Ladies and Gentlemen:--As a student of Anthropology and Heredity one
is sometimes compelled to make statements which seem to the thoughtless
listener either too radical or too horrible to be true. If I were to
assert, for example, that good men, men who have the welfare of the
community at heart, men who are kind fathers and indulgent husbands, men
who believe in themselves as pure, upright and good citizens, if I were
to say that even such men are thorough believers in and supporters of
the theory that it is right and wise to sacrifice the liberty, purity,
health and life of young girls and women and, through the terrible
power of heredity, to curse the race, rather than permit men and boys to
suffer in their own persons the results of their own misdeeds, mistakes
or crimes, I would be accused of being "morbid" and a "man hater." But
let us see if the above statement is not quite within the facts.
I shall take as an illustration the words and arguments of a man who
stands second, only, to our Chief Police officer in the largest city in
the United States, and since he was permitted to present his arguments
in the most widely read journals of the country it seems fitting that
these opinions be dealt with as of unusual importance. All the more is
this the case since they were intended to influence legislation in the
interest of State-regulated vice.
Among other things he said:
"Of course there are disorderly houses, but they are more hidden, and
less of that vice is flaunted, than in any other city in the world. Such
places have existed since the world began and men of observation know
that this fact is a safe-guard around their homes and daughters. Men of
candid judgment, religious men, know, too, that they had ten thousand
times rather have their live, robust boys err in this indulgence, than
think of them in the places of those unfortunates on the island, whose
hands are muffled or tied behind them. This is a desperately practical
question with more than a theoretical and sentimental side. It ought to
be talked about and better understood among fathers.
"Thank God that vice is so hidden that Dr. Park-hurst has to get
detectives to find disorderly houses, and that thousands of wives and
daughters do not know even of their existence. Such horrible disclosures
as were made before innocent women and girls in Dr. Parkhurst's audience
do vastly more harm in arousing their curiosity and polluting their
minds than a host of sin that is compelled to hide its head. When I was
Captain of the Twenty-ninth Precinct, I went with Dr. Talmage on
his errand for sensational information for his sermons. I know, from
observation and from reports which I was careful to gather, that never
in their history were the places he described as thronged by patrons,
largely from Brooklyn, or so much money spent there for debauchery as
after those sermons."
Now I assume that this Police Inspector is a good citizen, father,
husband and man. I assume that he is sincere and earnest in his desire
and efforts to suppress crime and promote--so far as he is able--the
welfare of the community. I assume, in short, that he is, in intent and
in fact, a loyal citizen and a conscientious officer. I have no reason
to believe that he is not doing what he conceives is best and right, and
yet even he is quoted as advocating the sacrifice of purity to impurity,
the creating of moral and social lepers in one sex in order that moral
and social lepers or the ignorantly vicious of the other sex may escape
the results of their own mistakes or vice. It impresses me anew that
such teaching, from such authority, is not only the most unfortunate
that can be put before a boy but that it goes farther perhaps than
anything else can to confirm in men that conditions of sex mania which
the Inspector says is more desirable should be cultivated by means of
regularly recognized state institutions for the utter sacrifice and
death of young girls than that it should end in the wreck of the sex
maniac himself and in his own destruction.
But were our statesmen students of heredity, they would not need to
be told that there is, there can be, no "safeguards around wives and
daughters" so long as their husbands, fathers and sons are polluting the
streams of life before they transmit that life itself to those who are
to be "our daughters and wives."
But not going so deeply into the subject, for the moment, as to deal
with its hereditary bearings; upon what principle his argument can
be valid, I fail to see. Why is it better that some girl shall be
sacrificed, body, mind and soul; why is it better that she shall be his
victim than that he shall be his own? And then again, the problem is
not solved when she is sacrificed. He has simply changed the form of his
disease, and in the change, while it is possible that he has delayed for
himself the day of destruction, he has, in the process, corrupted
not only his victim but the social conscience, as well. Were this all
perhaps it would be still thought wise to follow the advice of the
Inspector--and alas, of some physicians--and continue to sacrifice under
the bestial wheel of sex power those who are from first to last prey to
the conditions of social and legal environment in which they are allowed
no voice.
But this is not all. The seeming "cure" is no cure at all. It is simply
a postponement of the awful day for the sex maniac himself and, worse
than this--more terrible than this--it is the cause of the continuance
of the mania not only in himself but in his children. He marries some
honest girl by and by and thus associates, with the burnt-out dregs of
his life, one who would loathe him did she know his true character
and his concealed but burning flame of insanely inherited, insanely
indulged, bestially developed disease. But he is now--under the
shadow of social respectability and church sanction--to perpetuate his
unfortunate mania in those who are helpless--the unborn. Heredity is
not a slip-shod thing. It does not follow One parent and one alone. The
children of a father who "sowed his wild oats" by the method prescribed
by the Inspector (and alas, by social custom) are as truly his victims
as is the pariah of humanity who is to be quarantined in some given
locality, made a social leper and a physical wreck that he, personally,
may be neither the one nor the other. But nature is a terrible
antagonist. She bides her time and when she strikes she does not forget
to strike a harder, wider-reaching, more terrible blow than can be
compassed by a single individuality or a single generation. This is
the lesson that, so far, we have absolutely refused to learn. I do not
hesitate to take issue with the Inspector, therefore, and say that it
is far better for society, far better for the fathers of unfortunate
victims of sex mania, far better for the victim himself that he be "on
the Island with hands muffled or tied behind him," where death to one
will end the misery to all, than that by applying the remedy which
the Inspector recommends, the result should be, as it is, a
future generation of sex maniacs, scrofulous, epileptic or simply
constitutionally undermined weaklings.
The boys who are encouraged to "sow their wild oats" and taught that it
is safe to do so under State regulation should hear the reports of some
of the students of hereditary traits, conditions and developments. There
is to-day in an asylum not so far from the Inspector's own door but that
its records are easy of access, one victim of this pernicious theory
whose history runs thus: He was a gentleman of good social, financial
and mental surroundings. He was a "young man about town." He possessed,
(perhaps it was an hereditary trait) more consciousness of the fact that
he was a male animal than that he was an intelligent, self-respecting
human being who had no moral right to degrade another human being for
his gratification, while he assumed to still retain a higher and safer
plane than his companions in vice. He was, in brief, no better and no
worse than many young fellows who--alas, that they are so taught by men
who believe themselves good and honorable--"turn out to be good family
men."
After his system was thoroughly inoculated, physically, mentally, and
morally or ethically, with the tone, the condition, the _trend_ of the
life which the inspector, and many other good men, insist is unfit for
the ears of women, but necessary to the welfare of men and "best" for
them; after his life and flesh had this trend and absorption he married
a lovely wife from a good family. All went well. Society smiled (this is
history, not fiction), and said that rapid men when they did marry, made
the best husbands after all. It said such men knew better how to fully
appreciate purity at home.
Society did not state that there could be no purity in a stream where
half of the tributaries are polluted. But society was satisfied to talk
of "pure homes" so long as there was one pure partner to the compact,
which resulted in the home. It does not talk of an honest firm if but
one of its members is (privately and in his own person,) honest while
he accedes to the dishonest practices of his associates. But society
was satisfied. A child was born, society was charmed. Four more children
came. Society said that this late profligate was doing his duty as a
good citizen of the State. He is now about forty-seven years old. He is
a "paretic" in an asylum, and, if that were all, then the inspector's
theory might still stand, because he would say that at least the awful
calamity had been staved off all these years while he had built a "pure"
home and left to his country others to take his place. The facts
are these: His oldest son is an epileptic, the second is a physical
caricature of a man, the third is a moral idiot. He has no moral sense
at all, while he is mentally bright. He delights in victimizing dogs,
cats, or even smaller children. All things, in fact, which are in his
power are his legitimate prey. Then there is a girl. In the phraseology
of the doctor she "shows only the general, constitutional signs of her
inheritance."
The youngest son is now less than seven years old; he is such a
hopeless sex maniac even now that the parents of other children do not
dare allow them to be alone with him for one moment.
In telling me of this case the asylum physician, himself a profound
student of heredity, said of the child:
"He would shame an old Parisian debauchee. The Spartans were not so far
wrong after all. They killed all such children as these before they had
the chance to grow up and still further pollute the stream of life."
And so our good citizen followed only the usual course prescribed by the
inspector--and by society--and the result is (leaving out the horrible,
necessary sacrifice of a woman--some woman or some number of women)--the
result of the plan is this; a house of vice, (in a secluded quarter "for
greater safety"); a few years of license which he believed to be his
legitimate perquisite in the world and "no harm done;" the association
of the later years of his wasted energies, and his pretense and
vice-soaked life and flesh with the life of a pure girl, and then
the legacy to society of five more sex maniacs, (who, being born in a
wedlock, which, by its present terms, laws, and theories, still further
develops sex mania in men and thereby implants the disease in each
generation to be fought with or yielded to again); a doddering,
drivelling wreck of a man in an asylum at the prime of his manhood; a
worse than widowed wife with a knowledge in her soul which is an undying
serpent as she looks in despair upon the five lives she has given, in
her pathetic ignorance and trust. And his is not an unusual record.
Of course its details are seldom known outside of the family and
physicians. It is legitimate fruit of a tree which society in its
avarice and ignorance and vice carefully fosters. It is the tree, the
fruit of which fills our jails, mad-houses, asylums, poorhouses and
prisons year after year, and yet we tend it carefully and keep its root
strong and vigorous by exactly the methods recommended by the police
inspector and by all believers in State regulated and State licensed
vice, that is: It must be systematically continued for the good of
"robust boys who might else be on the island with muffled hands. It must
be kept in certain quarters and secret for greater safety to men, and
that our wives and daughters may not hear of it."
Not hear of it until when? Not until the years come when the honest
physician must tell her, if not the cause, at least the horrible facts,
when it is too late for her to prevent the awful crime of giving life
to the children of such a husband. We hold it a terrible crime to take
life. Is it not far more terrible in such a case to give life? In the
one instance the results to the victims are simply the sudden ending of
a more or less desirable existence in a more or less comfortable
world. In the other case it is assuming to thrust unasked upon helpless
children a living death, an inheritance of pollution which must, and
does, develop itself in one or another form as the years go by. Which is
the greater, more awful responsibility, to give or to take life? The law
says the latter.
Is it certain that heredity--nature's surest and least heeded
voice--does not in many cases say the former? When society is wiser it
will be a bit more like the Spartans. It will say: Far better that they
be "on the island" than that they lay their fatal curse upon the world
to expand and blight to the third and fourth generation, and, I believe,
it was to be the "sin of the _fathers_" which was thus to follow the
children, was it not? What was that sin? Are not its roots to be found
in the very soil advocated as good by believers in State regulation and
in a double standard of morals, and in the ignorance which they say
is desirable for "our wives and daughters." Ignorance that such things
exist as the secret, legalized, regulated slaughter (social, moral, and
actually physical) of hundreds and thousands of one sex at the demands
and for the gratification of the other?
Are there not sex maniacs in more directions than one?
Is not this very double standard theory in itself a sex mania?
Are not the men who advocate and the legislators who make laws which
recognize these double moral standards, and who ignore the plainest
fingerboards set up by nature in hereditary conditions--are not these,
in a sense, one and all sex maniacs?
When they talk of "keeping our wives and daughters" pure and ignorant
they do not seem to realize that the taint of blood which flows in the
veins of that very daughter, which she herself does not understand, and
which an ignorant mother does not dream of, and therefore cannot stand
guard over, flows as an ever present threat that she shall be one of
those very outcasts whom her own father is laboring to quarantine in
darkness and oblivion!
Nature has no favorites.
Heredity does not spare _your_ daughter, and yet men who plant the seeds
of sex perversion in their own families have the infinite impudence to
cast from their doors the blossom of their own tillage!
They go into heroics about being "disgraced." "You are no longer child
of mine!" that rings in a thousand pages of literature, in one hundred
cases out of one hundred and one should be met by the reply: This act
of mine proves as no other could that _I am_, indeed, _your_ daughter!
Blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh! Nature has told your secret
through me. Let us cry quits. You put the cursed taint in my blood when
I could not protect myself. _I_ am the one to complain, not you. Do not
cry out for quarter like a very coward. Face your record made in flesh
and blood. This polluted life of mine is Nature's reply to _your_ life
of license and uncleanness! _I_ am Nature's reply to your uncontrolled
passions--_inside of marriage and out_; I, the moral or mental idiot;
I, the disease polluted wreck; I, the epileptic; I, the lunatic; I,
the drunkard; I, the wrecker of the lives of others--I am your lineal
descendant! You sacrificed others recklessly, by act and by law, to your
desires and your arbitrary sex power; you cultivated a taint in your
blood.
It is true that you took the precaution to transmit it through purity
and ignorance to me. That very purity and ignorance of my mother served
to save your peace of mind and enable you to take advantage of her for
infinite opportunity for mischief. It, alas, could not save me, for I am
your child also. Her ignorance was your partner in a crime against
me, her helpless infant! Do not complain. Dislike my face as you will;
presented to you in whatsoever form or phase of distortion it may be,
I am your direct, lineal descendant! Build better! Or go down with the
structure you planned for other men's daughters and in which you locked
me before I was born!
If, because of their sex, men demand privileges, rights, emoluments,
honors, opportunities and freedom, which they claim as good for and
necessary to them and their welfare, while they insist that all these
are not to be allowed to women--would be her damnation--are not these,
also, sex maniacs? Has not humanity been long enough cursed by so
degrading and degraded, so ignorant and so fatally wrong a mental,
moral, social and legal outlook? I am attacking no individual. I am
using an individual utterance on this subject simply to the better
present the side of the case which is sustained by all of our present
laws, conditions and male sentiment. I am wishing to present the
reverse side of this awful picture. From man's point of view it is often
presented--and in many ways. But once or twice have I ever seen the
other side in print where it was looked at from a rational or scientific
point of view.
A short time ago a book was written which touched, to a moderate degree,
woman's side as well as the general human side of this problem. It was
put in the form of a novel that it might appeal to a larger reading
public than would an essay or magazine article. It had a tremendous
sale, and the only--or the chief--adverse criticism made upon it was,
that it pictured a type of father which either did not exist or was too
rare to be even taken as an illustration in fiction. Now, it is this
very type of father of which the Inspector speaks thus: "Men of candid
judgment, religious men, know too, that they had rather have their live,
robust boys err in this indulgence than think of them in the places of
those unfortunates on the island, etc., etc."
That is exactly the point made by the book referred to, and which was
criticised by one man as "morbid in its imaginings about fathers." Is
this Inspector "morbid?"
He said: "This is a desperately practical question with more than a
theoretical or sentimental side. It ought to be talked about and better
understood among fathers."
And I agree with him perfectly so far.
It is indeed, a desperately practical question for both men and
women and Anthropology and Heredity teach, in all peoples and in each
succeeding generation, that the question has not been solved by the
adoption of the double standard of morals!
It is so desperately practical that the land is literally covered with
the deplorable results, in hospitals, in prisons, in imbecile asylums
and in mad houses; but when he goes on to "thank God that this vice is
hidden, and that thousands of wives and daughters do not know of even
its existence," it impresses me that the Inspector is, in deploring the
ignorance of fathers and commending it in mothers, attempting to still
farther hedge boys about with a condition which inevitably makes of them
sex maniacs in more directions than one. Is not his mother as deeply
interested in her boy's welfare as is his father? Is it not to her eyes
and wisdom his younger days are most left and to whose watchfulness,
intelligence and information he must be trusted not to develop or
acquire fatal habits? or if he has them in his blood as a heritage from
his father, or from his father's father, by whom vice was looked upon as
"safe" if only kept from the ears and eyes of wife and daughter; is
it not imperative that the trained eye and mind of a woman who is not
ignorant of nor blind to the very earliest indications that Nature has
sent a message that there is a blood taint, so that, in so far as it
is possible she may labor to modify and control his awful inheritance
before it has him in a fatal grip?
Instead of this being the case it is advocated as desirable that she
be even "ignorant of the existence of such vice!" It is due more to the
fact that she has been ignorant than to any other one thing that, later
on, the boy's developed hereditary curse, or his acquired bad habits,
have so fixed themselves upon his young mind and body that the Inspector
and the boy's father find themselves in a position to choose between
a straight jacket for the boy himself, or first a wrecked and outraged
womanhood and later on descendants that are marked with a brand that is
worse than Cain's.
The Inspector says that such disclosures as Dr. Talmage's sermon before
innocent women and girls do vastly more harm than a host of sin that is
compelled to hide its head.
Now what is the implication? Did he mean to imply that those places
have, since the sermon, been thronged with the "wives and daughters of
Brooklyn?" If not, how did he know that it "polluted _their_ minds?" Has
he not jumped at that conclusion and cast a slur upon the wrong sex? the
sex that did _not_ "squander its money in patronizing these resorts?"
Was not that a rather desperate effort to sustain an argument by a
_non-sequitur?_
Are women's minds polluted by a knowledge of vice which they avoid
intelligently rather than simply escape from ignorantly? Are ignorance
and innocence the same thing? Did the Inspector believe that a knowledge
of the degradation into which their sons are led and pushed by just
such theories as these backed by a blind hereditary impulse which has
no intelligent care from a wise parentage, did he believe that such
knowledge would drive or lure "wives and daughters" into polluting vice?
And is it not strange to hear of a condition of things which can be
spoken of as good and desirable for boys and men which is in the same
breath depicted as pollution even to the ears of women? Can good women
live with these same men and not be polluted? How about the children?
Man has for ages past, claimed to be the logical animal. Beasts have no
logic at all, and in this regard woman has been gallantly classed, if
not exactly with the beasts, certainly not with man. We may say she has
been counted by him as a sort of missing link. She had logic--if she
agreed with all he said. Otherwise she was an emotional, irrational,
unclassified creature.
Now, when it comes to dealing with his fellows, man has--in the main--a
fair amount of reason and logic; but the moment he is called upon to
think of woman as simply a human being like himself, to deal with and
for her as such, to give her a chance to do the same with, and by,
and for herself, that moment man becomes an emotional, irrational sex
maniac. He is absolutely unable to look upon woman as first of all, a
free individuality, a human being on exactly the same plane as himself.
She is instantly "wife," "daughter," or victim to his mind always. Never
for one instant does he contemplate her as an entity entitled to life
and liberty, for, and because of herself. Always it is her relation to
him that he sees and deals with--and alas for his theories of justice,
gallantry or right--always it is as his subordinate, for his use, abuse,
or pleasure, that he thinks of and plans for her.
Why confine gilded houses to one quarter? To keep their vicious inmates
away from "our wives and daughters, and the streets which they are on,"
says the Inspector. But that is making sex irregularity a reason for
restricting liberty of residence and resort--even of promenade and
pleasure. That is to say, it restricts the liberty of one party to the
vice--to the irregularity of sex relations. And unfortunately it is the
wrong party who is restricted to compass the object claimed! The one
whose vice can and actually does injure--the wife and daughter--(the
pure woman who is his victim in marriage, and the daughter who is his
victim in heredity) the one who can do infinite wrong, is left to roam
at large!
It is the wrong partner in vice from whom State regulation seeks to
"protect" "our wives and daughters." It is the one who can do the
intelligent wife or daughter no harm whatever!
Man, we are told, is the logical animal. Why not apply a bit of logic
right here? Why not set a watch on and restrict the one who does the
real and permanent harm to the race?
Men claim that it is necessary to their health, happiness and comfort
to sacrifice utterly the characters, health, lives, and even liberty of
locomotion of thousands of women every year. This is simply infamous and
Nature teaches its infamy and unnaturalness.
From the protozoan to the highest beast or bird there is no distinction
of right, or opportunity or privilege as to the occupation, life,
liberty or the pursuit of happiness anywhere in nature between the
sexes until we reach the one species of animal where one sex has been
subordinated to the other by artificial industrial conditions--by
financial dependence.
Now, it so happens that as civilization goes on, Nature is taking a most
terrible revenge upon the human race for this sex perversion. Asylums
multiply, weaklings abound, criminals and lunatics blossom out from
heretofore honored ancestry. Nature is a terrible antagonist. Having
the power, man may pollute the fountain of life if he will, but Nature
revenges herself on him still.
He may cover his vice with the shimmer of gold, but the curse of the
serpent is there as of old. He may bind up the eyes of justice and
right; but he learns at the last 'tis a desperate fight. A cover for
vice in the father may be as fatal as ignorant maternity. Combined they
sow broadcast on the air the horrors of life and breed its despair.
It is to the "ignorance of our wives and daughters" on these points,
combined with the silence of law-protected vice for men and "regulated"
infamy for women that is due the possibility of passing in some states a
bill to reduce to ten years the "age of consent" at which a girl is held
legally responsible for her own ruin. If there was one good woman in the
legislature no such bill would have a ghost of a chance to pass, or be
kept from the public knowledge and rushed through a "secret session."
Yet fathers of daughters pass such bills!
Is it true, after all, that men are not so good protectors of women as
is woman of her sister? Ten years of age! Why, a girl is a baby then!
Think of your own little girl at ten! Do not dare to stop thinking
and talking and writing on the subject until such infamous laws are an
impossibility!
Do not allow any one to make you believe that it is not "modest" or
becoming for a woman to know about--and fight to the bitter death--any
and all such laws! You have no right _not_ to know it! You have no right
to dare to bring into this world a child who shall be subject to such
a law! It seems beyond belief but it is true. And then men talk of
"protecting" women! Men who hold that a girl is not old enough to give
lawful consent to lawful marriage or to the sale of property until she
is 18 years old, say she is, at the age of ten, to be held old enough to
give consent to her own eternal disgrace, ruin, degradation!
That such atrocious acts are possible is largely due to the fact that
"our wives and daughters" do not know these things. The ignorance of
one sex in all the vital affairs of life coupled with its financial
dependence upon the other sex has gone far to make of all men sex
maniacs and of so many children the victims of a polluted ancestry and
the future progenitors of an enfeebled race.
A famous physician who is an expert in these matters says in one of his
articles, read before his brother practitioners: "There are few families
in this country not tainted with one or another form of sex pollution.
If it is not physical in its demonstrations it is mental. Often it is
both, and to the trained eye, and thought, of a student of anthropology
and heredity, the present outlook is pitiful, indeed."
And again he says--and remember that it is not said by a woman about
man. It is the serious warning of a famous expert to his fellows who
were to meet and guard, in their profession, against the hereditary
results of just the sort of legislative provision which has gone far to
make of man the sex maniac he is. He said: "The wild beast is slumbering
in us all. It is not necessary, always, to invoke insanity to account
for its awakening." And if you will take the trouble to understand those
few sentences by a great specialist you will have found the whole of my
essay a mere illustration.