It is also beginning to be felt that, especially as regards women,

ignorant innocence is not merely too fragile a possession to be worth

preservation, but that it is positively mischievous, since it involves the

lack of necessary knowledge. "It is little short of criminal," writes Dr.

F.M. Goodchild,[21] "to send our young people into the midst of the

excitements and temptations of a great city with no more preparation than

if they were going to live in Paradise." In the case of women, ignorance

has the further disadvantage that it deprives them of the knowledge

necessary for intelligent sympathy with other women. The unsympathetic

attitude of women towards women is often largely due to sheer ignorance of

the facts of life. "Why," writes in a private letter a married lady who

keenly realizes this, "are women brought up with such a profound ignorance

of their own and especially other women's natures? They do not know half

as much about other women as a man of the most average capacity learns in

his day's march." We try to make up for our failure to educate women in

the essential matters of sex by imposing upon the police and other

guardians of public order the duty of protecting women and morals. But, as

Moll insists, the real problem of chastity lies, not in the multiplication

of laws and policemen, but largely in women's knowledge of the dangers of

sex and in the cultivation of their sense of responsibility.[22] We are

always making laws for the protection of children and setting the police

on guard. But laws and the police, whether their activities are good or

bad, are in either case alike ineffectual. They can for the most part only

be invoked when the damage is already done. We have to learn to go to the

root of the matter. We have to teach children to be a law to themselves.

We have to give them that knowledge which will enable them to guard their

own personalities.[23] There is an authentic story of a lady who had

learned to swim, much to the horror of her clergyman, who thought that

swimming was unfeminine. "But," she said, "suppose I was drowning." "In

that case," he replied, "you ought to wait until a man comes along and

saves you." There we have the two methods of salvation which have been

preached to women, the old method and the new. In no sea have women been

more often in danger of drowning than that of sex. There ought to be no

question as to which is the better method of salvation.

It is difficult nowadays to find any serious arguments against

the desirability of early sexual enlightenment, and it is almost

with amusement that we read how the novelist Alphonse Daudet,

when asked his opinion of such enlightenment, protested--in a

spirit certainly common among the men of his time--that it was

unnecessary, because boys could learn everything from the streets

and the newspapers, while "as to young girls--no! I would teach

them none of the truths of physiology. I can only see

disadvantages in such a proceeding. These truths are ugly,

disillusioning, sure to shock, to frighten, to disgust the mind,

the nature, of a girl." It is as much as to say that there is no

need to supply sources of pure water when there are puddles in

the street that anyone can drink of. A contemporary of Daudet's,

who possessed a far finer spiritual insight, Coventry Patmore,

the poet, in the essay on "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity" in

his beautiful book, _Religio Poetæ_, had already finely protested

against that "disease of impurity" which comes of "our modern

undivine silences" for which Daudet pleaded. And Metchnikoff,

more recently, from the scientific side, speaking especially as

regards women, declares that knowledge is so indispensable for

moral conduct that "ignorance must be counted the most immoral of

acts" (_Essais Optimistes_, p. 420).

The distinguished Belgian novelist, Camille Lemonnier, in his

_L'Homme en Amour_, deals with the question of the sexual

education of the young by presenting the history of a young man,

brought up under the influence of the conventional and

hypocritical views which teach that nudity and sex are shameful

and disgusting things. In this way he passes by the opportunities

of innocent and natural love, to become hopelessly enslaved at

last to a sensual woman who treats him merely as the instrument

of her pleasure, the last of a long succession of lovers. The

book is a powerful plea for a sane, wholesome, and natural

education in matters of sex. It was, however, prosecuted at

Bruges, in 1901, though the trial finally ended in acquittal.

Such a verdict is in harmony with the general tendency of feeling

at the present time.

The old ideas, expressed by Daudet, that the facts of sex are

ugly and disillusioning, and that they shock the mind of the

young, are both alike entirely false. As Canon Lyttelton remarks,

in urging that the laws of the transmission of life should be

taught to children by the mother: "The way they receive it with

native reverence, truthfulness of understanding and guileless

delicacy, is nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing

beauty of nature. People sometimes speak of the indescribable

beauty of children's innocence. But I venture to say that no one

quite knows what it is who has foregone the privilege of being

the first to set before them the true meaning of life and birth

and the mystery of their own being. Not only do we fail to build

up sound knowledge in them, but we put away from ourselves the

chance of learning something that must be divine." In the same

way, Edward Carpenter, stating that it is easy and natural for

the child to learn from the first its physical relation to its

mother, remarks (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 9): "A child at the

age of puberty, with the unfolding of its far-down emotional and

sexual nature, is eminently capable of the most sensitive,

affectional and serene appreciation of what _sex_ means

(generally more so as things are to-day, than its worldling

parent or guardian); and can absorb the teaching, if

sympathetically given, without any shock or disturbance to its

sense of shame--that sense which is so natural and valuable a

safeguard of early youth."

How widespread, even some years ago, had become the conviction

that the sexual facts of life should be taught to girls as well

as boys, was shown when the opinions of a very miscellaneous

assortment of more or less prominent persons were sought on the

question ("The Tree of Knowledge," _New Review_, June, 1894). A

small minority of two only (Rabbi Adler and Mrs. Lynn Lynton)

were against such knowledge, while among the majority in favor of

it were Mme. Adam, Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Besant, Björnson,

Hall Caine, Sarah Grand, Nordau, Lady Henry Somerset, Baroness

von Suttner, and Miss Willard. The leaders of the woman's

movement are, of course, in favor of such knowledge. Thus a

meeting of the Bund für Mutterschutz at Berlin, in 1905, almost

unanimously passed a resolution declaring that the early sexual

enlightenment of children in the facts of the sexual life is

urgently necessary (_Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 2, p. 91). It may

be added that medical opinion has long approved of this

enlightenment. Thus in England it was editorially stated in the

_British Medical Journal_ some years ago (June 9, 1894): "Most

medical men of an age to beget confidence in such affairs will be

able to recall instances in which an ignorance, which would have

been ludicrous if it had not been so sad, has been displayed on

matters regarding which every woman entering on married life

ought to have been accurately informed. There can, we think, be

little doubt that much unhappiness and a great deal of illness

would be prevented if young people of both sexes possessed a

little accurate knowledge regarding the sexual relations, and

were well impressed with the profound importance of selecting

healthy mates. Knowledge need not necessarily be nasty, but even

if it were, it certainly is not comparable in that respect with

the imaginings of ignorance." In America, also, where at an

annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Dr. Denslow

Lewis, of Chicago, eloquently urged the need of teaching sexual

hygiene to youths and girls, all the subsequent nine speakers,

some of them physicians of worldwide fame, expressed their

essential agreement (_Medico-Legal Journal_, June-Sept., 1903).

Howard, again, at the end of his elaborate _History of

Matrimonial Institutions_ (vol. iii, p. 257) asserts the

necessity for education in matters of sex, as going to the root

of the marriage problem. "In the future educational programme,"

he remarks, "sex questions must hold an honorable place."

While, however, it is now widely recognized that children are entitled to

sexual enlightenment, it cannot be said that this belief is widely put

into practice. Many persons, who are fully persuaded that children should

sooner or later be enlightened concerning the sexual sources of life, are

somewhat nervously anxious as to the precise age at which this

enlightenment should begin. Their latent feeling seems to be that sex is

an evil, and enlightenment concerning sex also an evil, however necessary,

and that the chief point is to ascertain the latest moment to which we can

safely postpone this necessary evil. Such an attitude is, however,

altogether wrong-headed. The child's desire for knowledge concerning the

origin of himself is a perfectly natural, honest, and harmless desire, so

long as it is not perverted by being thwarted. A child of four may ask

questions on this matter, simply and spontaneously. As soon as the

questions are put, certainly as soon as they become at all insistent, they

should be answered, in the same simple and spontaneous spirit, truthfully,

though according to the measure of the child's intelligence and his

capacity and desire for knowledge. This period should not, and, if these

indications are followed, naturally would not, in any case, be delayed

beyond the sixth year. After that age even the most carefully guarded

child is liable to contaminating communications from outside. Moll points

out that the sexual enlightenment of girls in its various stages ought to

be always a little ahead of that of boys, and as the development of girls

up to the pubertal age is more precocious than that of boys, this demand

is reasonable.

If the elements of sexual education are to be imparted in early childhood,

it is quite clear who ought to be the teacher. There should be no question

that this privilege belongs by every right to the mother. Except where a

child is artificially separated from his chief parent it is indeed only

the mother who has any natural opportunity of receiving and responding to

these questions. It is unnecessary for her to take any initiative in the

matter. The inevitable awakening of the child's intelligence and the

evolution of his boundless curiosity furnish her love and skill with all

opportunities for guiding her child's thoughts and knowledge. Nor is it

necessary for her to possess the slightest technical information at this

stage. It is only essential that she should have the most absolute faith

in the purity and dignity of her physical relationship to her child, and

be able to speak of it with frankness and tenderness. When that essential

condition is fulfilled every mother has all the knowledge that her young

child needs.

Among the best authorities, both men and women, in all the

countries where this matter is attracting attention, there seems

now to be unanimity of opinion in favor of the elementary facts

of the baby's relationship to its mother being explained to the

child by the mother as soon as the child begins to ask questions.

Thus in Germany Moll has repeatedly argued in this sense; he

insists that sexual enlightenment should be mainly a private and

individual matter; that in schools there should be no general and

personal warnings about masturbation, etc. (though at a later age

he approves of instruction in regard to venereal diseases), but

that the mother is the proper person to impart intimate knowledge

to the child, and that any age is suitable for the commencement

of such enlightenment, provided it is put into a form fitted for

the age (Moll, op. cit., p. 264).

At the Mannheim meeting of the Congress of the German Society for

Combating Venereal Disease, when the question of sexual

enlightenment formed the sole subject of discussion, the opinion

in favor of early teaching by the mother prevailed. "It is the

mother who must, in the first place, be made responsible for the

child's clear understanding of sexual things, so often lacking,"

said Frau Krukenberg ("Die Aufgabe der Mutter,"

_Sexualpädagogik_, p. 13), while Max Enderlin, a teacher, said on

the same occasion ("Die Sexuelle Frage in die Volksschule," id.,

p. 35): "It is the mother who has to give the child his first

explanations, for it is to his mother that he first naturally

comes with his questions." In England, Canon Lyttelton, who is

distinguished among the heads of public schools not least by his

clear and admirable statements on these questions, states

(_Mothers and Sons_, p. 99) that the mother's part in the sexual

enlightenment and sexual guardianship of her son is of paramount

importance, and should begin at the earliest years. J.H. Badley,

another schoolmaster ("The Sex Difficulty," _Broad Views_, June,

1904), also states that the mother's part comes first. Northcote

(_Christianity and Sex Problems_, p. 25) believes that the duty

of the parents is primary in this matter, the family doctor and

the schoolmaster coming in at a later stage. In America, Dr. Mary

Wood Allen, who occupies a prominent and influential position in

women's social movements, urges (in _Child-Confidence Rewarded_,

and other pamphlets) that a mother should begin to tell her child

these things as soon as he begins to ask questions, the age of

four not being too young, and explains how this may be done,

giving examples of its happy results in promoting a sweet

confidence between the child and his mother.

If, as a few believe should be the case, the first initiation is delayed

to the tenth year or even later, there is the difficulty that it is no

longer so easy to talk simply and naturally about such things; the mother

is beginning to feel too shy to speak for the first time about these

difficult subjects to a son or a daughter who is nearly as big as herself.

She feels that she can only do it awkwardly and ineffectively, and she

probably decides not to do it at all. Thus an atmosphere of mystery is

created with all the embarrassing and perverting influences which mystery

encourages.

There can be no doubt that, more especially in highly intelligent

children with vague and unspecialized yet insistent sexual

impulses, the artificial mystery with which sex is too often

clothed not only accentuates the natural curiosity but also tends

to favor the morbid intensity and even prurience of the sexual

impulse. This has long been recognized. Dr. Beddoes wrote at the

beginning of the nineteenth century: "It is in vain that we

dissemble to ourselves the eagerness with which children of

either sex seek to satisfy themselves concerning the conformation

of the other. No degree of reserve in the heads of families, no

contrivances, no care to put books of one description out of

sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of

children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of

curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps

be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in

different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of

the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can

but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T.

Beddoes, _Hygeia_, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of

the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one

of the causes of _psychopathia sexualis_. Marro (_La Pubertà_, p.

299) points out how the veil of mystery thrown over sexual

matters merely serves to concentrate attention on them. The

distinguished Dutch writer Multatuli, in one of his letters

(quoted with approval by Freud), remarks on the dangers of hiding

things from boys and girls in a veil of mystery, pointing out

that this must only heighten the curiosity of children, and so

far from keeping them pure, which mere ignorance can never do,

heats and perverts their imaginations. Mrs. Mary Wood Allen,

also, warns the mother (op. cit., p. 5) against the danger of

allowing any air of embarrassing mystery to creep over these

things. "If the instructor feels any embarrassment in answering

the queries of the child, he is not fitted to be the teacher, for

the feeling of embarrassment will, in some subtle way,

communicate itself to the child, and he will experience an

indefinable sense of offended delicacy which is both unnecessary

and undesirable. Purification of one's own thought is, then, the

first step towards teaching the truth purely. Why," she adds, "is

death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic

than birth, the gateway into life? Or why is the taking of

earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?" Mrs.

Ennis Richmond, in a book of advice to mothers which contains

many wise and true things, says: "I want to insist, more strongly

than upon anything else, that it is the _secrecy_ that surrounds

certain parts of the body and their functions that gives them

their danger in the child's thought. Little children, from

earliest years, are taught to think of these parts of their body

as mysterious, and not only so, but that they are mysterious

because they are unclean. Children have not even a name for them.

If you have to speak to your child, you allude to them

mysteriously and in a half-whisper as 'that little part of you

that you don't speak of,' or words to that effect. Before

everything it is important that your child should have a good

working name for these parts of his body, and for their

functions, and that he should be taught to use and to hear the

names, and that as naturally and openly as though he or you were

speaking of his head or his foot. Convention has, for various

reasons, made it impossible to speak in this way in public. But

you can, at any rate, break through this in the nursery. There

this rule of convention has no advantage, and many a serious

disadvantage. It is easy to say to a child, the first time he

makes an 'awkward' remark in public: 'Look here, laddie, you may

say what you like to me or to daddy, but, for some reason or

other, one does not talk about these' (only say _what_ things)

'in public.' Only let your child make the remark in public

_before_ you speak (never mind the shock to your caller's

feelings), don't warn him against doing so" (Ennis Richmond,

_Boyhood_, p. 60). Sex must always be a mystery, but, as Mrs.

Richmond rightly says, "the real and true mysteries of generation

and birth are very different from the vulgar secretiveness with

which custom surrounds them."

The question as to the precise names to be given to the more

private bodily parts and functions is sometimes a little

difficult to solve. Every mother will naturally follow her own

instincts, and probably her own traditions, in this matter. I

have elsewhere pointed out (in the study of "The Evolution of

Modesty") how widespread and instinctive is the tendency to adopt

constantly new euphemisms in this field. The ancient and simple

words, which in England a great poet like Chaucer could still use

rightly and naturally, are so often dropped in the mud by the

vulgar that there is an instinctive hesitation nowadays in

applying them to beautiful uses. They are, however,

unquestionably the best, and, in their origin, the most dignified

and expressive words. Many persons are of opinion that on this

account they should be rescued from the mud, and their sacredness

taught to children. A medical friend writes that he always taught

his son that the vulgar sex names are really beautiful words of

ancient origin, and that when we understand them aright we cannot

possibly see in them any motive for low jesting. They are simple,

serious and solemn words, connoting the most central facts of

life, and only to ignorant and plebeian vulgarity can they cause

obscene mirth. An American man of science, who has privately and

anonymously printed some pamphlets on sex questions, also takes

this view, and consistently and methodically uses the ancient

and simple words. I am of opinion that this is the ideal to be

sought, but that there are obvious difficulties at present in the

way of attaining it. In any case, however, the mother should be

in possession of a very precise vocabulary for all the bodily

parts and acts which it concerns her children to know.

It is sometimes said that at this early age children should not be told,

even in a simple and elementary form, the real facts of their origin but

should, instead, hear a fairy-tale having in it perhaps some kind of

symbolic truth. This contention may be absolutely rejected, without

thereby, in any degree, denying the important place which fairy-tales hold

in the imagination of young children. Fairy-tales have a real value to the

child; they are a mental food he needs, if he is not to be spiritually

starved; to deprive him of fairy-tales at this age is to do him a wrong

which can never be made up at any subsequent age. But not only are sex

matters too vital even in childhood to be safely made matter for a

fairy-tale, but the real facts are themselves as wonderful as any

fairy-tale, and appeal to the child's imagination with as much force as a

fairy-tale.

Even, however, if there were no other reasons against telling children

fairy-tales of sex instead of the real facts, there is one reason which

ought to be decisive with every mother who values her influence over her

child. He will very quickly discover, either by information from others or

by his own natural intelligence, that the fairy-tale, that was told him in

reply to a question about a simple matter of fact, was a lie. With that

discovery his mother's influence over him in all such matters vanishes for

ever, for not only has a child a horror of being duped, but he is

extremely sensitive about any rebuff of this kind, and never repeats what

he has been made to feel was a mistake to be ashamed of. He will not

trouble his mother with any more questions on this matter; he will not

confide in her; he will himself learn the art of telling "fairy-tales"

about sex matters. He had turned to his mother in trust; she had not

responded with equal trust, and she must suffer the punishment, as

Henriette Fürth puts it, of seeing "the love and trust of her son stolen

from her by the first boy he makes friends with in the street." When, as

sometimes happens (Moll mentions a case), a mother goes on repeating these

silly stories to a girl or boy of seven who is secretly well-informed, she

only degrades herself in her child's eyes. It is this fatal mistake, so

often made by mothers, which at first leads them to imagine that their

children are so innocent, and in later years causes them many hours of

bitterness because they realize they do not possess their children's

trust. In the matter of trust it is for the mother to take the first step;

the children who do not trust their mothers are, for the most part, merely

remembering the lesson they learned at their mother's knee.

The number of little books and pamphlets dealing with the

question of the sexual enlightenment of the young--whether

intended to be read by the young or offering guidance to mothers

and teachers in the task of imparting knowledge--has become very

large indeed during recent years in America, England, and

especially Germany, where there has been of late an enormous

production of such literature. The late Ben Elmy, writing under

the pseudonym of "Ellis Ethelmer," published two booklets, _Baby

Buds_, and _The Human Flower_ (issued by Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy,

Buxton House, Congleton), which state the facts in a simple and

delicate manner, though the author was not a notably reliable

guide on the scientific aspects of these questions. A charming

conversation between a mother and child, from a French source, is

reprinted by Edward Carpenter at the end of his _Love's Coming of

Age. How We Are Born_, by Mrs. N.J. (apparently a Russian lady

writing in English), prefaced by J.H. Badley, is satisfactory.

Mention may also be made of _The Wonder of Life_, by Mary Tudor

Pole. Margaret Morley's _Song of Life_, an American book, which I

have not seen, has been highly praised. Most of these books are

intended for quite young children, and while they explain more or

less clearly the origin of babies, nearly always starting with

the facts of plant life, they touch very slightly, if at all, on

the relations of the sexes.

Mrs. Ennis Richmond's books, largely addressed to mothers, deal

with these questions in a very sane, direct, and admirable

manner, and Canon Lyttelton's books, discussing such questions

generally, are also excellent. Most of the books now to be

mentioned are intended to be read by boys and girls who have

reached the age of puberty. They refer more or less precisely to

sexual relationships, and they usually touch on masturbation.

_The Story of Life_, written by a very accomplished woman, the

late Ellice Hopkins, is somewhat vague, and introduces too many

exalted religious ideas. Arthur Trewby's _Healthy Boyhood_ is a

little book of wholesome tendency; it deals specially with

masturbation. _A Talk with Boys About Themselves_ and _A Talk

with Girls About Themselves_, both by Edward Bruce Kirk (the

latter book written in conjunction with a lady) deal with general

as well as sexual hygiene. There could be no better book to put

into the hands of a boy or girl at puberty than M.A. Warren's

_Almost Fourteen_, written by an American school teacher in 1892.

It was a most charming and delicately written book, which could

not have offended the innocence of the most sensitive maiden.

Nothing, however, is sacred to prurience, and it was easy for the

prurient to capture the law and obtain (in 1897) legal

condemnation of this book as "obscene." Anything which sexually

excites a prurient mind is, it is true, "obscene" for that mind,

for, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder remarks, obscenity is "the

contribution of the reading mind," but we need such books as this

in order to diminish the number of prurient minds, and the

condemnation of so entirely admirable a book makes, not for

morality, but for immorality. I am told that the book was

subsequently issued anew with most of its best portions omitted,

and it is stated by Schroeder (_Liberty of Speech and Press

Essential to Purity Propaganda_, p. 34) that the author was

compelled to resign his position as a public school principal.

Maria Lischnewska's _Geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder_

(reprinted from _Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 4 and 5) is a most

admirable and thorough discussion of the whole question of sexual

education, though the writer is more interested in the teacher's

share in this question than in the mother's. Suggestions to

mothers are contained in Hugo Salus, _Wo kommen die Kinder her?_,

E. Stiehl, _Eine Mutterpflicht_, and many other books. Dr. Alfred

Kind strongly recommends Ludwig Gurlitt's _Der Verkehr mit meinem

Kindern_, more especially in its combination of sexual education

with artistic education. Many similar books are referred to by

Bloch, in his _Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. xxvi.

I have enumerated the names of these little books because they

are frequently issued in a semi-private manner, and are seldom

easy to procure or to hear of. The propagation of such books

seems to be felt to be almost a disgraceful action, only to be

performed by stealth. And such a feeling seems not unnatural when

we see, as in the case of the author of _Almost Fourteen_, that a

nominally civilized country, instead of loading with honors a man

who has worked for its moral and physical welfare, seeks so far

as it can to ruin him.

I may add that while it would usually be very helpful to a mother

to be acquainted with a few of the booklets I have named, she

would do well, in actually talking to her children, to rely

mainly on her own knowledge and inspiration.

The sexual education which it is the mother's duty and privilege to

initiate during her child's early years cannot and ought not to be

technical. It is not of the nature of formal instruction but is a private

and intimate initiation. No doubt the mother must herself be taught.[24]

But the education she needs is mainly an education in love and insight.

The actual facts which she requires to use at this early stage are very

simple. Her main task is to make clear the child's own intimate relations

to herself and to show that all young things have a similar intimate

relation to their mothers; in generalizing on this point the egg is the

simplest and most fundamental type to explain the origin of the individual

life, for the idea of the egg--in its widest sense as the seed--not only

has its truth for the human creature but may be applied throughout the

animal and vegetable world. In this explanation the child's physical

relationship to his father is not necessarily at first involved; it may be

left to a further stage or until the child's questions lead up to it.

Apart from his interest in his origin, the child is also interested in his

sexual, or as they seem to him exclusively, his excretory organs, and in

those of other people, his sisters and parents. On these points, at this

age, his mother may simply and naturally satisfy his simple and natural

curiosity, calling things by precise names, whether the names used are

common or uncommon being a matter in regard to which she may exercise her

judgment and taste. In this manner the mother will, indirectly, be able to

safeguard her child at the outset against the prudish and prurient notions

alike which he will encounter later. She will also without unnatural

stress be able to lead the child into a reverential attitude towards his

own organs and so exert an influence against any undesirable tampering

with them. In talking with him about the origin of life and about his own

body and functions, in however elementary a fashion, she will have

initiated him both in sexual knowledge and in sexual hygiene.

The mother who establishes a relationship of confidence with her child

during these first years will probably, if she possesses any measure of

wisdom and tact, be able to preserve it even after the epoch of puberty

into the difficult years of adolescence. But as an educator in the

narrower sense her functions will, in most cases, end at or before

puberty. A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance

with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would

usually be supplied by the school.

The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a

pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and

the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts

of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards. He insists much

on this subject in his great treatise, the _Elementarwerk_

(1770-1774). The questions of children are to be answered

truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at

anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations. They are

to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual

irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset.

Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal

disease. Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be

shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his

practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to

be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, _La Rèforme de

l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitième siècle: Basedow et le

Philanthropinisme_, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272). Basedow was too far

ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence

in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.

Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician,

Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to

promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations. In his

remarkable book, _Hygeia_, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV)

he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that

"discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom," and

deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of

sexual education. He insists on the great importance of lectures

on natural history which, he had found, could be given with

perfect propriety to a mixed audience. His experiences had shown

that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy,

even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from

this point of view. He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to

gain his first knowledge of sexual difference from anatomical

subjects, the dignity of death being a noble prelude to the

knowledge of sex and depriving it forever of morbid prurience.

It is scarcely necessary to remark that this method of teaching

children the elements of sexual anatomy in the _post-mortem_ room

has not found many advocates or followers; it is undesirable, for

it fails to take into account the sensitiveness of children to

such impressions, and it is unnecessary, for it is just as easy

to teach the dignity of life as the dignity of death.

The duty of the school to impart education in matters of sex to

children has in recent years been vigorously and ably advocated

by Maria Lischnewska (op. cit.), who speaks with thirty years'

experience as a teacher and an intimate acquaintance with

children and their home life. She argues that among the mass of

the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every

opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is

no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them,

parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually

incapable of aiding their children here. That the school should

assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in

accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life. She

would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during

the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive

instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual

organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow

being selected by preference. The facts of gestation would of

course be included. When this stage was reached it would be easy

to pass on to the human species with the statement: "Just in the

same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in

the mother's body."

It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska's

argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the

instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of

progress. Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and

impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in

matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history. It would

supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the

information the child had already received from its mother. But

it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and

intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child.

That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible

among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will

adequately take its place.

There can be no doubt, however, that while in the future the school will

most probably be regarded as the proper place in which to teach the

elements of physiology--and not as at present a merely emasculated and

effeminated physiology--the introduction of such reformed teaching is as

yet impracticable in many communities. A coarse and ill-bred community

moves in a vicious circle. Its members are brought up to believe that sex

matters are filthy, and when they become adults they protest violently

against their children being taught this filthy knowledge. The teacher's

task is thus rendered at the best difficult, and under democratic

conditions impossible. We cannot, therefore, hope for any immediate

introduction of sexual physiology into schools, even in the unobtrusive

form in which alone it could properly be introduced, that is to say as a

natural and inevitable part of general physiology.

This objection to animal physiology by no means applies, however, to

botany. There can be little doubt that botany is of all the natural

sciences that which best admits of this incidental instruction in the

fundamental facts of sex, when we are concerned with children below the

age of puberty. There are at least two reasons why this should be so. In

the first place botany really presents the beginnings of sex, in their

most naked and essential forms; it makes clear the nature, origin, and

significance of sex. In the second place, in dealing with plants the facts

of sex can be stated to children of either sex or any age quite plainly

and nakedly without any reserve, for no one nowadays regards the botanical

facts of sex as in any way offensive. The expounder of sex in plants also

has on his side the advantage of being able to assert, without question,

the entire beauty of the sexual process. He is not confronted by the

ignorance, bad education, and false associations which have made it so

difficult either to see or to show the beauty of sex in animals. From the

sex-life of plants to the sex-life of the lower animals there is, however,

but a step which the teacher, according to his discretion, may take.

An early educational authority, Salzmann, in 1785 advocated the

sexual enlightenment of children by first teaching them botany,

to be followed by zoölogy. In modern times the method of

imparting sex knowledge to children by means, in the first place,

of botany, has been generally advocated, and from the most

various quarters. Thus Marro (_La Pubertà_, p. 300) recommends

this plan. J. Hudrey-Menos ("La Question du Sexe dans

l'Education," _Revue Socialiste_, June, 1895), gives the same

advice. Rudolf Sommer, in a paper entitled "Mädchenerziehung oder

Menschenbildung?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I,

Heft 3) recommends that the first introduction of sex knowledge

to children should be made by talking to them on simple natural

history subjects; "there are endless opportunities," he remarks,

"over a fairy-tale, or a walk, or a fruit, or an egg, the sowing

of seed or the nest-building of birds." Canon Lyttelton

(_Training of the Young in Laws of Sex_, pp. 74 et seq.) advises

a somewhat similar method, though laying chief stress on personal

confidence between the child and his mother; "reference is made

to the animal world just so far as the child's knowledge extends,

so as to prevent the new facts from being viewed in isolation,

but the main emphasis is laid on his feeling for his mother and

the instinct which exists in nearly all children of reverence due

to the maternal relation;" he adds that, however difficult the

subject may seem, the essential facts of paternity must also be

explained to boys and girls alike. Keyes, again (_New York

Medical Journal_, Feb. 10, 1906), advocates teaching children

from an early age the sexual facts of plant life and also

concerning insects and other lower animals, and so gradually

leading up to human beings, the matter being thus robbed of its

unwholesome mystery. Mrs. Ennis Richmond (_Boyhood_, p. 62)

recommends that children should be sent to spend some of their

time upon a farm, so that they may not only become acquainted

with the general facts of the natural world, but also with the

sexual lives of animals, learning things which it is difficult to

teach verbally. Karina Karin ("Wie erzieht man ein Kind zür

wissenden Keuschheit?" _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I,

Heft 4), reproducing some of her talks with her nine-year old

son, from the time that he first asked her where children came

from, shows how she began with telling him about flowers, to pass

on to fish and birds, and finally to the facts of human

pregnancy, showing him pictures from an obstetrical manual of the

child in its mother's body. It may be added that the advisability

of beginning the sex teaching of children with the facts of

botany was repeatedly emphasized by various speakers at the

special meeting of the German Congress for Combating Venereal

Disease devoted to the subject of sexual instruction

(_Sexualpädagogik_, especially pp. 36, 47, 76).

The transition from botany to the elementary zoölogy of the lower animals,

to human anatomy and physiology, and to the science of anthropology based

on these, is simple and natural. It is not likely to be taken in detail

until the age of puberty. Sex enters into all these subjects and should

not be artificially excluded from them in the education of either boys or

girls. The text-books from which the sexual system is entirely omitted

ought no longer to be tolerated. The nature and secretion of the

testicles, the meaning of the ovaries and of menstruation, as well as the

significance of metabolism and the urinary excretion, should be clear in

their main lines to all boys and girls who have reached the age of

puberty.

At puberty there arises a new and powerful reason why boys and girls

should receive definite instruction in matters of sex. Before that age it

is possible for the foolish parent to imagine that a child may be

preserved in ignorant innocence.[25] At puberty that belief is obviously

no longer possible. The efflorescence of puberty with the development of

the sexual organs, the appearance of hair in unfamiliar places, the

general related organic changes, the spontaneous and perhaps alarming

occurrence in boys of seminal emissions, and in girls of menstruation, the

unaccustomed and sometimes acute recognition of sexual desire accompanied

by new sensations in the sexual organs and leading perhaps to

masturbation; all these arouse, as we cannot fail to realize, a new

anxiety in the boy's or girl's mind, and a new curiosity, all the more

acute in many cases because it is carefully concealed as too private, and

even too shameful, to speak of to anyone. In boys, especially if of

sensitive temperament, the suffering thus caused may be keen and

prolonged.

A doctor of philosophy, prominent in his profession, wrote to

Stanley Hall (_Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 452): "My entire youth,

from six to eighteen, was made miserable from lack of knowledge

that any one who knew anything of the nature of puberty might

have given; this long sense of defect, dread of operation, shame

and worry, has left an indelible mark." There are certainly many

men who could say the same. Lancaster ("Psychology and Pedagogy

of Adolescence," _Pedagogical Seminary_, July, 1897, pp. 123-5)

speaks strongly regarding the evils of ignorance of sexual

hygiene, and the terrible fact that millions of youths are always

in the hands of quacks who dupe them into the belief that they

are on the road to an awful destiny merely because they have

occasional emissions during sleep. "This is not a light matter,"

Lancaster declares. "It strikes at the very foundation of our

inmost life. It deals with the reproductory part of our natures,

and must have a deep hereditary influence. It is a natural result

of the foolish false modesty shown regarding all sex instruction.

Every boy should be taught the simple physiological facts before

his life is forever blighted by this cause." Lancaster has had in

his hands one thousand letters, mostly written by young people,

who were usually normal, and addressed to quacks who were duping

them. From time to time the suicides of youths from this cause

are reported, and in many mysterious suicides this has

undoubtedly been the real cause. "Week after week," writes the

_British Medical Journal_ in an editorial ("Dangerous Quack

Literature: The Moral of a Recent Suicide," Oct. 1, 1892), "we

receive despairing letters from those victims of foul birds of

prey who have obtained their first hold on those they rob,

torture and often ruin, by advertisements inserted by newspapers

of a respectable, nay, even of a valuable and respected,

character." It is added that the wealthy proprietors of such

newspapers, often enjoying a reputation for benevolence, even

when the matter is brought before them, refuse to interfere as

they would thereby lose a source of income, and a censorship of

advertisements is proposed. This, however, is difficult, and

would be quite unnecessary if youths received proper

enlightenment from their natural guardians.

Masturbation, and the fear that by an occasional and perhaps

outgrown practice of masturbation they have sometimes done

themselves irreparable injury, is a common source of anxiety to

boys. It has long been a question whether a boy should be warned

against masturbation. At a meeting of the Section of Psychology

of the British Medical Association some years ago, four speakers,

including the President (Dr. Blandford), were decidedly in favor

of parents warning their children against masturbation, while

three speakers were decidedly against that course, mainly on the

ground that it was possible to pass through even a public school

life without hearing of masturbation, and also that the warning

against masturbation might encourage the practice. It is,

however, becoming more and more clearly realized that ignorance,

even if it can be maintained, is a perilous possession, while the

teaching that consists, as it should, in a loving mother's

counsel to the child from his earliest years to treat his sexual

parts with care and respect, can only lead to masturbation in the

child who is already irresistibly impelled to it. Most of the sex

manuals for boys touch on masturbation, sometimes exaggerating

its dangers; such exaggeration should be avoided, for it leads to

far worse evils than those it attempts to prevent. It seems

undesirable that any warnings about masturbation should form part

of school instruction, unless under very special circumstances.

The sexual instruction imparted in the school on sexual as on

other subjects should be absolutely impersonal and objective.

At this point we approach one of the difficulties in the way of

sexual enlightenment: the ignorance or unwisdom of the would-be

teachers. This difficulty at present exists both in the home and

the school, while it destroys the value of many manuals written

for the sexual instruction of the young. The mother, who ought to

be the child's confidant and guide in matters of sexual

education, and could naturally be so if left to her own healthy

instincts, has usually been brought up in false traditions which

it requires a high degree of intelligence and character to escape

from; the school-teacher, even if only called upon to give

instruction in natural history, is oppressed by the same

traditions, and by false shame concerning the whole subject of

sex; the writer of manuals on sex has often only freed himself

from these bonds in order to advocate dogmatic, unscientific, and

sometimes mischievous opinions which have been evolved in entire

ignorance of the real facts. As Moll says (Das _Sexualleben des

Kindes_, p. 276), necessary as sexual enlightenment is, we cannot

help feeling a little skeptical as to its results so long as

those who ought to enlighten are themselves often in need of

enlightenment. He refers also to the fact that even among

competent authorities there is difference of opinion concerning

important matters, as, for instance, whether masturbation is

physiological at the first development of the sexual impulse and

how far sexual abstinence is beneficial. But it is evident that

the difficulties due to false tradition and ignorance will

diminish as sound traditions and better knowledge become more

widely diffused.

The girl at puberty is usually less keenly and definitely conscious of her

sexual nature than the boy. But the risks she runs from sexual ignorance,

though for the most part different, are more subtle and less easy to

repair. She is often extremely inquisitive concerning these matters; the

thoughts of adolescent girls, and often their conversation among

themselves, revolve much around sexual and allied mysteries. Even in the

matter of conscious sexual impulse the girl is often not so widely

different from her brother, nor so much less likely to escape the

contamination of evil communications, so that the scruples of foolish and

ignorant persons who dread to "sully her purity" by proper instruction are

exceedingly misplaced.

Conversations dealing with the important mysteries of human

nature, Obici and Marchesini were told by ladies who had formerly

been pupils in Italian Normal Schools, are the order of the day

in schools and colleges, and specially circle around procreation,

the most difficult mystery of all. In England, even in the best

and most modern colleges, in which games and physical exercise

are much cultivated, I am told that "the majority of the girls

are entirely ignorant of all sexual matters, and understand

nothing whatever about them. But they do wonder about them, and

talk about them constantly" (see Appendix D, "The School

Friendships of Girls," in the second volume of these _Studies_).

"The restricted life and fettered mind of girls," wrote a

well-known physician some years ago (J. Milner Fothergill,

_Adolescence_, 1880, pp. 20, 22) "leave them with less to

actively occupy their thoughts than is the case with boys. They

are studiously taught concealment, and a girl may be a perfect

model of outward decorum and yet have a very filthy mind. The

prudishness with which she is brought up leaves her no

alternative but to view her passions from the nasty side of human

nature. All healthy thought on the subject is vigorously

repressed. Everything is done to darken her mind and foul her

imagination by throwing her back on her own thoughts and a

literature with which she is ashamed to own acquaintance. It is

opposed to a girl's best interests to prevent her from having

fair and just conceptions about herself and her nature. Many a

fair young girl is irredeemably ruined on the very threshold of

life, herself and her family disgraced, from ignorance as much as

from vice. When the moment of temptation comes she falls without

any palpable resistance; she has no trained educated power of

resistance within herself; her whole future hangs, not upon

herself, but upon the perfection of the social safeguards by

which she is hedged and surrounded." Under the free social order

of America to-day much the same results are found. In an

instructive article ("Why Girls Go Wrong," _Ladies' Home

Journal_, Jan., 1907) B.B. Lindsey, who, as Judge of the Juvenile

Court of Denver, is able to speak with authority, brings forward

ample evidence on this head. Both girls and boys, he has found,

sometimes possess manuscript books in which they had written down

the crudest sexual things. These children were often sweet-faced,

pleasant, refined and intelligent, and they had respectable

parents; but no one had ever spoken to them of sex matters,

except the worst of their school-fellows or some coarse-minded

and reckless adult. By careful inquiry Lindsey found that only in

one in twenty cases had the parents ever spoken to the children

of sexual subjects. In nearly every case the children

acknowledged that it was not from their parents, but in the

street or from older companions, that they learnt the facts of

sex. The parents usually imagined that their children were

absolutely ignorant of these matters, and were astonished to

realize their mistake; "parents do not know their children, nor

have they the least idea of what their children know, or what

their children talk about and do when away from them." The

parents guilty of this neglect to instruct their children, are,

Lindsey declares, traitors to their children. From his own

experience he judges that nine-tenths of the girls who "go

wrong," whether or not they sink in the world, do so owing to the

inattention of their parents, and that in the case of most

prostitutes the mischief is really done before the age of twelve;

"every wayward girl I have talked to has assured me of this

truth." He considers that nine-tenths of school-boys and

school-girls, in town or country, are very inquisitive regarding

matters of sex, and, to his own amazement, he has found that in

the girls this is as marked as in the boys.

It is the business of the girl's mother, at least as much as of the boy's,

to watch over her child from the earliest years and to win her confidence

in all the intimate and personal matters of sex. With these aspects the

school cannot properly meddle. But in matters of physical sexual hygiene,

notably menstruation, in regard to which all girls stand on the same

level, it is certainly the duty of the teacher to take an actively

watchful part, and, moreover, to direct the general work of education

accordingly, and to ensure that the pupil shall rest whenever that may

seem to be desirable. This is part of the very elements of the education

of girls. To disregard it should disqualify a teacher from taking further

share in educational work. Yet it is constantly and persistently

neglected. A large number of girls have not even been prepared by their

mothers or teachers for the first onset of the menstrual flow, sometimes

with disastrous results both to their bodily and mental health.[26]

"I know of no large girl's school," wrote a distinguished

gynæcologist, Sir W.S. Playfair ("Education and Training of Girls

at Puberty," _British Medical Journal_, Dec. 7, 1895), "in which

the absolute distinction which exists between boys and girls as

regards the dominant menstrual function is systematically cared

for and attended to. Indeed, the feeling of all schoolmistresses

is distinctly antagonistic to such an admission. The contention

is that there is no real difference between an adolescent male

and female, that what is good for one is good for the other, and

that such as there is is due to the evil customs of the past

which have denied to women the ambitions and advantages open to

men, and that this will disappear when a happier era is

inaugurated. If this be so, how comes it that while every

practical physician of experience has seen many cases of anæmia

and chlorosis in girls, accompanied by amenorrhæa or menorrhagia,

headaches, palpitations, emaciation, and all the familiar

accompaniments of breakdown, an analogous condition in a

school-boy is so rare that it may well be doubted if it is ever

seen at all?"

It is, however, only the excuses for this almost criminal

negligence, as it ought to be considered, which are new; the

negligence itself is ancient. Half a century earlier, before the

new era of feminine education, another distinguished

gynæcologist, Tilt (_Elements of Health and Principles of Female

Hygiene_, 1852, p. 18) stated that from a statistical inquiry

regarding the onset of menstruation in nearly one thousand women

he found that "25 per cent. were totally unprepared for its

appearance; that thirteen out of the twenty-five were much

frightened, screamed, or went into hysterical fits; and that six

out of the thirteen thought themselves wounded and washed with

cold water. Of those frightened ... the general health was

seriously impaired."

Engelmann, after stating that his experience in America was

similar to Tilt's in England, continues ("The Health of the

American Girl," _Transactions of the Southern Surgical and

Gynæcological Society_, 1890): "To innumerable women has fright,

nervous and emotional excitement, exposure to cold, brought

injury at puberty. What more natural than that the anxious girl,

surprised by the sudden and unexpected loss of the precious

life-fluid, should seek to check the bleeding wound--as she

supposes? For this purpose the use of cold washes and

applications is common, some even seek to stop the flow by a cold

bath, as was done by a now careful mother, who long lay at the

point of death from the result of such indiscretion, and but

slowly, by years of care, regained her health. The terrible

warning has not been lost, and mindful of her own experience she

has taught her children a lesson which but few are fortunate

enough to learn--the individual care during periods of functional

activity which is needful for the preservation of woman's

health."

In a study of one hundred and twenty-five American high school

girls Dr. Helen Kennedy refers to the "modesty" which makes it

impossible even for mothers and daughters to speak to each other

concerning the menstrual functions. "Thirty-six girls in this

high school passed into womanhood with no knowledge whatever,

from a proper source, of all that makes them women. Thirty-nine

were probably not much wiser, for they stated that they had

received some instruction, but had not talked freely on the

matter. From the fact that the curious girl did not talk freely

on what naturally interested her, it is possible she was put off

with a few words as to personal care, and a reprimand for her

curiosity. Less than half of the girls felt free to talk with

their mothers of this most important matter!" (Helen Kennedy,

"Effects of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence,"

_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1896.)

The same state of things probably also prevails in other

countries. Thus, as regards France, Edmond de Goncourt in

_Chérie_ (pp. 137-139) described the terror of his young heroine

at the appearance of the first menstrual period for which she

had never been prepared. He adds: "It is very seldom, indeed,

that women speak of this eventuality. Mothers fear to warn their

daughters, elder sisters dislike confidences with their younger

sisters, governesses are generally mute with girls who have no

mothers or sisters."

Sometimes this leads to suicide or to attempts at suicide. Thus a

few years ago the case was reported in the French newspapers of a

young girl of fifteen, who threw herself into the Seine at

Saint-Ouen. She was rescued, and on being brought before the

police commissioner said that she had been attacked by an

"unknown disease" which had driven her to despair. Discreet

inquiry revealed that the mysterious malady was one common to all

women, and the girl was restored to her insufficiently punished

parents.

Half a century ago the sexual life of girls was ignored by their parents

and teachers from reasons of prudishness; at the present time, when quite

different ideas prevail regarding feminine education, it is ignored on the

ground that girls should be as independent of their physiological sexual

life as boys are. The fact that this mischievous neglect has prevailed

equally under such different conditions indicates clearly that the varying

reasons assigned for it are merely the cloaks of ignorance. With the

growth of knowledge we may reasonably hope that one of the chief evils

which at present undermine in early life not only healthy motherhood but

healthy womanhood generally, may be gradually eliminated. The data now

being accumulated show not only the extreme prevalence of painful,

disordered, and absent menstruation in adolescent girls and young women,

but also the great and sometimes permanent evils inflicted upon even

healthy girls when at the beginning of sexual life they are subjected to

severe strain of any kind. Medical authorities, whichever sex they belong

to, may now be said to be almost or quite unanimous on this point. Some

years ago, indeed, Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, in a very able book, _The

Question of Rest for Women_, concluded that "ordinarily healthy" women may

disregard the menstrual period, but she admitted that forty-six per cent,

of women are not "ordinarily healthy," and a minority which comes so near

to being a majority can by no means be dismissed as a negligible quantity.

Girls themselves, indeed, carried away by the ardor of their pursuit of

work or amusement, are usually recklessly and ignorantly indifferent to

the serious risks they run. But the opinions of teachers are now tending

to agree with medical opinion in recognizing the importance of care and

rest during the years of adolescence, and teachers are even prepared to

admit that a year's rest from hard work during the period that a girl's

sexual life is becoming established, while it may ensure her health and

vigor, is not even a disadvantage from the educational point of view. With

the growth of knowledge and the decay of ancient prejudices, we may

reasonably hope that women will be emancipated from the traditions of a

false civilization, which have forced her to regard her glory as her

shame,--though it has never been so among robust primitive peoples,--and

it is encouraging to find that so distinguished an educator as Principal

Stanley Hall looks forward with confidence to such a time. In his

exhaustive work on _Adolescence_ he writes: "Instead of shame of this

function girls should be taught the greatest reverence for it, and should

help it to normality by regularly stepping aside at stated times for a few

years till it is well established and normal. To higher beings that looked

down upon human life as we do upon flowers, these would be the most

interesting and beautiful hours of blossoming. With more self-knowledge

women will have more self-respect at this time. Savagery reveres this

state and it gives to women a mystic awe. The time may come when we must

even change the divisions of the year for women, leaving to man his week

and giving to her the same number of Sabbaths per year, but in groups of

four successive days per month. When woman asserts her true physiological

rights she will begin here, and will glory in what, in an age of

ignorance, man made her think to be her shame. The pathos about the

leaders of woman's so-called emancipation, is that they, even more than

those they would persuade, accept man's estimate of this state."[27]

These wise words cannot be too deeply pondered. The pathos of the

situation has indeed been--at all events in the past for to-day a more

enlightened generation is growing up--that the very leaders of the woman's

movement have often betrayed the cause of women. They have adopted the

ideals of men, they have urged women to become second-rate men, they have

declared that the healthy natural woman disregards the presence of her

menstrual functions. This is the very reverse of the truth. "They claim,"

remarks Engelmann, "that woman in her natural state is the physical equal

of man, and constantly point to the primitive woman, the female of savage

peoples, as an example of this supposed axiom. Do they know how well this

same savage is aware of the weakness of woman and her susceptibility at

certain periods of her life? And with what care he protects her from harm

at these periods? I believe not. The importance of surrounding women with

certain precautions during the height of these great functional waves of

her existence was appreciated by all peoples living in an approximately

natural state, by all races at all times; and among their comparatively

few religious customs this one, affording rest to women, was most

persistently adhered to." It is among the white races alone that the

sexual invalidism of women prevails, and it is the white races alone,

which, outgrowing the religious ideas with which the menstrual seclusion

of women was associated, have flung away that beneficent seclusion itself,

throwing away the baby with the bath in an almost literal sense.[28]

In Germany Tobler has investigated the menstrual histories of

over one thousand women (_Monatsschrift für Geburtshülfe und

Gynäkologie_, July, 1905). He finds that in the great majority of

women at the present day menstruation is associated with

distinct deterioration of the general health, and diminution of

functional energy. In 26 per cent. local pain, general malaise,

and mental and nervous anomalies coexisted; in larger proportion

come the cases in which local pain, general weak health or

psychic abnormality was experienced alone at this period. In 16

per cent. only none of these symptoms were experienced. In a very

small separate group the physical and mental functions were

stronger during this period, but in half of these cases there was

distinct disturbance during the intermenstrual period. Tobler

concludes that, while menstruation itself is physiological, all

these disturbances are pathological.

As far as England is concerned, at a discussion of normal and

painful menstruation at a meeting of the British Association of

Registered Medical Women on the 7th of July, 1908, it was stated

by Miss Bentham that 50 per cent. of girls in good position

suffered from painful menstruation. Mrs. Dunnett said it usually

occurred between the ages of twenty-four and thirty, being

frequently due to neglect to rest during menstruation in the

earlier years, and Mrs. Grainger Evans had found that this

condition was very common among elementary school teachers who

had worked hard for examinations during early girlhood.

In America various investigations have been carried out, showing

the prevalence of disturbance in the sexual health of school

girls and young women. Thus Dr. Helen P. Kennedy obtained

elaborate data concerning the menstrual life of one hundred and

twenty-five high school girls of the average age of eighteen

("Effect of High School Work upon Girls During Adolescence,"

_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1896). Only twenty-eight felt no

pain during the period; half the total number experienced

disagreeable symptoms before the period (such as headache,

malaise, irritability of temper), while forty-four complained of

other symptoms besides pain during the period (especially

headache and great weakness). Jane Kelley Sabine (quoted in

_Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, Sept. 15, 1904) found in

New England schools among two thousand girls that 75 per cent.

had menstrual troubles, 90 per cent. had leucorrhoea and ovarian

neuralgia, and 60 per cent. had to give up work for two days

during each month. These results seem more than usually

unfavorable, but are significant, as they cover a large number of

cases. The conditions in the Pacific States are not much better.

Dr. Mary Ritter (in a paper read before the California State

Medical Society in 1903) stated that of 660 Freshmen girls at the

University of California, 67 per cent. were subject to menstrual

disorders, 27 per cent. to headaches, 30 per cent. to backaches,

29 per cent. were habitually constipated, 16 per cent. had

abnormal heart sounds; only 23 per cent. were free from

functional disturbances. Dr. Helen MacMurchey, in an interesting

paper on "Physiological Phenomena Preceding or Accompanying

Menstruation" (_Lancet_, Oct. 5, 1901), by inquiries among one

hundred medical women, nurses, and women teachers in Toronto

concerning the presence or absence of twenty-one different

abnormal menstrual phenomena, found that between 50 and 60 per

cent. admitted that they were liable at this time to disturbed

sleep, to headache, to mental depression, to digestive

disturbance, or to disturbance of the special senses, while about

25 to 50 per cent. were liable to neuralgia, to vertigo, to

excessive nervous energy, to defective nervous and muscular

power, to cutaneous hyperæsthesia, to vasomotor disturbances, to

constipation, to diarrhoea, to increased urination, to cutaneous

eruption, to increased liability to take cold, or to irritating

watery discharges before or after the menstrual discharge. This

inquiry is of much interest, because it clearly brings out the

marked prevalence at menstruation of conditions which, though not

necessarily of any gravity, yet definitely indicate decreased

power of resistance to morbid influences and diminished

efficiency for work.

How serious an impediment menstrual troubles are to a woman is

indicated by the fact that the women who achieve success and fame

seem seldom to be greatly affected by them. To that we may, in

part, attribute the frequency with which leaders of the women's

movement have treated menstruation as a thing of no importance in

a woman's life. Adele Gerhard, and Helene Simon, also, in their

valuable and impartial work, _Mutterschaft und Geistige Arbeit_

(p. 312), failed to find, in their inquiries among women of

distinguished ability, that menstruation was regarded as

seriously disturbing to work.

Of late the suggestion that adolescent girls shall not only rest

from work during two days of the menstrual period, but have an

entire holiday from school during the first year of sexual life,

has frequently been put forward, both from the medical and the

educational side. At the meeting of the Association of Registered

Medical Women, already referred to, Miss Sturge spoke of the good

results obtained in a school where, during the first two years

after puberty, the girls were kept in bed for the first two days

of each menstrual period. Some years ago Dr. G.W. Cook ("Some

Disorders of Menstruation," _American Journal of Obstetrics_,

April, 1896), after giving cases in point, wrote: "It is my

deliberate conviction that no girl should be confined at study

during the year of her puberty, but she should live an outdoor

life." In an article on "Alumna's Children," by "An Alumna"

(_Popular Science Monthly_, May, 1904), dealing with the sexual

invalidism of American women and the severe strain of motherhood

upon them, the author, though she is by no means hostile to

education, which is not, she declares, at fault, pleads for rest

for the pubertal girl. "If the brain claims her whole vitality,

how can there be any proper development? Just as very young

children should give all their strength for some years solely to

physical growth before the brain is allowed to make any

considerable demands, so at this critical period in the life of

the woman nothing should obstruct the right of way of this

important system. A year at the least should be made especially

easy for her, with neither mental nor nervous strain; and

throughout the rest of her school days she should have her

periodical day of rest, free from any study or overexertion." In

another article on the same subject in the same journal ("The

Health of American Girls," Sept., 1907), Nellie Comins Whitaker

advocates a similar course. "I am coming to be convinced,

somewhat against my wish, that there are many cases when the girl

ought to be taken out of school entirely for some months or for a

year _at the period of puberty_." She adds that the chief

obstacle in the way is the girl's own likes and dislikes, and the

ignorance of her mother who has been accustomed to think that

pain is a woman's natural lot.

Such a period of rest from mental strain, while it would fortify

the organism in its resistance to any reasonable strain later,

need by no means be lost for education in the wider sense of the

word, for the education required in classrooms is but a small

part of the education required for life. Nor should it by any

means be reserved merely for the sickly and delicate girl. The

tragic part of the present neglect to give girls a really sound

and fitting education is that the best and finest girls are

thereby so often ruined. Even the English policeman, who

admittedly belongs in physical vigor and nervous balance to the

flower of the population, is unable to bear the strain of his

life, and is said to be worn out in twenty-five years. It is

equally foolish to submit the finest flowers of girlhood to a

strain which is admittedly too severe.

It seems to be clear that the main factor in the common sexual and general

invalidism of girls and young women is bad hygiene, in the first place

consisting in neglect of the menstrual functions and in the second place

in faulty habits generally. In all the more essential matters that concern

the hygiene of the body the traditions of girls--and this seems to be more

especially the case in the Anglo-Saxon countries--are inferior to those of

youths. Women are much more inclined than men to subordinate these things

to what seems to them some more urgent interest or fancy of the moment;

they are trained to wear awkward and constricting garments, they are

indifferent to regular and substantial meals, preferring innutritious and

indigestible foods and drinks; they are apt to disregard the demands of

the bowels and the bladder out of laziness or modesty; they are even

indifferent to physical cleanliness.[29] In a great number of minor ways,

which separately may seem to be of little importance, they play into the

hands of an environment which, not always having been adequately adjusted

to their special needs, would exert a considerable stress and strain even

if they carefully sought to guard themselves against it. It has been found

in an American Women's College in which about half the scholars wore

corsets and half not, that nearly all the honors and prizes went to the

non-corset-wearers. McBride, in bringing forward this fact, pertinently

remarks, "If the wearing of a single style of dress will make this

difference in the lives of young women, and that, too, in their most

vigorous and resistive period, how much difference will a score of

unhealthy habits make, if persisted in for a life-time?"[30]

"It seems evident," A.E. Giles concludes ("Some Points of

Preventive Treatment in the Diseases of Women," _The Hospital_,

April 10, 1897) "that dysmenorrhoea might be to a large extent

prevented by attention to general health and education. Short

hours of work, especially of standing; plenty of outdoor

exercise--tennis, boating, cycling, gymnastics, and walking for

those who cannot afford these; regularity of meals and food of

the proper quality--not the incessant tea and bread and butter

with variation of pastry; the avoidance of overexertion and

prolonged fatigue; these are some of the principal things which

require attention. Let girls pursue their study, but more

leisurely; they will arrive at the same goal, but a little

later." The benefit of allowing free movement and exercise to the

whole body is undoubtedly very great, both as regards the sexual

and general physical health and the mental balance; in order to

insure this it is necessary to avoid heavy and constricting

garments, more especially around the chest, for it is in

respiratory power and chest expansion more than in any other

respect that girls fall behind boys (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis,

_Man and Woman_, Ch. IX). In old days the great obstacle to the

free exercise of girls lay in an ideal of feminine behavior which

involved a prim restraint on every natural movement of the body.

At the present day that ideal is not so fervently preached as of

old, but its traditional influence still to some extent persists,

while there is the further difficulty that adequate time and

opportunity and encouragement are by no means generally afforded

to girls for the cultivation and training of the romping

instincts which are really a serious part of education, for it is

by such free exercise of the whole body that the neuro-muscular

system, the basis of all vital activity, is built up. The neglect

of such education is to-day clearly visible in the structure of

our women. Dr. F. May Dickinson Berry, Medical Examiner to the

Technical Education Board of the London County Council, found

(_British Medical Journal_, May 28, 1904) among over 1,500 girls,

who represent the flower of the schools, since they had obtained

scholarships enabling them to proceed to higher grade schools,

that 22 per cent, presented some degree, not always pronounced,

of lateral curvature of the spine, though such cases were very

rare among the boys. In the same way among a very similar class

of select girls at the Chicago Normal School, Miss Lura Sanborn

(_Doctors' Magazine_, Dec., 1900) found 17 per cent, with spinal

curvature, in some cases of a very pronounced degree. There is no

reason why a girl should not have as straight a back as a boy,

and the cause can only lie in the defective muscular development

which was found in most of the cases, sometimes accompanied by

anæmia. Here and there nowadays, among the better social classes,

there is ample provision for the development of muscular power in

girls, but in any generalized way there is no adequate

opportunity for such exercise, and among the working class, above

all, in the section of it which touches the lower middle class,

although their lives are destined to be filled with a constant

strain on the neuro-muscular system from work at home or in

shops, etc., there is usually a minimum of healthy exercise and

physical development. Dr. W.A.B. Sellman, of Baltimore ("Causes

of Painful Menstruation in Unmarried Women," _American Journal

Obstetrics_, Nov., 1907), emphasizes the admirable results

obtained by moderate physical exercise for young women, and in

training them to care for their bodies and to rest their nervous

systems, while Dr. Charlotte Brown, of San Francisco, rightly

insists on the establishment in all towns and villages alike of

outdoor gymnastic fields for women and girls, and of a building,

in connection with every large school, for training in physical,

manual, and domestic science. The provision of special

playgrounds is necessary where the exercising of girls is so

unfamiliar as to cause an embarrassing amount of attention from

the opposite sex, though when it is an immemorial custom it can

be carried out on the village green without attracting the

slightest attention, as I have seen in Spain, where one cannot

fail to connect it with the physical vigor of the women. In boys'

schools games are not only encouraged, but made compulsory; but

this is by no means a universal rule in girls' schools. It is not

necessary, and is indeed highly undesirable, that the games

adopted should be those of boys. In England especially, where the

movements of women are so often marked by awkwardness, angularity

and lack of grace, it is essential that nothing should be done to

emphasize these characteristics, for where vigor involves

violence we are in the presence of a lack of due neuro-muscular

coördination. Swimming, when possible, and especially some forms

of dancing, are admirably adapted to develop the bodily movements

of women both vigorously and harmoniously (see, e.g., Havelock

Ellis, _Man and Woman_, Ch. VII). At the International Congress

of School Hygiene in 1907 (see, e.g., _British Medical Journal_,

Aug. 24, 1907) Dr. L.H. Gulick, formerly Director of Physical

Training in the Public Schools of New York City, stated that

after many experiments it had been found in the New York

elementary and high schools that folk-dancing constituted the

very best exercise for girls. "The dances selected involved many

contractions of the large muscular masses of the body and had

therefore a great effect on respiration, circulation and

nutrition. Such movements, moreover, when done as dances, could

be carried on three or four times as long without producing

fatigue as formal gymnastics. Many folk-dances were imitative,

sowing and reaping dance, dances expressing trade movements (the

shoemaker's dance), others illustrating attack and defense, or

the pursuit of game. Such neuro-muscular movements were racially

old and fitted in with man's expressive life, and if it were

accepted that the folk-dances really expressed an epitome of

man's neuro-muscular history, as distinguished from mere

permutation of movements, the folk-dance combinations should be

preferred on these biological grounds to the unselected, or even

the physiologically selected. From the æsthetic point of view the

sense of beauty as shown in dancing was far commoner than the

power to sing, paint or model."

It must always be remembered that in realizing the especial demands of

woman's nature, we do not commit ourselves to the belief that higher

education is unfitted for a woman. That question may now be regarded as

settled. There is therefore no longer any need for the feverish anxiety of

the early leaders of feminine education to prove that girls can be

educated exactly as if they were boys, and yield at least as good

educational results. At the present time, indeed, that anxiety is not only

unnecessary but mischievous. It is now more necessary to show that women

have special needs just as men have special needs, and that it is as bad

for women, and therefore, for the world, to force them to accept the

special laws and limitations of men as it would be bad for men, and

therefore, for the world, to force men to accept the special laws and

limitations of women. Each sex must seek to reach the goal by following

the laws of its own nature, even although it remains desirable that, both

in the school and in the world, they should work so far as possible side

by side. The great fact to be remembered always is that, not only are

women, in physical size and physical texture, slighter and finer than men,

but that to an extent altogether unknown among men, their centre of

gravity is apt to be deflected by the series of rhythmic sexual curves on

which they are always living. They are thus more delicately poised and any

kind of stress or strain--cerebral, nervous, or muscular--is more likely

to produce serious disturbance and requires an accurate adjustment to

their special needs.

The fact that it is stress and strain in general, and not

necessarily educational studies, that are injurious to adolescent

women, is sufficiently proved, if proof is necessary, by the fact

that sexual arrest, and physical or nervous breakdown, occur with

extreme frequency in girls who work in shops or mills, even in

girls who have never been to school at all. Even excesses in

athletics--which now not infrequently occur as a reaction against

woman's indifference to physical exercise--are bad. Cycling is

beneficial for women who can ride without pain or discomfort,

and, according to Watkins, it is even beneficial in many diseased

and disordered pelvic conditions, but excessive cycling is evil

in its results on women, more especially by inducing rigidity of

the perineum to an extent which may even prevent childbirth and

necessitate operation. I may add that the same objection applies

to much horse-riding. In the same way everything which causes

shocks to the body is apt to be dangerous to women, since in the

womb they possess a delicately poised organ which varies in

weight at different times, and it would, for instance, be

impossible to commend football as a game for girls. "I do not

believe," wrote Miss H. Ballantine, Director of Vassar College

Gymnasium, to Prof. W. Thomas (_Sex and Society_, p. 22) "women

can ever, no matter what the training, approach men in their

physical achievements; and," she wisely adds, "I see no reason

why they should." There seem, indeed, as has already been

indicated, to be reasons why they should not, especially if they

look forward to becoming mothers. I have noticed that women who

have lived a very robust and athletic outdoor life, so far from

always having the easy confinements which we might anticipate,

sometimes have very seriously difficult times, imperilling the

life of the child. On making this observation to a distinguished

obstetrician, the late Dr. Engelmann, who was an ardent advocate

of physical exercise for women (in e.g. his presidential address,

"The Health of the American Girl," _Transactions Southern

Surgical and Gynæcological Association_, 1890), he replied that

he had himself made the same observation, and that instructors in

physical training, both in America and England, had also told him

of such cases among their pupils. "I hold," he wrote, "precisely

the opinion you express [as to the unfavorable influence of

muscular development in women]. _Athletics_, i.e., overdone

physical training, causes the girl's system to approximate to the

masculine; this is so whether due to sport or necessity. The

woman who indulges in it approximates to the male in her

attributes; this is marked in diminished sexual intensity, and in

increased difficulty of childbirth, with, in time, lessened

fecundity. Healthy habits improve, but masculine muscular

development diminishes, womanly qualities, although it is true

that the peasant and the laboring woman have easy labor. I have

never advocated muscular development for girls, only physical

training, but have perhaps said too much for it and praised it

too unguardedly. In schools and colleges, so far, however, it is

insufficient rather than too much; only the wealthy have too much

golf and athletic sports. I am collecting new material, but from

what I already have seen I am impressed with the truth of what

you say. I am studying the point, and shall elaborate the

explanation." Any publication on this subject was, however,

prevented by Engelmann's death a few years later.

A proper recognition of the special nature of woman, of her peculiar needs

and her dignity, has a significance beyond its importance in education and

hygiene. The traditions and training to which she is subjected in this

matter have a subtle and far-reaching significance, according as they are

good or evil. If she is taught, implicitly or explicitly, contempt for the

characteristics of her own sex, she naturally develops masculine ideals

which may permanently discolor her vision of life and distort her

practical activities; it has been found that as many as fifty per cent. of

American school girls have masculine ideals, while fifteen per cent.

American and no fewer than thirty-four per cent. English school girls

wished to be men, though scarcely any boys wished to be women.[31] With

the same tendency may be connected that neglect to cultivate the emotions,

which, by a mischievously extravagant but inevitable reaction from the

opposite extreme, has sometimes marked the modern training of women. In

the finely developed woman, intelligence is interpenetrated with emotion.

If there is an exaggerated and isolated culture of intelligence a tendency

shows itself to disharmony which breaks up the character or impairs its

completeness. In this connection Reibmayr has remarked that the American

woman may serve as a warning.[32] Within the emotional sphere itself, it

may be added, there is a tendency to disharmony in women owing to the

contradictory nature of the feelings which are traditionally impressed

upon her, a contradiction which dates back indeed to the identification of

sacredness and impurity at the dawn of civilization. "Every girl and

woman," wrote Hellmann, in a pioneering book which pushed a sound

principle to eccentric extremes, "is taught to regard her sexual parts as

a precious and sacred spot, only to be approached by a husband or in

special circumstances a doctor. She is, at the same time, taught to regard

this spot as a kind of water-closet which she ought to be extremely

ashamed to possess, and the mere mention of which should cause a painful

blush."[33] The average unthinking woman accepts the incongruity of this

opposition without question, and grows accustomed to adapt herself to each

of the incompatibles according to circumstances. The more thoughtful woman

works out a private theory of her own. But in very many cases this

mischievous opposition exerts a subtly perverting influence on the whole

outlook towards Nature and life. In a few cases, also, in women of

sensitive temperament, it even undermines and ruins the psychic

personality.

Thus Boris Sidis has recorded a case illustrating the disastrous

results of inculcating on a morbidly sensitive girl the doctrine

of the impurity of women. She was educated in a convent. "While

there she was impressed with the belief that woman is a vessel of

vice and impurity. This seemed to have been imbued in her by one

of the nuns who was very holy and practiced self-mortification.

With the onset of her periods, and with the observation of the

same in the other girls, this doctrine of female impurity was all

the stronger impressed on her sensitive mind." It lapsed,

however, from conscious memory and only came to the foreground in

subsequent years with the exhaustion and fatigue of prolonged

office work. Then she married. Now "she has an extreme abhorrence

of women. Woman, to the patient, is impurity, filth, the very

incarnation of degradation and vice. The house wash must not be

given to a laundry where women work. Nothing must be picked up in

the street, not even the most valuable object, perchance it might

have been dropped by a woman" (Boris Sidis, "Studies in

Psychopathology," _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, April 4,

1907). That is the logical outcome of much of the traditional

teaching which is given to girls. Fortunately, the healthy mind

offers a natural resistance to its complete acceptation, yet it

usually, in some degree, persists and exerts a mischievous

influence.

It is, however, not only in her relations to herself and to her sex that a

girl's thoughts and feelings tend to be distorted by the ignorance or the

false traditions by which she is so often carefully surrounded. Her

happiness in marriage, her whole future career, is put in peril. The

innocent young woman must always risk much in entering the door of

indissoluble marriage; she knows nothing truly of her husband, she knows

nothing of the great laws of love, she knows nothing of her own

possibilities, and, worse still, she is even ignorant of her ignorance.

She runs the risk of losing the game while she is still only beginning to

learn it. To some extent that is quite inevitable if we are to insist

that a woman should bind herself to marry a man before she has experienced

the nature of the forces that marriage may unloose in her. A young girl

believes she possesses a certain character; she arranges her future in

accordance with that character; she marries. Then, in a considerable

proportion of cases (five out of six, according to the novelist Bourget),

within a year or even a week, she finds she was completely mistaken in

herself and in the man she has married; she discovers within her another

self, and that self detests the man to whom she is bound. That is a

possible fate against which only the woman who has already been aroused to

love is entitled to regard herself as fairly protected.

There is, however, a certain kind of protection which it is possible to

afford the bride, even without departing from our most conventional

conceptions of marriage. We can at least insist that she shall be

accurately informed as to the exact nature of her physical relations to

her future husband and be safeguarded from the shocks or the disillusions

which marriage might otherwise bring. Notwithstanding the decay of

prejudices, it is probable that even to-day the majority of women of the

so-called educated class marry with only the vaguest and most inaccurate

notions, picked up more or less clandestinely, concerning the nature of

the sexual relationships. So highly intelligent a woman as Madame Adam has

stated that she believed herself bound to marry a man who had kissed her

on the mouth, imagining that to be the supreme act of sexual union,[34]

and it has frequently happened that women have married sexually inverted

persons of their own sex, not always knowingly, but believing them to be

men, and never discovering their mistake; it is not long indeed since in

America three women were thus successively married to the same woman, none

of them apparently ever finding out the real sex of the "husband." "The

civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar'

often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites

about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in

marriage than outside it.[35] The girl is full of vague and romantic faith

in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in

sentimental novels from which every touch of wholesome reality has been

carefully omitted. "All the candor of faith is there," as Sénancour puts

it in his book _De l'Amour_, "the desires of inexperience, the needs of a

new life, the hopes of an upright heart. She has all the faculties of

love, she must love; she has all the means of pleasure, she must be loved.

Everything expresses love and demands love: this hand formed for sweet

caresses, an eye whose resources are unknown if it must not say that it

consents to be loved, a bosom which is motionless and useless without

love, and will fade without having been worshipped; these feelings that

are so vast, so tender, so voluptuous, the ambition of the heart, the

heroism of passion! She needs must follow the delicious rule which the law

of the world has dictated. That intoxicating part, which she knows so

well, which everything recalls, which the day inspires and the night

commands, what young, sensitive, loving woman can imagine that she shall

not play it?" But when the actual drama of love begins to unroll before

her, and she realizes the true nature of the "intoxicating part" she has

to play, then, it has often happened, the case is altered; she finds

herself altogether unprepared, and is overcome with terror and alarm. All

the felicity of her married life may then hang on a few chances, her

husband's skill and consideration, her own presence of mind. Hirschfeld

records the case of an innocent young girl of seventeen--in this case, it

eventually proved, an invert--who was persuaded to marry but on

discovering what marriage meant energetically resisted her husband's

sexual approaches. He appealed to her mother to explain to her daughter

the nature of "wifely duties." But the young wife replied to her mother's

expostulations, "If that is my wifely duty then it was your parental duty

to have told me beforehand, for, if I had known, I should never have

married." The husband in this case, much in love with his wife, sought for

eight years to over-persuade her, but in vain, and a separation finally

took place.[36] That, no doubt, is an extreme case, but how many innocent

young inverted girls never realize their true nature until after marriage,

and how many perfectly normal girls are so shocked by the too sudden

initiation of marriage that their beautiful early dreams of love never

develop slowly and wholesomely into the acceptance of its still more

beautiful realities?

Before the age of puberty it would seem that the sexual initiation of the

child--apart from such scientific information as would form part of school

courses in botany and zoölogy--should be the exclusive privilege of the

mother, or whomever it may be to whom the mother's duties are delegated.

At puberty more authoritative and precise advice is desirable than the

mother may be able or willing to give. It is at this age that she should

put into her son's or daughter's hands some one or other of the very

numerous manuals to which reference has already been made (page 53),

expounding the physical and moral aspects of the sexual life and the

principles of sexual hygiene. The boy or girl is already, we may take it,

acquainted with the facts of motherhood, and the origin of babies, as well

as, more or less precisely, with the father's part in their procreation.

Whatever manual is now placed in his or her hands should at least deal

summarily, but definitely, with the sexual relationship, and should also

comment, warningly but in no alarmist spirit, with the chief auto-erotic

phenomena, and by no means exclusively with masturbation. Nothing but good

can come of the use of such a manual, if it has been wisely selected; it

will supplant what the mother has already done, what the teacher may still

be doing, and what later may be done by private interview with a doctor.

It has indeed been argued that the boy or girl to whom such literature is

presented will merely make it an opportunity for morbid revelry and

sensual enjoyment. It can well be believed that this may sometimes happen

with boys or girls from whom all sexual facts have always been

mysteriously veiled, and that when at last they find the opportunity of

gratifying their long-repressed and perfectly natural curiosity they are

overcome by the excitement of the event. It could not happen to children

who have been naturally and wholesomely brought up. At a later age, during

adolescence, there is doubtless great advantage in the plan, now

frequently adopted, especially in Germany, of giving lectures, addresses,

or quiet talks to young people of each sex separately. The speaker is

usually a specially selected teacher, a doctor or other qualified person

who may be brought in for this special purpose.

Stanley Hall, after remarking that sexual education should be

chiefly from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, adds:

"It may be that in the future this kind of initiation will again

become an art, and experts will tell us with more confidence how

to do our duty to the manifold exigencies, types and stages of

youth, and instead of feeling baffled and defeated, we shall see

that this age and theme is the supreme opening for the highest

pedagogy to do its best and most transforming work, as well as

being the greatest of all opportunities for the teacher of

religion" (Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 469). "At

Williams College, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Clark," the same

distinguished teacher observes (ib., p. 465), "I have made it a

duty in my departmental teaching to speak very briefly, but

plainly to young men under my instruction, personally if I deemed

it wise, and often, though here only in general terms, before

student bodies, and I believe I have nowhere done more good, but

it is a painful duty. It requires tact and some degree of hard

and strenuous common sense rather than technical knowledge."

It is scarcely necessary to say that the ordinary teacher of

either sex is quite incompetent to speak of sexual hygiene. It is

a task to which all, or some, teachers must be trained. A

beginning in this direction has been made in Germany by the

delivery to teachers of courses of lectures on sexual hygiene in

education. In Prussia the first attempt was made in Breslau when

the central school authorities requested Dr. Martin Chotzen to

deliver such a course to one hundred and fifty teachers who took

the greatest interest in the lectures, which covered the anatomy

of the sexual organs, the development of the sexual instinct, its

chief perversions, venereal diseases, and the importance of the

cultivation of self-control. In _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_

(Bd. i, Heft 7) Dr. Fritz Reuther gives the substance of lectures

which he has delivered to a class of young teachers; they cover

much the same ground as Chotzen's.

There is no evidence that in England the Minister of Education

has yet taken any steps to insure the delivery of lectures on

sexual hygiene to the pupils who are about to leave school. In

Prussia, however, the Ministry of Education has taken an active

interest in this matter, and such lectures are beginning to be

commonly delivered, though attendance at them is not usually

obligatory. Some years ago (in 1900), when it was proposed to

deliver a series of lectures on sexual hygiene to the advanced

pupils in Berlin schools, under the auspices of a society for the

improvement of morals, the municipal authorities withdrew their

permission to use the classrooms, on the ground that "such

lectures would be extremely dangerous to the moral sense of an

audience of the young." The same objection has been made by

municipal officials in France. In Germany, at all events,

however, opinion is rapidly growing more enlightened. In England

little or no progress has yet been made, but in America steps are

being taken in this direction, as by the Chicago Society for

Social Hygiene. It must, indeed, be said that those who oppose

the sexual enlightenment of youth in large cities are directly

allying themselves, whether or not they know it, with the

influences that make for vice and immorality.

Such lectures are also given to girls on leaving school, not only

girls of the well-to-do, but also those of the poor class, who

need them fully as much, and in some respects more. Thus Dr. A.

Heidenhain has published a lecture (_Sexuelle Belehrung der aus

den Volksschule entlassenen Mädchen_, 1907), accompanied by

anatomical tables, which he has delivered to girls about to leave

school, and which is intended to be put into their hands at this

time. Salvat, in a Lyons thesis (_La Dépopulation de la France_,

1903), insists that the hygiene of pregnancy and the care of

infants should form part of the subject of such lectures. These

subjects might well be left, however, to a somewhat later period.

Something is clearly needed beyond lectures on these matters. It should be

the business of the parents or other guardians of every adolescent youth

and girl to arrange that, once at least at this period of life, there

should be a private, personal interview with a medical man to afford an

opportunity for a friendly and confidential talk concerning the main

points of sexual hygiene. The family doctor would be the best for this

duty because he would be familiar with the personal temperament of the

youth and the family tendencies.[37] In the case of girls a woman doctor

would often be preferred. Sex is properly a mystery; and to the unspoilt

youth, it is instinctively so; except in an abstract and technical form it

cannot properly form the subject of lectures. In a private and

individualized conversation between the novice in life and the expert, it

is possible to say many necessary things that could not be said in public,

and it is possible, moreover, for the youth to ask questions which shyness

and reserve make it impossible to put to parents, while the convenient

opportunity of putting them naturally to the expert otherwise seldom or

never occurs. Most youths have their own special ignorances, their own

special difficulties, difficulties and ignorances that could sometimes be

resolved by a word. Yet it by no means infrequently happens that they

carry them far on into adult life because they have lacked the

opportunity, or the skill and assurance to create the opportunity, of

obtaining enlightenment.

It must be clearly understood that these talks are of medical, hygienic,

and physiological character; they are not to be used for retailing moral

platitudes. To make them that would be a fatal mistake. The young are

often very hostile to merely conventional moral maxims, and suspect their

hollowness, not always without reason. The end to be aimed at here is

enlightenment. Certainly knowledge can never be immoral, but nothing is

gained by jumbling up knowledge and morality together.

In emphasizing the nature of the physician's task in this matter as purely

and simply that of wise practical enlightenment, nothing is implied

against the advantages, and indeed the immense value in sexual hygiene, of

the moral, religious, ideal elements of life. It is not the primary

business of the physician to inspire these, but they have a very intimate

relation with the sexual life, and every boy and girl at puberty, and

never before puberty, should be granted the privilege--and not the duty or

the task--of initiation into those elements of the world's life which are,

at the same time, natural functions of the adolescent soul. Here, however,

is the sphere of the religious or ethical teacher. At puberty he has his

great opportunity, the greatest he can ever obtain. The flower of sex that

blossoms in the body at puberty has its spiritual counterpart which at the

same moment blossoms in the soul. The churches from of old have recognized

the religious significance of this moment, for it is this period of life

that they have appointed as the time of confirmation and similar rites.

With the progress of the ages, it is true, such rites become merely formal

and apparently meaningless fossils. But they have a meaning nevertheless,

and are capable of being again vitalized. Nor in their spirit and essence

should they be confined to those who accept supernaturally revealed

religion. They concern all ethical teachers, who must realize that it is

at puberty that they are called upon to inspire or to fortify the great

ideal aspirations which at this period tend spontaneously to arise in the

youth's or maiden's soul.[38]

The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind

of sexual initiation is called for. Before puberty, although the psychic

emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual

emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual

sensations are rare. For the normal boy or girl love is usually an

unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau's words "a state in which the body

has but the smallest place." At the first rising of the sun of sex the

boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body

emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a

great company of singing angels. With the definite eruption of physical

sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in

adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears. Against the

force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving

maternal counsel--the agencies we have so far been concerned with--may be

powerless. In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact

that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new

psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl

at puberty. The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness

of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the

feeling for art and poetry, the craving for religious conceptions and

emotions--all these things awake spontaneously in the unspoiled boy or

girl at puberty. I say "unspoiled," for if these things have been thrust

on the child before puberty when they have yet no meaning for him--as is

unfortunately far too often done, more especially as regards religious

notions--then it is but too likely that he will fail to react properly at

that moment of his development when he would otherwise naturally respond

to them. Under natural conditions this is the period for spiritual

initiation. Now, and not before, is the time for the religious or ethical

teacher as the case may be--for all religions and ethical systems may

equally adapt themselves to this task--to take the boy or girl in hand,

not with any special and obtrusive reference to the sexual impulses but

for the purpose of assisting the development and manifestation of this

psychic puberty, of indirectly aiding the young soul to escape from sexual

dangers by harnessing his chariot to a star that may help to save it from

sticking fast in any miry ruts of the flesh.

Such an initiation, it is important to remark, is more than an

introduction to the sphere of religious sentiment. It is an initiation

into manhood, it must involve a recognition of the masculine even more

than of the feminine virtues. This has been well understood by the finest

primitive races. They constantly give their boys and girls an initiation

at puberty; it is an initiation that involves not merely education in the

ordinary sense, but a stern discipline of the character, feats of

endurance, the trial of character, the testing of the muscles of the soul

as much as of the body.

Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty--involving

physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting

for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes--are

common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly

always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and

hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of

civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability

to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood.

It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern

education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.

The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has

been elaborately described by A.C. Haddon (_Reports

Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Chs. VII

and XII). It lasts a month, involves much severe training and

power of endurance, and includes admirable moral instruction.

Haddon remarks that it formed "a very good discipline," and adds,

"it is not easy to conceive of a more effectual means for a rapid

training."

Among the aborigines of Victoria, Australia, the initiatory

ceremonies, as described by R.H. Mathews ("Some Initiation

Ceremonies," _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1905, Heft 6), last

for seven months, and constitute an admirable discipline. The

boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many

trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort,

sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement,

brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and

folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals

are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation

ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well

as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into

womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina. These

ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (_Northern

Tribes of Central Australia_, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in

British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is

a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months,

and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls

clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the

nymphæ. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is

disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When

the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is

marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy

as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," _British

Medical Journal_, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a

missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and

discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the

tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and

endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2)

In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex

separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that

of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by

night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does

not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults,

with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E.

Gottschling, "The Bawenda," _Journal Anthropological

Institution_, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting

account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary,

Wessmann, _The Bawenda_, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been

fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The

Chensamwali' or Initiation Ceremony of Girls," _Zeitschrift für

Ethnologie_, 1898, Heft 6). At the first sign of menstruation the

girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a grass hut

prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her.

At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and

the women dance round her, no men being present. It was only with

much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony.

The girl is then informed in regard to the hygiene of

menstruation. "Many songs about the relations between men and

women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties

when she becomes a wife.... The girl is taught to be faithful to

her husband, and to try and bear children. The whole matter is

looked upon as a matter of course, and not as a thing to be

ashamed of or to hide, and being thus openly treated of and no

secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are

very virtuous, because the subject of married life has no glamour

for them. When a woman is pregnant she is again danced; this time

all the dancers are naked, and she is taught how to behave and

what to do when the time of her delivery arrives."

Among the Yuman Indians of California, as described by Horatio

Rust ("A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians," _American

Anthropologist_, Jan. to March, 1906, p. 28) the girls are at

puberty prepared for marriage by a ceremony. They are wrapped in

blankets and placed in a warm pit, where they lie looking very

happy as they peer out through their covers. For four days and

nights they lie here (occasionally going away for food), while

the old women of the tribe dance and sing round the pit

constantly. At times the old women throw silver coins among the

crowd to teach the girls to be generous. They also give away

cloth and wheat, to teach them to be kind to the old and needy;

and they sow wild seeds broadcast over the girls to cause them to

be prolific. Finally, all strangers are ordered away, garlands

are placed on the girls' heads, and they are led to a hillside

and shown the large and sacred stone, symbolical of the female

organs of generation and resembling them, which is said to

protect women. Then grain is thrown over all present, and the

ceremony is over.

The Thlinkeet Eskimo women were long noted for their fine

qualities. At puberty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole

year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective

and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests,"

says Bancroft (_Native Races of Pacific_, vol. i, p. 110),

referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be

during this period of confinement that the foundation of her

influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her

character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind

as well as body."

We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood

and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have

merely preserved the shells of initiation in which the core has decayed.

In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present

the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of

some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character

which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly

incomplete.

This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium

of literature. The influence of literature in sexual education thus

extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on

sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater

part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and

auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature

proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy.

The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's

evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative

representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of

love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized

peoples passes through imagination." All literature is thus, to the

adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[39] It depends, to some

extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in

authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or

girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central

facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age

of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it

would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great

ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more

degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature

against the young. All our religious and literary traditions

serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare.

"So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man,

"gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament,

that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of

either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that

the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and

his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused

speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the

sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of

the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out

erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a

Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with

their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same

way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read

the glowing erotic poetry of _Venus and Adonis_, which her

friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model

introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even

its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so

unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and

concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by

showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those

everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of

the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to

conventional pruderies.

We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion

whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to

immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in

what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of

Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of

Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord

Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He

could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare

more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works."

The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an

incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have

been a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of his argument, but it

does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into

which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the

nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds

is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar

interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere

there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be

said that the statements of the great writers about natural

things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the

young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her

delight when a child in the historical books of the Old

Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the

faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is

equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that

these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if

only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love

and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's

shop window.