often allow itself to be inhibited without claiming payment. And if

desire so frequently manifests itself in abnormal forms of the coarsest

and commonest dissipation, this is almost always to be explained by

some hindrance opposed to its normal expression. When women face facts

and realise this truth, many things in men’s conduct will be clear that

hitherto have been hidden from them.

Again it may be thought that I am exaggerating; and there are, I know,

other aspects of this question which just now I am neglecting. But the

unreal and abysmal misconception into which one sex has fallen with

regard to the other—this horrible, grasping, backwash of shame—is, in

large measure, the result of our pretence and the way in which women

have been kept living with blinds drawn down upon most of the unruly

turbulence and elemental forces of life. It may also be held mistakenly

that in what I have said I am writing against women; that I am raising a

belated cry for masculine prerogatives and standards of sexual conduct.

But that is not so. I am, it is undeniable, writing against the attitude

of the modern woman towards marriage, her coldness of response to passion

and her suppression of the realities of sex; an attitude I deplore and

hold to be destructive alike to the happiness of women and men and to

the health of the race, as also to any practical moral life. But such

coldness and atrophy of instinct, I believe, has been imposed upon women

by wrong education, the conditions of ignorance under which they marry

and become mothers, and all the hindrances set around them, preventing

them living out their lives from a sexual point of view.

It is example and the ideal set before us which produces the formation

of opinion and of character, and few mothers remember the inner discord

which exists between what they teach their daughters about love and what

they act themselves in the daily life. And if the home is wrong, the

school is, I think, much worse. In olden times, and still among primitive

peoples—whose unconsidered actions are in many directions so much wiser

than is our knowledge—girls were early given by matrons all the gathered

wisdom of their sex pertaining to wifehood and motherhood; just the

knowledge that we make it hard for them to gain. Could folly be greater

than this?

With the decay of the specific traditions of the ideal of womanhood

the idea of a general culture, neither male nor female, has tended to

prevail. We touch here the deep roots of the evil. And what I wish to

make plain is the inevitable failure of an educational system which

makes no kind of arrangement for the special care and training of girls

during the most critical years of their growth. There is, I allege, in

all our educational establishments a strange and most culpable lack

of understanding of the nature of the girl and her functions as a

woman. They model brains without proper consideration of bodies, and

with frightful convention repress from the seeking young the realities

of love, and treat as secret, almost as something to be ignored, the

functions connected with a girl’s sexual life.

The mistake here is so far-reaching that I find it difficult to write

calmly. For again I must assert that what we are doing is really to teach

our girls a shameful denial of their womanhood. I wish that the power of

my pen was stronger, so that I might bring a stinging consciousness of

all the terrible mischief that is being done to the knowledge of every

mother and every teacher.

How many of us have ourselves suffered? But our memories are strangely

short. We forget, in our complacence and lazy, vicarious optimism, the

dark places that imprisoned our young growing souls, haunts of gloom

and despair that were never lit by a ray of sympathetic enlightenment

from our sadder and wiser, but so forgetful, elders. We forget the

grievous wounds to our self-respect. We forget the duality of soul; those

oscillations between fear and disgust and curiosity and desire, with,

perhaps, furtive trembling concessions to a power we did not understand,

to be followed by morbid reactions of loathing, both of the mysterious

impulse and of ourselves, that survive in those deadly disharmonies that

are beginning to engage the attention of modern psychologists, and act

to-day in our adult consciousness to war with the sum of unity which is

happiness.

Yes, we all have forgotten. Yet none the less has this shameful early

struggle left us fettered and seeking, and we have no window to inform us

we are in prison. It has warped our natures, till, when in after years we

look at Love, we behold, not the shining impersonation of the Life-force,

but seeing double, view a monstrous Siamese twin of two figures, Lust

and Sentimentality, a satyr bound to a wan angel by a navel-cord of

procreative necessity. And often there is no rest, no cessation from a

conflict that has left us helpless, so that for us love is moulded round

a core of diseased desires.

It makes us examine our hearts. Is it to be so for ever?

We forget that perhaps four-fifths of the misery that follows in the

train of sex-fulfilment is due to this mental and moral “diphobia”

acquired in the days of adolescence in the unassisted struggle with the

awakening and entirely misunderstood sex-impulse. We may forget, but few

and happy are they who escape the effects of that encounter. According

to our temperaments it has made us sedulous puritans and unconscious

hypocrites, passionless neuters, or careless cynics and voluptuaries. And

we are all of us to some extent marked and dirtied for ever. Deep and

ineffaceable in us are the records of our disastrous early grapple with a

great organic impulse which no one taught us to understand.

I am strongly of opinion that the tendency, so prevalent among women,

to regard love as a twofold thing, one part of which is physical and

evil and the other part spiritual and good, is almost diagnostic in an

individual of a disharmony arising from an ancient reaction against sex,

caused by some hindering influence or shock, encountered at the opening

of the conscious sexual life.

The tremendous force that awakens in soul and body in these early years,

and that with wise control and comprehension might be tended till in

due course it flowers into Love, is early shorn of its splendour. Its

whispered intimations of wondrous things to come fall on deaf ears.

Taught to regard it as a malignant enemy that may destroy, instead of the

most sacred and wonderful agency in human life, we enter into a hopeless

struggle to eliminate the most basal part of our nature, or fawn before

it in furtive and shameful surrender.

So most of us, embittered by the degradation of this struggle, _whether

it be won or lost_, grow up to view with distrust what we absurdly

call the “physical side of love.” We, and especially women, accept it

resignedly as an unavoidable baseness in the grain of Love. We forget

that the baseness is in us and not in Love. _Love has no physical side,

or mental side, or spiritual side._ It is a unity upon which we lay

sacrilegious hands when we make an artificial separation into physical

and spiritual.

We do this because of our own impurity, and because of the hurts we have

suffered. We can no longer look at Love without furtively scanning his

garments for the stains of Lust. We have created Lust. Lust is a morbid

by-product in the evolution of Love.

It is this that we have suffered.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVI

A CONTINUATION OF THE LAST CHAPTER, WITH AN ATTEMPT TO SUGGEST A REMEDY

An attempt to find the remedy—What is the real root of the

evil—The young woman of the new generation—The years since

the war began—An examination of present conditions—What

is likely to happen when peace comes—The independent

woman—The Commissioner’s Report of the National Birth-Rate

Investigation, 1916—The failure in our lives—Where is the

real root of the evil—The whole educational system of girls

in our homes and in our schools is wrong—The importance of

menstruation—Influence of conventionality—Wrong ideals set

before girls—The destruction working in our midst—Fear of sex

directs our educational system—The remedy to begin in our

schools—We must educate girls to be women—Menstruation and the

girl’s special sexual life must be emphasised and not as now

ignored—Adolescent schools—The sexual life of the adolescent

girl—The difficulties that must be faced—Opposition on the part

of women—Motherhood to be saved—Regeneration of the girl’s

instincts through consciousness—The hope with which we may look

to the future—Motherhood will triumph.

CHAPTER XVI

A CONTINUATION OF THE LAST CHAPTER, WITH AN ATTEMPT TO SUGGEST A REMEDY

“With fear and trembling take care of the heart of the people;

that is the root of the matter in education—that is the highest

in education.”—K’UNG FU ’TZU.

It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is

to find the remedy. And the question I now wish to put squarely is this:

Where is the real root of the evil, what is wrong in our educational

ideals that accounts for our failure to develop the best and happiest

type of women? You may, of course, deny this, and assert that we do not

fail, but that will not alter facts. I say we are creating a race of

work-efficient and highly educated, but unsatisfied women, whose very

independence betrays their sorrow. This is a very serious matter. It

would seem that our young women have now for the first time realised

their power in outside things. War has acted quickly in facilitating

their economic emancipation. But I find it hard not to think that this

may involve a cost which their womanhood will not bear without injury

more or less profound. Women are being sold to work in the same way that

formerly men were sold. And though no one can know the results, I am very

far from sharing the sense of satisfaction expressed by so many to-day:

I fear for the girls I see in such numbers in every place of work a

deadening of response to life—a further clog and degradation of womanly

feeling and instincts. And as I have said again and again, my fear is

much deeper, because this externalisation of life is no new thing. I

could add more, much more; but words—what are they in the face of facts!

Last week I was in conversation with a young and comely tram conductress.

She was married: I asked her if she had children. She answered me: “My

goodness, No!” and then added, “One doesn’t want babies on this job.”

One dares not generalise too largely, yet for so long women, in this

industrially blinded land, have been struggling to gain the world at the

payment of losing themselves.

The young women of the new generation are full of distrust, the most

demoralising of influences. By this I do not mean that they distrust

themselves; they do not. What they do distrust is instinct and emotion,

with a corresponding over-valuation of intellectualism and of marketable

work-power; and from this distrust there has followed necessarily a

breaking away from fixed standards, with a loss of any steadying ideal.

This, I think, is the essential trouble, sending them very far astray

from the facts of life.

Look at the women you may see in all classes of society. You may see

them hastening to and from their work; you may see them in the streets

each evening or in every place of amusement. How many bear upon their

brows this stamp of a nature unfixed of purpose, in the expression of

their face as well as the body movements, in their restlessness and noisy

happiness is the sign of disharmonies aroused, a nature strained and

failing in the fulfilment of its functions. One feels that as women these

young girls of the present generation have lost something, lost it so

completely that they know no longer what they desire.

I should, however, like to make it very clear that I am not disparaging

women, nor do I fail to admire all they have achieved in difficult

positions. There is no need to re-tell the oft-told and much praised

facts of what they have done in these years since the war began. There

can be no shadow of doubt as to the efficiency and value of the work of

the thousands of women at present engaged in many and varied branches of

labour. But what I fear is the waste of the struggle should it continue

for any period of years. Let us except this hard working of women as a

necessary evil of warfare, demanding at the same time special protection

and special provision for child-bearers. But do not let us fall into the

error of regarding such conditions as in themselves good and desirable,

leading, as I believe must follow, to a further obliteration of sex, with

its differences and wise separation.

Difficult as at present is the problem, we need to understand that we

cannot afford to be wasteful of the strength of women. We are being

wasteful. The physiological life even of the unmarried woman ought to

handicap her in almost every kind of work. Long hours of standing, the

lifting of heavy weights, any kind of drain on the nervous power, cannot

fail to do harm. There are days when every young girl and woman who may

have to bear children, however strong, ought to release tension, to step

aside from work to maintain full health. I am filled with impatience at

our pretence on this question of women’s health. There is a difference

between the work capacity of the woman and the work capacity of the

man. Sex must play a far larger part, making far stronger claims on

the strength of the girl and the woman than it ever does in the lives

of boys and men. It is vain to assume that because women are willing,

and apparently able, to do the same work now as men in the past have

done, that, therefore, it is wise to allow them to do it. The price of

the violent energy, so wastefully being poured out, will have to be

paid. Countless women and girls are using up now the nervous energy and

strength of which they are merely the pilots and guardians; the health

and calm of spirit which should be stored and transmitted to generations

to come.

The increased activity and exertion daily demanded from child-bearers

must be anti-social in its racial effects. Either these girls, constantly

stimulated, over-excited, and robbed of the tranquillity they need, will

bear enfeebled children, or, what is more likely, through the direct

premium placed on childlessness, fewer and fewer children will be born,

and from this there may tend to follow a further deadening and even a

crushing out of the maternal instinct. Children will not be wanted.

I pointed out in the earlier chapters of my book[105] that such a

transformation of impulse may take place. The parental instinct is not

fixed, and disuse is the swiftest way to decay. Think what this must

mean to the life values of the future. I believe it is not possible to

estimate how far-reaching may be the results of what is now being done

so quickly and so recklessly. By our absurd denials and our ignorance we

shall have brought down upon us this evil—our punishment for conceiving

sex in women as something too terrible to be faced in its reality.

Let us understand what it is that we shall be doing. We are built up of

habits just as a house is built up of bricks. And what motherhood is

going to be in the future depends on our desires and our action to-day.

A sound nation has for its essential condition healthy children—yes,

and many of them—and healthy mothers to bear and to rear them. We know

this. But what are the facts? We find more and more young women turning

away from motherhood. They are marrying in larger numbers just now, for

war has turned men into heroes and this has made marriage popular. But

we may not count too much on this, for no longer does marriage mean the

bearing of children and the founding of a family. The wife no longer is

comparable to the fruitful vine, no longer are children like olive plants

about the table of the house. The blessings of the old sweet poem fail to

stir our desires. Babies are not wanted.

The volume of evidence and the observations made by the Commissioners’

Report of the National Birth-Rate Investigation, 1916, which lies upon

my desk, cannot be read without a sense of almost hopeless depression.

A dark picture is revealed of men and women harried and driven by the

sex instinct within them; the relation of the husband and the wife made

hateful from a perpetual fear of the natural consequences of birth. The

struggle is but too clearly apparent in every section of society. The

evidence discloses that the prevention of conception is growing steadily

and rapidly, for though it began with and, for a time, was practised only

by the well-to-do, it is now spreading downwards to the poorest, amongst

whom the practice of abortion has for long been extensively used. Dr.

Mary Scharlieb, whose report is, perhaps, the most interesting of all

the Commissioners, states that in the working classes there are five

abortions to every one live birth.

What sordid facts this Report reveals! What a failure it proves our life!

Is there any use in talking of raising the birth-rate until these things

are changed? Is our land fit to receive the children? Has not the child

the right to demand from its parents that its birth shall be looked on as

something more than an unfortunate mistake?

I know, of course, the difficulties which face the parents, among which

economic difficulties are important, arising from the competitive

capitalistic system by which all our lives are entangled. Yet I feel

that these considerations, though they cannot be neglected and increase

the evil, alone are not responsible; that the cause lies deeper and

is dependent on the desires of the mind; that apart from any economic

causes, and even assuming that every child could be better born and

with a happy life secured to it, there would yet be much of the problem

that would remain unsolved. And what I am trying all this time to make

plain is this: If we wish to get rid of the atrophy that is increasingly

present in the instincts of our young women, and quicken their response

to passion, with its desire for motherhood, we must first get rid of our

wrong values of what is good in life and makes for enduring happiness;

and to do this we must change our educational methods, the training in

the home and in the school, and conditions of work that are their parent.

There can be no help and no change, at least I cannot see any, except to

alter our ideals. Nothing else of any wide value can be done until these

are changed.

In the name of common sense and of sanity let us get to the real bottom

of this matter. To do anything at all we must begin at the beginning,

where the wrong is started. It is absurd to go on crying out against

the shirking of motherhood, while at the same time, in the education

of our girls and afterwards in the arrangements we make for their

working life, we show a complete evasion of the function most intimately

connected with motherhood. That is where the clue to the trouble lies.

The whole educational system in our homes and in our schools, as well

as the conditions in our workshops and houses of business, is wrong. It

discourages motherhood very heavily. And the rational thing for us to

do in the matter is not to grow eloquent about a declining birth-rate,

or to blame women for not desiring to be mothers, but rather to make

intelligent changes so as to minimise to the young the discouragement

that by our teaching and our actions we have hitherto given to motherhood.

And the first step towards this must be, I am certain, to banish from the

consciousness of every girl all feeling of shame, and all concealments

connected with her function of menstruation. In other words, we have to

face the facts of a girl’s sexual life. This is not going to be easy.

In the immediate past our attitude of hiding on these questions was due

to reasons of prudishness in regard to all natural functions, and notably

menstruation—the rubicon in the life of every girl, which first brings

or, I ought to say, _should bring_, full realisation that life for her is

separate and needs to take a different course from the life of the boy

and the man.

This truth has been disliked so much that in practice it has been

disregarded. The wrong is started early and is continued throughout the

sexual life. The real controlling force in the education of the girl is

the mother; and motherhood has failed. Girls, with an almost criminal

neglect, have been left without any wise preparation for the first

menstruation, upon the regular establishment of which function their

health in the future must depend. Many girls, being seriously frightened

or stirred to rebellion and anger, have done foolish actions, and through

neglected hygiene evil is begun that never can be undone. This is no

over-statement. The first few menstruations have a far greater influence

not only on the body, but also on the brain and the soul of a girl than

do those that follow later when the sexual health is better established.

Every mother and teacher ought to know and heed this.

At best, and even when instructed by their mothers, girls have been

taught to regard this function as a troublesome illness that must be

suffered with patience; such a view, of course, being a relic of the

supposed curse laid upon the woman’s sex. Nor can it be said that even

to-day there is any improvement when quite different ideals prevail

regarding woman’s place and her vocation. For the new emancipation has

brought with it a false view that girls should be educated in the same

way as boys, and should be brought up in the pretence that it is right

and possible for them to work and play at all times like boys and to be

as independent of their sexual life as boys can afford to be.

Now, it does not need much imagination to understand the harm of such

teaching. The menstrual function—which really marks the sex of the girl

and fits her for motherhood—is ignored as if its occurrence were of no

importance. And such an attitude of dislike and hiding necessarily causes

a feeling of shame, more or less deep according to the temperament of

the girl. From the very first sex is presented in the shape of something

to be despised and desperately fought against, something secret and

disgusting. Even at this early stage disharmony enters into the young and

sensitive soul.

Some girls revolt in the very depths of their being, while the common

feelings aroused are expressed by such words as aversion and dislike,

anger and shame. Do you not see now the harm that is done? How sadly we

are sowing for the future. For what can be the result except to teach

our girls a shameful disrespect for themselves. What wonder is there

that many girls are stirred to rebellion which takes the outward form of

resolutely ignoring their monthly periods, and the fact that they are

girls. And the immediate result is a general lowering in the standard of

sexual health.

I shall be told that this is not true. But I am writing of what I know.

Menstruation is a perfectly natural function and every girl should

be taught so to regard it. But at its start it does exercise a very

disturbing effect on the whole system and character. And the folly that

pretends that in these early years special care is not required at the

monthly periods cannot be too strongly condemned. For the harm is deeper

and further reaching than the physical hurt, though certainly in our

folly we are making invalids of the future mothers of the race. Harm

in many cases is done to the after sex expression; harm which probably

is never recognised, and about which the ordinary parent and teacher

are densely ignorant and optimistic. How little do we consider the

consequences of our acts? I say there is no limit and no end to the evil

that we are permitting. And the most fearful thing about it is that it

all seems so wantonly needless.

The always difficult passage of the girl into the woman is alarming only

to the girl who knows nothing about herself and her sexual life. Just

as far as she understands does recoil and resentment and shame become

needless. Rightly taught, she will learn to regard her special function,

not as something to be hidden and ignored, but as the sign of the changes

that now are taking place in her body—healthy natural changes that will

fit her one day for love and wifehood and motherhood. Then, indeed, her

shame and her aversion will be converted into pride. Understanding, she

will have a fitting reverence for herself. She will now know why she is

under certain restrictions, and has at the times of her monthly periods

to refrain from overwork and all strain, and to give up some pleasures

and excitements; she will do this gladly in order that her development

into womanhood may be without pain, healthy and complete.

I believe firmly that this change in our attitude to menstruation—a

change that will emphasise its importance to health and its connection

with fit motherhood—a change that must start at the beginning of the

girl’s conscious sexual life, is absolutely necessary to the development

of a higher motherhood. At least, if it does not come, I can have no

hope at all. You cannot gather fruit from a tree that is unhealthy at

its root. And you cannot have glad motherhood while you start out by

despising the function most sacredly connected with motherhood. We must

understand this. Until we do understand it, and then act in the practical

way that will cause us to change our teaching to all young girls, we

shall find women in ever-increasing numbers turning away from motherhood,

and wasting in external things the realities of love and life.

How can healthy womanhood be possible within the limits and wrong

ideals of our present system, and how can they fail to give rise to

continuous restlessness? I declare once more and plainly that we are

raising a generation of girls—those with whom the duties of wifehood

and motherhood should reside—who have instincts atrophied by dull

studies, to be followed by deadening work. I hold that this is a matter

of the gravest concern, not only for women and men and their individual

happiness in union one with the other, but is also what will decide the

future of this land and empire.

But few among us understand the destruction that is working in our

midst. We do not recognise the symptoms that mark the disharmony in

the lives of the great majority of the girls and young women of the

present generation. War has but increased the mischief. Independence in

material things has given triumph to that rebellion which our mistaken

training and wrong ideal had started long ago smouldering in the souls

of our daughters. To-day youth is in demand; the young girl can fill

every place. And youth has risen fearlessly and splendidly to every

opportunity, but so quickly as not to have time to consider how much

is being trampled underfoot. The danger of speed—the filling of every

moment of time, always a mistake made by women—has been intensified by

the war. The war race has provided the opportunity to live riotously and

wastefully.

Of course, it is we of the older generation—the mothers—who are to blame.

We have left our daughters in a dangerous position; we did not see where

modern education, with its effort to obliterate sex, must inevitably lead.

Education may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous process. And

what is most to be feared is the shut-in instincts that tend to twist

the nature from its simple fulfilment. There is something essentially

harmful in any failure or wrong expression of a special function. Now, we

have insisted upon repressions, and what we believed to be a high moral

and efficient working character for girls, not knowing that what we so

mistakenly were straining for was really something very like an entire

absence of any kind of womanly character. The real nature of girls is

wild, and our fears have been very great. And for this reason have we

held that the nakedness of the adolescent’s new-born womanhood must be

clothed with conventionalities and draped with culture.

It is this fear of sex that directs our educational system: there is too

much drill and too much strain. Girls’ schools are governed too much, for

girls need, not less, but more liberty than boys. The teachers are dull

and narrow in their own outlook and in their experience of life; they are

not trained to understand the needs of adolescent girls, only to teach

them facts that as a rule are of no real service; they do not trouble to

train the inner and hidden instincts that really form character, they do

not even look for them; they reck nothing of early development or late,

of the presence of strong passion or its absence; they have no kind of

understanding of the unceasing action of sex, forcing its expression in

unconscious acts, which alone give the clue to character; of all this

(the only knowledge that matters) the teachers are profoundly ignorant;

but they measure out girl-humanity for the conventional standard of

efficiency like a dressmaker measures out her material with a yard

measure. There is no thought, at least none is betrayed, that the school

is a preparation for living. No kind of training is given for the part

the girls will have to play in the life of sex for their own health

and happiness and the regeneration of the race. The sexual life is

persistently ignored.

I recall reading somewhere—I do not remember the exact connection—how

an official of a college for girls was questioned by a visitor as to the

advantage gained by the students in their after life from a university

training. She answered: “One third of the students profit by it, another

third gain some little good, while the remaining third are failures.”

“And what becomes of the failures?” was the question asked, while the

answer given was this: “Oh, they marry!” Now, I do not know if this

excellent story can be accepted as a fact, but it does point to a

contempt for marriage and its duties—a contempt for woman’s sex and for

her own work—which I believe is present in the thought and attitude, even

if not acknowledged openly, among the majority of educationalists. This

is a very serious matter.

The remedy, then, has to begin in our schools. We must control education

with a finer sense of its value to life. And to do this we must accept

the extreme importance of sex, and guard those differences which separate

the girl from the boy.

As a first movement of reform, I would recommend one to three years’

rest from the usual school work for every girl, during the period when

her sexual life is becoming established. This is not, of course, to

advocate idleness. I am not upholding any form of invalidism for girls;

the adolescent always should have plenty of healthy occupation, but

that is a far different thing from the strain of the ordinary school

course, foolishly arranged for girls on the same lines as that for

boys, and without any regard to the important function of menstruation.

There should be attached to every school for girls a special class for

adolescents, and this should be the most important class in the school.

At the onset of puberty the girls would enter this class, in which they

would stay for two years or longer. The sexual life would not be, as now

it is, ignored; rather the chief work of the school would be the healthy

establishment of the menstrual function, upon which the future well-being

of the girl depends, and to the interests of which everything else should

for a time be secondary.

There must be a new valuation of education, with an entire change of

attitude, which will make possible more openness between the teacher and

her pupils. The difficulties here will, I know, be great. If the mothers

do not know how to help their daughters, and usually they do not; if the

girls do not know how to help themselves, and dumb and untaught they are

helpless, the task of the teachers cannot fail to be hard. And especially

will this be the case wherever the mother has failed in her duty and a

girl has received no kind of sexual training in the home.

I know of what I am writing here, and how real is the prejudice that will

have to be overcome. In my own school I was met with this trouble again

and again. The girls resented any mention of their menstrual function,

and expressed often real anger and disgust when I required them to tell

me the dates of their monthly periods, so that I might see they had extra

food, more rest, and lighter studies. The answer that usually was given

to me was this: “My mother never wanted me to tell her; I took no notice

when I was at home.” What an unconscious indictment of the mothers!

Often it was after long and patient effort only that I gained my way,

and brought my girls to speak to me naturally about this function. I had

the very hardest work to free their thoughts from the deeply implanted

feelings of shame and disgust: in many cases I failed altogether, and

I cannot, indeed, be sure that I ever fully succeeded. Of course, my

failures were the result of harm that had been done much earlier in the

home.

It was at this time of my life, now long years ago, when these

considerations were forced upon my attention by my failures with my

elder pupils, that I was first led to desire special classes for girls

to enter at the age of puberty, where the life, the work, and the aims

were separate and quite different from the ordinary school. It is so much

easier to do the wise thing, if what you are doing is a matter of course,

and not something you start for yourself.

I am convinced of the value that would be gained for life from the plan

I am advocating. I would begin with these special classes, but I want

more than that to be done. A much better course would be that separate

adolescent schools should be provided, preferably in the country, where

all work as well as play could be done out of doors. All girls would

enter before the commencement of puberty, and would stay in one of these

special adolescent schools for two or three years or longer. The work

would be organised entirely to meet the needs of the individual girl;

there must be no set courses of study, no hide-bound rules, and above

all no examinations to be crammed for. In my opinion, which was formed

from my own experience in my school, girls should do hardly any steady

work for one year before and two years after puberty; they cannot, I am

certain, work continuously without peril. Mental overwork or any kind

of strain destroys the nervous resistance and tends to that irritable

weakness which makes the rankest ground for all sexual ill health, and

may work to establish evil habits in ways not yet openly recognised. The

kind of work done should be chosen by the girl herself; there should be

far more opportunity for rest and for play, and, while guarding against

opportunities for harmful idleness, any kind of mental or bodily strain

must be avoided. Hard study, if this is necessary, will come later at the

close of this special school period. But I plead for all girls during the

difficult time of their metamorphosis from the girl to the woman to leave

them much more largely than we do at present to nature and to themselves.

The adolescent girl often is thought to be lazy, and when called upon

to work she shows an exasperating dulness and inattention. This is

a natural condition when the girl is passing through the langour of

physical growth; she is overcome, not by listlessness, but by the strain

of her awakening senses, and the inattention of the mind is, as a rule,

but a symptom of the mysterious and difficult maturing of the brain. The

apparent apathy is not real: all the girl’s power, all energy of body and

mind is being consumed by the overwhelming force of the half-conscious

life of instincts that are ripening within. The young girl for the first

time feels, though very rarely does she understand, the power of her

nature stirring her soul. And any seeming backwardness in studies during

these years, as should be known by the wise teacher, leads afterwards to

finer progress, if only the right opportunity of unstrained development

is given. But it is this harmony of growth that we have been disturbing

as with persistent zeal we have educated from the outside. Little wonder

that we have failed. I have spoken before of the wide difference that is

present between the nature of the boy and that of the girl, and though

I speak with hesitation on a question that is too complex to permit

dogmatic assertions, the boy has, I think, a much more healthy and

conscious knowledge of himself; a girl understands herself less, and

has a very dim notion of the motives of her conduct. This leads to very

certain danger. The thoughts of most girls are occupied with vague and

romantic longings, much heightened by the nonsense written on love in

the books girls are allowed to read, stories from which every hint of

wholesome reality has been omitted. Such false feelings, dominating the

girl’s mind at the time of the adolescent crisis, work grave evil.

While always thinking of love most girls know almost nothing of what love

really is; and certainly the strain of any sudden chance investigation of

the physical facts of sex is a very near danger.

That is one reason why, in a previous section, I have urged so strongly

that sexual enlightenment be given to the girl while she is still at the

age when sex has no strong personal significance.

The importance of early knowledge is not sufficiently recognised. If

from childhood there has been frankness between the girl and her mother,

and they have spoken together openly of sex and the facts of birth, it

will certainly have happened that the chief emphasis in the mother’s

instruction will have been placed upon the relation between the child

and herself.[106] Such teaching may well prove a great safeguard. The

personal, or “pleasure,” element in sex will in this way not be too soon

forced and stamped on the girl’s consciousness; it will be, as it should,

deferred until the age of passion comes. Even then the result of the

earlier teaching will be present to direct the desires. Love and marriage

will not be divorced entirely from the thought of motherhood, as so

disastrously happens with many girls to-day.

It is a question I must leave, though it is one on which much more

might be said. For I believe we have here a further explanation of the

triumph of the egoistical sexual desires over the parental instincts

of sacrifice. I am altogether convinced of the deep and wide-reaching

harm that is done, in ways that have never yet been recognised, from

the sexual ignorance of girls and our shameful concealments and untrue

education. And I have felt often that the brutal frankness of boys in

sex matters, bad as certainly it sometimes is in its after coarsening

effect, in many ways is better in its results than the confused silence

and sentiment with which most girls are surrounded; it is, at least, in

nearer touch with the facts of life.

I have had considerable experience with adolescent girls. I am sure that

their thoughts are more occupied with sex than they know themselves, or

is recognised by the adults who are with them. I am speaking here of the

normal girl in whom the sexual impulse takes definite form during the

early years of puberty. It will need all our wisdom and patience to be

able to help the girl now, if we have left her in the darkness of her

soul before. She is suffering the anguish of youth, reaching out for

the unknown ideal, which she cannot grasp, cannot even distinguish or

conceive. There are, of course, other types of girls—girls of delicate

and sensitive temperament in whom sexual development for long may be

delayed. This may be due to various causes, but is most frequently a

result of excessive mental strain from over-pressure or unsuitable work

at the onset of puberty, tending to de-normalise the sex-life.

Now, to some parents and teachers, not understanding the results, it may

seem that this is an end to be desired, and that such a postponement of

the sex-life to the years when the girl is older will be a safeguard

against evils. This, I believe, is a mistake. The sex feelings are not

absent but hidden, and the result too often is a profound melancholy

and a dull heaviness which may continue to spoil life. And when the

time comes, as come it must, and the long-repressed feelings force an

expression, the sex-strain is often very great, and troubles frequently

arise that could not have happened except for our interference with the

right process of nature.

Of course, whatever we do, we must expect often to fail. We are not

dealing with anything that can be fixed; and our methods as well as our

success must vary with each individual girl. It is this personal element

that has not been considered. And this is why there is such need for a

higher and different standard in our schools, and of more knowledge and

understanding on the part of all who are connected with the training of

girls. I know of nothing that can prepare the girl but the early teaching

of the mother, but I think in the later adolescent years it is the wise

teacher who can better carry on the work.

The task of the educator ought to be plain: to encourage all girls in

their natural reaching out for experience and knowledge of themselves,

not to smother all that is individual in them under set lessons,

necessary perhaps and helpful at other periods of growth, but now I am

certain harmful, dulling the character with falsehood and the bodies with

constraints, and wearying the minds with overstrain through long hours

of drudgery into a dull acceptance.

The worst influence of the school is its isolation from life.

Consciousness, not instruction, should be the aim of education. Yet

in all directions our girls have been led and forced into following

material consciousness, and, at the same time, they have increasingly

lost consciousness of themselves. Realisation of one’s own being—how to

produce this by means of education—that is the question. What answer are

we going to give?

Such a rest period in specially adapted schools as I am here advocating

would serve not only to establish the health of adolescent girls and fit

them for vigorous womanhood, it would, as I believe, change their ideal

and remake life. In such surroundings fitted to their own needs, and with

a different valuation of the future set before them, they would have a

truer sense of self-consciousness; they would come to understand in quite

a new way the responsibilities and high glory of being women.

The difficulties, of course, are numerous. And, first of all, it will not

be easy to find the right teachers for these adolescent schools. They

will need to be specially trained; but training alone will not serve. The

teachers must have had a much wider experience of life than is usual to

women; they ought to have genius and a passionate love of children: they

need to be mothers in spirit.

Necessarily, the expense of such teachers and of these special schools,

which should be established in great numbers and with no thought of

sparing the cost, will be heavy. It will be thought, I know, by many that

this fact alone makes the plan impracticable. I can answer only, that any

expenditure that will produce fit and glad mothers for the future is an

expense that will be met by a wise nation.

I would urge that this question be approached from a practical attitude.

On all sides concern is being felt at the decline in the birth-rate,

which has fallen one-third in the last thirty-five years. The Royal

Commission that I have referred to already has made its investigation and

issued its report. Much has been written on the problem, and many guesses

made as to the vaguely understood causes. The economists find all the

evil in economic conditions; the religious say that it is our morality

that is at fault. Many are the remedies suggested, a few of which are

practical and good. And so urgent is the matter felt to be, now that war

with its destruction of life is teaching us a little more the value of

life, that changes, long called for, but hitherto seemingly unattainable,

shortly may be made in our divorce and marriage laws. The sharp and cruel

line drawn between the married and the unmarried mother will at last

waver and break on its rotten supports. Already the saving of child life

has become a matter of such urgent need that much necessary reform is

being accomplished. There is little doubt that these valuable movements

will go on.

Yet, I think, we are failing to attack the real cause, and unless we do

attack it there, right at the beginning, we shall go on as we usually

do, experimenting in this way and in that, doing one thing and leaving

another undone, and we shall only tinker and fuss and then wonder why we

fail. Blind and fools! we fail, and shall go on failing, because we do

not educate our girls and act in life in such a way as will encourage

motherhood.

I have put out my idea: I have tried to be as explicit as possible in

suggesting the remedy. I am conscious now of opposition that will be

raised. I shall be told that my plan, which seems so simple, of educating

girls to be women is not practicable. And then I shall be reminded of

the immense surplus of women in this country who are unable to marry and

live a full and healthy life—a surplus large before the war, enormously

greater now.[107]

Let me state at once that I am very far indeed from forgetting this great

host of enforced celibate women. I have spoken more than once in my book

about them, and I am not now concerned with their position. What I want

is to save the future. Many girls and women to-day are finding their work

and the fresh excitements of independence sufficient to gladden life.

They do not claim pity; yet this satisfaction that women are feeling is

the danger that threatens the future. It is just because these women,

whose desires will be fixed on work and away from motherhood, must be

here among us, in every place, especially in our schools and in our

factories—everywhere in contact with youth—that I am pleading with all

the power that I have for a quite changed training for the young girls

of the coming generation of women. I fear greatly the influence that I

believe must grow up if industrial values of what is good in life are

unchecked, and the desire of women is turned more from motherhood and the

life that matters to the outside details of existence.

Life must be re-shaped, and the first step is the perception of an idea.

We want belief, for life must have a structure—the scaffolding on which

we may build. And each individual woman among us may not be trusted to

make her own structure—to convey and carry whatever it may be that she

desires. Such selfishness makes any permanent building impossible. That

is why in this generation we have lost our ideal.