Pocket Guide To Writing In History

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 Pocket Guide To Writing
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.
 PART V
SEXUAL EDUCATION
Wendla. I have a sister who has been married for two and a half
years, I myself have been made an aunt for the third time, and I
haven’t the least idea how it all comes about. Don’t be cross, Mother
dear, don’t be cross! Whom in the world should I ask but you! Please
tell me, dear Mother. I am ashamed for myself. Please, Mother,
speak! Don’t scold me for asking you about it. Give me an answer—
How does it happen? How does it all come about? You cannot really
deceive yourself that I, who am fourteen years old, still believe in
the stork.
Frau Bergmann. Good Lord, child, but you are peculiar! What
ideas you have! I really can’t do that!
Wendla. But why not, Mother? Why not? It can’t be anything ugly
if everybody is delighted over it!
Frau Bergmann. O—O God protect me! I deserve—— Go get
dressed, child, go get dressed.
Wendla. I’ll go. And suppose your child went out and asked the
chimney sweep?

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XIV

THE MOTHER AND THE CHILD
A tragedy of childhood—The Awakening of Spring, by Frank Wedekind—How we
have ignored the need of the young for sexual enlightenment—The old
method of silence a fatal mistake—Our fear of sex—The question of the sexual
 education of the child—Conflicting opinion—The twin causes of our civilisation
prudery and prurience—The manner in which parents shirk and evade the
natural inquiries of their children about birth and the facts of sex—The
inevitable harm of this action—The early activity of the child’s intelligence—
Foolish stories and lies—Stimulate instead of quiet curiosity—Sex knowledge
gained from servants and vicious companions—This danger from servants
greater in the case of boys—Many young boys seduced by women—The duty
of the mother to instruct her children—The difficulties that hinder parents—
The child and the sexual impulse—The teaching of Freud—The danger from
mistakes in the early training of the child—No age too young for education to
begin—Mistakes that may be made—Our unconscious teaching stronger than
anything we say—The mistake of set lessons—Sex not a subject to be taught
like arithmetic—What is necessary is to tell the child the truth—Its questions
must be answered as soon as they are put—The importance of not arousing
curiosity—The child, not the mother, to be the guide—Cases in which we must
be prepared to fail—The mother cannot always help her child—Recapitulation
—The real difficulty in sexual education arises from our treatment of sex as
something apart from the rest of life—We are afraid—Nothing worth doing can
be done until this is changed.

CHAPTER XIV
THE MOTHER AND THE CHILD
“The child at its mother’s knee is not too young to hear from her lips the sacred
facts concerning his own origin; in a few years, indeed, he will be too old, for he
will have learnt those facts from a worse source, perhaps in the gutter; and
instead of being beautiful to him, as they might and could be, they will be merely
dirty.”—Havelock Ellis.

The quotation I have placed before these three chapters on

Sexual Education, which form the fifth and final section of my book,
is taken from the play, The Awakening of Spring, by Frank
Wedekind; he calls it a tragedy of childhood, and dedicates the work
to parents and to teachers. The play deals with a group of school
children, just entering the age of puberty, and consists mainly of
their conversations one with another. These imaginative young souls
speculate about the mysteries of birth and sex in a manner that is
typical of all children, not mentally inert. Herein rests the great value
of the work: we come to realise the terrible darkness surrounding
the sexual life of the great majority of boys and girls, with the
resulting tragedies that may, and often do, destroy health and even
life. Unable to explain the forces germinating in their nature, these
children are hindered and crushed by the sham decencies and
complacent morality that greet their blind gropings. Never was a
more powerful indictment made against the sham of our educational
system as a preparation for life.
The manner in which, up to the present time, we have ignored the
need of the young for enlightenment and guidance in questions of
such elemental importance to health and well-being is at once
remarkable and difficult to understand. Under the influence of the
idea of the sinfulness and radically evil nature of the sexual life, we
have stood helpless, as if we were faced with a mysterious and
malignant power; we have left the development even of our own
children to the blind hazard of chance. Those among us who were
wiser were not heeded. Celebrated pedagogues of a hundred years
ago, such as Rousseau, Salzmann, Jean Paul and others, expressed
themselves strongly in favour of the early sexual enlightenment of
youth, and gave many valuable suggestions as to the methods of
such teaching. Their wise recommendations remained for the most
part without practical results. Only in recent years, in connection
with the question of the protection of motherhood and the campaign
against prostitution, has interest in the matter been reawakened. A
heightened sense of responsibility has been quickened amongst us.
An increased knowledge, gained by the patient work of investigation
of the sexual impulse, is proving the immense importance of its right
direction in the individual life. This would seem to be forcing us to
act.
To-day it is conceded, even by many who are conservative in their
attitude to sex, that the old plan of silence and leaving this matter to
chance, has been a fatal mistake: we are coming to understand that
every child has a sacred claim to wise training in sex knowledge.
 There can be no doubt of our past guilt. The proof rests in
unnumbered and needless disasters in the lives of almost all of us—
sufferings unendurable and maiming; hurts to our deepest selves,
that we have come to understand only when our thoughts have
been liberated by knowledge.
From our fear of sex, we have become the victims of sex.
What can save us? It is women—the mothers who hold the future
in their keeping. The answer rests with them. Liberation from the
manifold problems of our disordered sexual life depends largely on a
right transmission of knowledge to our children, so that they without
harm may become wise. Such teaching must be given first by the
mother. In this way only, through a trained and wiser motherhood,
making possible the unhampered unfoldment of the children of the
future, can humanity come into its heritage.
This is my firm conviction, my profound belief. And for this reason,
in my book on Motherhood, I have placed the question of sexual
education last, because I hold it to be the most important of all—the
foundation necessary before other changes or reforms can be of any
avail.
There is much that gives me hope. This question of the sexual
education of her children has begun to stir in the conscious thought
of countless mothers. The days of folded hands are happily over.
Mothers of all classes desire knowledge for their children because
they want to save them from suffering and from falling into the
mistakes that they, through want of knowing, have themselves
made.[100]
While, however, mothers, as well as the great mass of
educationalists and reformers, recognise more and more the need
for this knowledge for all children, they are yet uncertain as to how
and when sex teaching should be given.[101] There is too much
hesitating so that often cowardice prevents any action being taken.
And the question, “What shall we teach our children and at what age
ought we first to speak?” is one to which few have as yet found a
certain answer.
The truth is, the vast majority of mothers and teachers are
themselves amazingly and perilously ignorant on the whole subject
of sex. The ban of silence has worked untold evil in our thoughts,
and what makes the difficulty even worse is that we are so very
much afraid of sex it is impossible for us to learn. Hence we go
about seeking mysteries and hunting lies, and completely lose sight
of what should be as clear as daylight—the need of the little child.
The twin curses of our civilisation that fetter the spirit, prudery
and prurience, acting together, have drawn sex into the darkest,
unwholesomest corners of our minds, so that few of us mention the
subject even to our own children without a feeling of shame. So
pitifully afraid are we of the facts of life that we invent fables and lie
to them as to how they were born.
Parents shirk and evade the natural inquiries of their children; very
often no kind of answer is given to their young searchings for the
truth. In other cases foolish fictions that outrage even a child’s
intelligence are repeated, and falsehood piled upon falsehood. For it
is one condition of a lie that it can never stand alone; and when a
mother has lied to her child once, she is compelled to weave a
network of falsehood to sustain her first false statement. She must
go on from one foolish evasion to worse untruths to keep up
appearances. Every story which, like that of the stork or the
gooseberry bush, rests upon a lie, is an outrage to the child. And the
mother’s authority stands upon a veritable quicksand, for the day
will come when the child will not believe her. A careless word may be
spoken by a servant, a companion, or some other, and, if the mother
has not saved herself in time, she will be discovered by her child as
a liar. The whole structure of her pretence and shameful evasions
will totter and fall to ruin. And with it must go her power to influence
her child. Barriers of doubts and silence are raised which, as time
goes on, more and more will separate the child from the parent. And
such barriers once set up can hardly ever be broken through. An
embarrassing sense of shame, rising like a poisonous gas between
mother and child, will work death to any confidence. How many
mothers have been forced in bitterness to cry, “I lied to my child. I
concealed the truth year after year. Now my child turns from me,
and no longer has faith in me or in my words.”
And this failure of duty on the part of the mother works unknown
harm to the child. That is the essential point. Do our children remain
in ignorance of the facts of sex which we, in our fear, fail to teach
them? No, they do not. Girls and boys in tens of thousands take the
course of action threatened by the child Wendla—they go and learn
from others what their mothers have refused to tell them. Few
children fail to discover, either through their own intelligence or by
some information they gain at school or from servants, some kind of
sexual information. Thus too often they glean their first knowledge
of sex from the vulgar, ignorant lips of the prurient.
I marvel at the blindness of parents, who seem unable to
approach this question with even common understanding. Nine
children out of ten gain information upon the relations of the sexes
in the worst possible way. Fortunate is the child who escapes the
contamination of ignorant indecency.
It should be remembered that in children the activity of the
intelligence begins to work at an early age. Curiosity is very
prominent: all children want “to find out.” And their activity will
certainly tend to manifest itself in an inquisitive desire to know many
elementary facts of life, which are dependent upon sex. The primary
and most universal of these desires is the wish to know where
babies come from. The degree of curiosity differs, of course, in
different children; I do not think it is absent from any normal child.
If they do not question their elders, they certainly will talk with one
another. And the shy child, or the child who is kept from other
companions, is not saved from these curiosities: I am inclined to
think that the interest is strengthened and made more dangerous by
repression.
 Many foolish stories are told by mothers, in their blindness and
lack of faith, to put off the child’s natural desire to learn its origin.
There is a curious illusion that children accept these fables, and
really believe that the baby is found in the garden under the
gooseberry tree, or brought by the stork, or by the doctor in his bag.
But the child’s perception is more acute than is believed, and very
rarely is any one deceived. And the mother forgets that by puzzling
the child’s mind with these foolish stories she defeats very surely the
object for which they are invented. The greater the mystery about
sex matters the more will childish curiosity be aroused. We cannot
escape from this. The child thinks much less of what it knows and is
sure of than of what it does not know, but wants to find out.
And the same objection, of stimulating instead of quieting
curiosity, applies to the plan adopted by many parents of telling the
child when it asks these questions that it is too young to understand
and must wait until it is older. This postponement is better than
inventing foolish fables and telling lies, but I am sure it is unwise.
The mother thinks the child is satisfied and forgets. Very rarely is
this the case; the child puzzles alone, its curiosity only quickened by
the hurt that has been given to its sensitive young intelligence. A
wide experience has taught me that the only children who do not
talk or think much about the origin of babies are the children who
know how babies are born.
The silly stories told by parents are supplemented by equally
absurd and often seriously injurious conversations with other
children. Many servants of both sexes are addicted to idle and
irreverent, even if not vicious, talk upon this subject, and by this
means the views of many children, and even their whole future
outlook, upon sex are distorted and besmirched. This is particularly
the case with boys, where any intimacy with servants is much more
dangerous than a similar intimacy in the case of girls.
I must follow this question a little, though it leads me aside from
the main subject of this chapter. Young boys at school and
elsewhere are in constant danger. It is rarely that girls are placed in
a position of intimacy with an adult male, except their father or their
brothers. The very reverse is the case with boys: they are tended,
and when young are washed and bathed, by women servants, their
clothes are looked after by women, in sickness they are nursed by
women, and in innumerable cases they are brought into much more
intimate relations with women than girls are ever brought into with
men.
I would like to say a great deal more about this danger. The part
played by servants in the sexual initiation of boys carelessly left in
their charge, and often when they are still children, is much larger
than usually is credited. It is folly to close our eyes to the evils that
may, and often do, arise. Perhaps in no other matter has the
ignorance of mothers worked greater evils or been more culpable
than it has been here. Nor is it servants alone that have to be feared
in this connection: many boys have been seduced by women, who
would be least suspected of such an act. I could give cases from my
own knowledge: men, at least, will know that I speak the truth. The
facts are ugly, but they may not be overlooked. No mother should be
ignorant on these matters. For myself I would trust my little adopted
son—he is twelve years old—with no servant and with very few
women. This may seem a hard saying, but it is based on a wide
knowledge of what happens to many boys. We expose our children
to manifold dangers which only now are we coming to understand.
We have to accept these things unless we are ready to act.
Even if no such great evil happens, much harm may be done by
vulgar speech. Beautiful and sacred emotions, marvellous processes
of nature, legitimate and essential longings, become associated in
the tender expanding mind of the healthy boy with the unseemly,
the shameful, and the unclean. Where the child should learn to
wonder, he is taught to know shame and to deride. The results are
terrible in many cases.
It is the mother’s duty and privilege unceasingly to watch her
child, but this she can do only if she has knowledge and is wise.
 It must not be thought that I am unmindful of the many and great
difficulties that hinder the actions of parents. Under our present
conditions of almost universal concealments, the sexual education of
our children is, indeed, so difficult a problem that I am conscious of
all manner of obstacles as I attempt to suggest a solution. Of one
thing only am I certain: we can no longer leave this matter safely to
the hazard of chance.
I know well that there are many parents who, fully recognising the
importance of safeguarding their children, yet hold back in fear of
what they think may be the danger of bringing the sex impulses too
early into the child’s focus of consciousness. It is also thought,
though less often said, that in previous generations boys and girls
got on very well without this fad of sex-instruction. But the question
is whether they really did. The widespread prevalence of sexual
troubles (which are only now beginning to be understood and to
gain the attention that for so long they have claimed) is to a large
extent the corollary of our hypocritical or cynical attitude as adults to
the difficulties of youth. We ourselves have “muddled through,” and
we placate our consciences with the whisper, “What we have done,
the youngsters can do also. Let them alone, it’s a beastly awkward
subject to tackle.”
It would be waste of time to answer such arguments. I would
point out only one result of such criminal and cold-blooded
indifference: it is generally the most promising children who are
destroyed through sex struggles. The coarser-fibred children may
escape and come through without great hurt: it is the sensitive
children—who fight and recoil and thus suffer—who are sacrificed by
the total lack of appreciation on the part of their elders of their
difficulties and blind gropings for light, sacrificed sometimes to the
slaying of the body and the soul.
The first objection needs more careful consideration. Here, as I
have pointed out already, the greatest difference of opinion arises in
connection with the questions as to when and how sexual instruction
should be given to children. Some, like myself, plead for the
enlightenment to be as early as possible, in the first years of the
child’s life, so that never may there be a conscious period in which
the child does not know. There are, however, many who disagree
and hold it better, for the reasons I have shown, to defer sexual
instruction till the child is older, to the onset of puberty, or even later.
Perhaps the attitude common to most parents is one of hesitation,
that may be expressed in the question: For how long can we safely
leave this matter alone?
No one will wisely give a dogmatic answer to this question. Yet I
think we can come to a better understanding if we at once put out
of our minds any idea of formal instruction. Sex is not something
outside of life—a subject that we can teach or not teach to our child,
like arithmetic, for instance. This has been our great mistake. And
we shall see our folly more clearly, if for a little time we focus our
attention on the child, and stop our rather useless discussions.
Now it is part of the popular belief about the sexual impulse that it
is absent in childhood, and first appears in the period of life known
as puberty. This is a serious error and one that has brought many
evil consequences, not the least of which has been our failure to
understand the nature of the child. We are now reaping our mistakes
and finding out that the exact opposite of this is the truth. The
remarkable work of Freud, that has opened up a whole new field of
inquiry, has shown us that the sexual instinct is never absent in the
normal child. “In reality,” he states, “the new-born infant brings
sexuality with it into the world, sexual sensations accompany it
through the days of lactation and childhood, and very few children
can fail to experience sexual activities and feelings before the period
of puberty.”[102]
Possibly there is some little exaggeration in this view, for the basis
of our knowledge is still very narrow; but it seems certain we must
accept Freud’s view as in the main right, as, indeed, any one of us
who has had any experience of children may prove for ourselves by
our own observation. Have you ever considered the games of your
young children—the way in which they imitate father and mother,
play the game of the family, and delight in being the parents of their
dolls? Your child is being taught by Nature, and the first appearance
of sex in its heart occurs as simply as the fall of the dew upon the
flowers. It is we, their elders, who in our blundering too often break
in and sully this beautiful unfolding. Sex is not something to be
escaped from. This never can be done. We have, even if against our
will, to accept its presence.
Freud—and his opinion may not be put aside—holds that in all
young children there is present a sexual life more or less
subconscious, which may be exaggerated and even perverted by any
carelessness, neglect, or repression. It is believed that certain
manifestations of infantile activity, notably the excretory functions
and feeding, as also the common habit of thumb-sucking and biting
of the nails, are closely connected with the sexual impulse.
In normal children the sexuality of this infantile period, which lasts
until the third or fourth year, then passes into more or less complete
oblivion. There follows a happy play period during which sex is
latent, and this lasts until puberty approaches. It is during this
period of sexual latency that the psychic forces of the child develop
—forces which, in later years, act as inhibitions on the sexual life
and narrow and direct its expression like dams. But in nervous
children, where frequently there is sexual precocity, this order is very
likely to be disturbed. And the danger may be increased by the over-
fondling of an unwise and voluptuous mother, by an ignorant nurse,
or the suggestion of an older and vicious child, with very detrimental
results. A wrong direction may most easily be given to the child’s
sexual development in its earliest years. Neurotic manifestations
such as hysteria, obsessions, and many sexual perversions, are
traced back by Freud to the influence of the wrongly directed or
repressed erotic experiences of childhood. It seems to be quite clear
that any repression of the instinctive and subconscious infantile
sexuality makes for evil; that the only safe course to follow is the
culture of a healthy and right expression. Freud goes the length of
saying that obsessions are in every case transformed reproaches
which have escaped from the attempted repression and are always
connected with some pleasurable sexual feeling aroused in
childhood.
Now, before I go on further to point out the line of action, and the
change in our attitude to this question, that must follow inevitably
from our knowledge of the early existence in the child of the sexual
impulse, I would wish to underline as strongly as I am able the facts
that we have learnt: (1) Every child is born with a sexual nature; (2)
this infantile sexuality furnishes the groundwork of the later sexual
life; (3) and the individual’s sexual conduct and health will depend,
in part at least, on the peculiarities of this early period of infancy and
childhood; (4) therefore, the sexual desires and instincts with which
the child is born cannot safely be left alone; they must be dealt with
in some way; (5) for a wrong direction to these instincts may most
easily be given by any mistake or neglect on the part of the mother
or those connected with the child; (6) lastly, and most important of
all, repression of sex is always dangerous; any efforts made in this
direction are very likely to lead to evil in the later life of the child.
We have found now the answer to the question we were seeking:
the sexual education of the child should begin in its earliest years,
since there is no age too young for harm to be done by our neglect
or mistakes.
The first teacher must, therefore, be the mother, who is with the
child and should watch over and direct its unfolding nature, by
unceasing and selfless care, in these early years when care counts
for most. And I would state in passing, that here is another reason—
and I hold it the strongest reason of all—why no mother, who is not
forced to do so, should leave her home to work and have thus to
delegate her sacred duty of caring for her child to another.
But again we are faced with difficulties many and various that will
have to be overcome. For while every one must agree that a wise
mother is incomparably the child’s best teacher, it is equally true that
the unwise mother may do incalculable harm. And when we face, as
I am attempting to do, the conditions of the ordinary home, as we
all know it to be under the present guidance of ignorance and
prejudice in these questions, it seems certain that few mothers can
wisely carry out this teaching. Not much hope for the child until this
is changed. Thus, it is clear that the sexual education of the child
will have to begin with changed conditions in the home and sexual
education of the mother.
This is going to be a very difficult task, and I speak here of good
mothers, not of bad ones. It is a painful fact that many mothers,
who are keenly conscious of their responsibility and most anxious to
train their children aright, are too shy to be of much direct use to
them in their sexual education. They cannot free themselves, even
when they wish to do this, from the vulgarisation of the idea of sex
that has resulted from their own training.
There can be nothing gained by pretending that this question of
sexual education is going to be an easy matter. It may be so in
theory, it will not be easy in practice. Sometimes, indeed, I am so
filled with doubts and sadness, that, if doing and saying nothing
were working well, I might be tempted to think that to establish
sexual training under present conditions was even a worse course
than to go on leaving the matter alone. But I know that all is not
well. By continuing our policy of negligence and cowardice we are
holding open the way to disasters in the future, the far-reaching
evils of which we are only now beginning to understand.
It is obvious that sex instruction may be given blunderingly even
with the greatest good-will; I am, indeed, exceedingly doubtful of
the efficacy of any kind of formal teaching. Certainly set lessons, or
even “arranged talks,” should not be given to young children. All
children harbour curiosities regarding their bodily structure and the
basis of life. In an atmosphere of trust, sooner or later they will
express these natural curiosities in a tentative, haphazard way. This
is the psychological moment for the mother’s teaching. The question
asked must be answered truthfully and in terms simplified to the
comprehension of the child. The reply must have the air of being
both candid and confidential: that is to say, it must satisfy curiosity
and at the same time leave the impression that such subjects are to
be avoided in general conversation, not because they are “nasty,”
but because they are so sacred and intimate that they should be
mentioned only to those the child loves and respects. The ideal must
ever be to educate through love, to avoid always repressive
measures, and to aid the expression of the normal sex instincts: let
the child establish its own psychic individuality.
Our unconscious example must always be far stronger in its result
on the child’s mind than anything we can say. Of what use can our
teaching be, if, through our own want of purity, the concealments
that breed curiosity and shame, are evident in all our attitude to our
bodies and to the physical facts of our being? The child is not shown
the duty of reverence for himself; he is not taught the beauty of all
the processes of his young life; the sex organs are left without
proper names, and the child is told that it must not speak of these
parts. We are continuously careless in our conversations and in our
acts before our children. We take them to see picture plays and
allow them to read books and tell them stories in which love is
vulgarised, and all kinds of false statements are allowed. In these
and in numerous other ways, weeds are caused by our folly to
spring up in the child’s mind. We can never undo by any teaching a
sense of shame in sex and love that our actions and thoughtless
words have revealed to the quick intelligence of the child.
It is entirely false to think that the facts of sex plainly and simply
told will shock and seem strange to the young child. It is to the
prurient only that there is anything ugly or disillusioning in birth and
love. The child will receive your information with wonder and
guileless delicacy. The mother need have no fear of her child, only of
herself. The error in all these cases is the error of our own impurity
of thought; the hateful idea that the facts of sex are ugly and
disillusioning. Here we have the key to the whole problem: it
explains the utter helplessness and weakness of our attitude. It will
be very long before this can be changed; the evil is rooted so deeply
in almost all of us.
 A child of four and even younger will begin to ask questions of its
mother. As soon as the questions are put they should be answered
in such a manner that the child’s curiosity is satisfied. And this brings
me to what I hold to be more important than all else. In this difficult
question of sexual enlightenment, it is the child who must be the
guide of the parent. I regard this as the most urgent rule for every
mother. Never arouse sexual curiosity in the child, either directly by
offering instruction on the subject or indirectly by careless speech or
action, but always be ready to satisfy such curiosity at once when it
is present in the child’s consciousness.
This is, of course, to say that every question of the child must be
answered by the truth. It goes without saying, that the mother must
give her answer just as if she were talking on any other subject, or
explaining the function of any other organ of the body. This course
can be adopted only where adults are able to talk of these subjects
without shame. There must be no hushed voices, no special manner
in speaking. Any hint of such feeling or hesitancy on the part of the
mother will communicate itself at once to the quick consciousness of
the child. Here again I am driven back to the difficulty of our own
fear of sex: this is the stumbling-block that hinders the right
teaching of our children.
I know there are many parents who will fear this openness of
speech and action, holding that it is dangerous to break through the
mystery and reserve with which we have surrounded the physical
facts of love. This danger is felt to be specially great in the case of
girls. I am certain this is a very deep mistake. Show the child that
the mystery of sex rests in its sacredness: teach it that, for this
reason, we do not speak of the subject lightly, holding it in too great
reverence for common speech; but never let it be thought of as a
subject tabooed, one on which openness of thought is not nice, for
thus it will become shameful, and uncleanness and not mystery will
keep it in the dark places of the child’s consciousness.
But here I would give a further word of warning to the mother.
She must not expect or desire from her child a continued attention
to her teaching, nor must she force by over-emphasis or any kind of
moral warnings a false sentiment in her teaching. I believe this to be
very important. The child, at the age when such questions first will
be asked and should be answered, will tire very quickly of any
information that the mother gives. It will break off to run away and
play, or will interrupt the most beautiful and carefully prepared
lesson. But if the mother is wise, she will never go beyond the
interest of the child.
Facts communicated in this way and at such natural opportunities
are subconsciously noted and swiftly dismissed from the
consciousness of the child, who soon becomes interested in
something else after the disconnected discursive fashion of childish
thinking. And, when so treated, it will be found that children are not
inordinately interested in these questions; they will break off from
what they are asking you about birth or the procedure of the sexual
act to talk about toy soldiers or dolls. This very carelessness in
attention is, indeed, the immense value of this form of teaching: the
child has the information and yet does not trouble about it, and
ignores it when it is not to the point. Such can never be the case
when the information is given in the form of a set lesson and
interconnected with moral teaching. So important is this that I think
it better and safer for the mother to err on the side of saying too
little than saying too much. All that is essential is that the truth
should be told.
Now this is not going to be easy. Above all else, it is necessary to
establish, as far as is possible, feelings of openness and sympathy
between the mother and her child. And for this it is essential that
the mother must herself have the most absolute faith in the purity of
sex, and in her own physical relationship to her child and to its
father. Without this nothing that is worth gaining can be gained from
any form of teaching. The slightest doubt or uncertainty on the
mother’s part is fatal; then, at once, shame will begin to creep in to
hurt the young and sensitive life.
 There is another matter that must be considered. It is often
stated, by the most careful parents as well as by those who are
careless, that complete and perfect sympathy exists between them
and their children. “My child tells me everything” has been the
thought to bring comfort to many mothers. But is this true? For
myself I have wondered if such an ideal can ever be attained fully.
Nor am I certain, if we think of the child only, whether it is an ideal
really to be desired. We have to remember that we—the parents—
belong to one generation and the child to another. And this barrier of
age is felt in nothing more strongly than it is in sex. The intense and
complicated forces that have moulded us are but awakening in the
young life. We can, at best, hope only to guide our children; we can
give to them some little knowledge gained by the experience of our
mistakes, but we cannot give them the knowledge they can gain
only from life, nor can we save them from making their own
mistakes.
Idle curiosity is banished by simple honest teaching, and much evil
is thereby prevented. But the boundless curiosity of the child is not
and, indeed, should not be satisfied. The boy or the girl, as he or
she grows older, will have to experiment, to find out for himself or
herself. To ignore this need is, I am certain, to blind ourselves to the
facts of life. We must be prepared that, with all our care, our most
loving efforts to gain the confidence of our children will be met by
refusals.
And although this failure may, and, indeed, must sadden us as we
watch the child of our love passing out of the protective circle of our
power to help, we need to know that this is a natural process—a
step forward that should be taken by the boy or girl; we even fail in
our duty do we try to hold them back and refuse to loosen the cords
of guidance. The child is fulfilling his or her own needs in turning
from us. Age cannot always help youth. In the early years the child
desires and should have the very individualised and binding relation
with its parents, but when he is older he ought to free himself from
the old bindings—from the covering protection of the mother and
father—if he is to establish his own character and suitably adapt
himself to the world outside the home.
Our children will turn away from us in their search for knowledge
and experience. All that any mother can do is to establish a
relationship of openness and confidence in her child’s early years, for
if it is not done then hardly ever can it be done later. But even when
this has done, there will still be needed the utmost care that what
has been gained may not be used for the mother’s own satisfaction
and against the good of the boy or the girl.
All the wisdom and patience and tenderness and sacrifice of the
parents will be needed after the epoch of puberty and in the difficult
years of adolescence, to know when it is wise to give advice and
claim confidence, or when the harder duty must be done of pushing
the boy or the girl away to experiment and live upon their own
responsibility.
Here, again, I would give warning: in these later adolescent years
it is always the child—boy or girl—and not the parents who must be
the guide. The mother and the father must be ready at all times, but
their task is, I think, one of very patient and loving waiting: it is the
child who must desire to give the confidence. It is true that the wise
parent may create opportunities of confidence; to these the boy or
the girl will respond readily; at least this will be so when the early
training of the child has been without any hateful sense of shame.

Such are the facts as they present themselves to me.

The real failure in sexual education arises from our treatment of
sex as something apart from the rest of life. We have got to change
this, if we are to help our children. Sex must cease to be a forbidden
subject. Label any natural function as improper, not to be spoken
about and repellent, and at once you set up an abnormal curiosity,
and open a way for almost every evil. We must cease to be afraid.
There is, of course, a very deep reason for this fear of sex. The
sex impulses are not often realised and understood in the conscious
life of men and women, and although they can be caught up and
fused into all that is best in the individual character, they remain in
most of us unrecognised and untamed. You will see what I mean.
The sex instinct has retained its wildness, and we must, I think, face
the fact that there is in all of us a volcanic element in sex, underlying
and influencing all the rest of our nature, and, for that very reason,
shaking the individual character from its foundations with tremor, if
not with catastrophe. This distrust of the dynamic force, which so
often we have found difficult to control in ourselves, causes us to
fear for our children. We are afraid that many growths we do not like
may spring up in them. And the immediate result in us is an
inhibitory awkwardness—largely an effort of hiding—in the face of
everything that comes within hailing distance of the sex passion.
Until we have cleared our thoughts from this confusion of fear,
very little good can be done. Let us purify ourselves and re-establish
our own faith. When once we come to understand, we cannot go on
leaving our children to be sullied, and in some cases—and those not
a few—even crushed and destroyed by our mock modesty, sham
decencies and complacent blindness.
It is my firm conviction that most of the perversions of sex, a
whole list of diseases, the almost countless number of unhappy
marriages, many of the existing social evils—may be traced back to
this cause. It is unsafe to prophesy, yet I think much of the misery
would be remedied, if once we could dispel the unwholesome
mystery with which we, in our timidity and uncleanness of mind,
have enveloped the facts of birth and the relations between the
sexes. Such mystery is really nothing but shame; much of it may be
dispelled by the wholesome light of simple and wise teaching. So
only can we hope to guide our children’s natural and beautiful
unfolding. We must inculcate in them from their earliest years
respect for their own bodies and for the reproductive act.
Reverence for sex as something holy should be part of every
child’s education. The eternal hymn of Love is the noblest strain in
the universe, and the young should be taught to heed it reverently.
There must be no false valuation of the impulse which unites men
and women, if we wish our daughters and our sons to fulfil worthily
the high duties of parenthood. We cannot teach unless our faith is
great and we also practise. We must plant deep in our children’s
fresh natures a desire for beauty, not alone in outside things, but in
all thought and in every deed relating to the Life force, which is
Love.
You will see now the scope of the claim I am making for sexual
education: it is to be the means whereby concealments are to be
broken through and shame in sex is to be destroyed.

CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XV
SEXUAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO THE ADOLESCENT GIRL
Our very limited powers—Our children have to experiment and to learn life for
themselves—The theoretical teacher who reforms the world on paper—The
hindrances placed in the way of the sex emotions—We educate girls and boys
as if they were sexless neuters—The folly of this denial of sex—The origin of
our fear—An attempt to express the psychological meaning of the
combination of the man and the woman—The differences between the boy
and the girl—An attempt to follow this dissimilarity—The evils arising from the
modern tendency to ignore sex differences—This the real weakness in the
position of the modern girl—She has a profound distrust of herself as a
woman—Our schools and educational system founded on the needs of boys—
This a great evil—The development of the girl at puberty more difficult than
the development of the boy—Every girl lives a hidden life of her own—The
conflict in the sensitive soul of the adolescent—This the age of romance and
idealism—The danger of sudden and wrong knowledge of the physical facts of
sex—Full instruction of girls more necessary even than the instruction of boys
—The immense danger of repression—The transformation of puberty—Painful
experiences of youth act harmfully in the later years—Our deadly silences and
sham presentation of life—The injury we do to the girl by ignoring her sexual
life—Induces sexual coldness—This the great cause of unhappiness in
marriage—Our fear and denial of love—This what is wrong with life.
 CHAPTER XV
SEXUAL EDUCATION WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO THE ADOLESCENT GIRL
“But, alas! a hindrance ever lurketh in our way; it is the leaven in the dough, the
deadly flies that invert the sweetness of the fragrant wine; … Thus … the wrongful
thoughts ferment. Evil plougheth in and urgeth as a task-master. He wasteth and
destroyeth, and, lo! we are taken captive in this thraldom; he giveth over the
innocent and pure to death; defilement spreadeth, and of joy there is naught
left.”—(Eng. trans., Jewish Prayer for the Day of Atonement.)

Now, because I desire sexual enlightenment for all children, and,

in particular, for all girls, and seek as a reformer the re-shaping of
education in the home and in the school, it does not follow that I am
so over-presumptuous as to believe it possible in this way quickly to
remedy all sexual mistakes, or that I do not realise how our policy of
muddle and leaving these matters alone has not always been as
disastrous as, indeed, we might expect. I know that in many cases
and among numerous young people the sexual life follows a healthy
and beautiful unfolding, in spite of anything we may do or may leave
undone. And it needs but a cursory view to see that all is not
confused and an aimless conflict of waste, but that the wonderful
beauty of youth often will triumph over the meanness of our fears,
our subterfuges and blind blunderings. One perceives something
that goes on, something that is continually working in the child to
make order out of our muddle, beauty out of our defacements: to
force light, frankness and purity in place of our shams and our lies.
Doubtless to the theoretical teacher eager to reform the world on
paper, it seems a very easy matter to lay down rules for mothers and
teachers regarding sexual instruction—new finger-posts to conduct,
whereby the young generation may be guarded from making the
mistakes that we ourselves have made. But can we do this? For in
sex we have as yet learnt very little, and I doubt sometimes if we
can ever learn very much, except each one of us for ourselves out of
our own experience. We of an older generation cannot save our
children very far, or hold them back from life. And it may be well that
at once we realise and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our
power.
But this is not to say that we are to shirk and continue to act as if
all were well when we know that it is not so. The manner in which,
up to the present day, we have completely ignored the very fact of
sex in our educational system is almost incredible. There has been in
many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in our
treatment of youth.
No other emotion is so hindered, opposed, and loaded with
material and moral fetters. We know how education makes a
beginning in this way, and how life continues the process. Perhaps
some of these hindrances are inevitable; but many are the direct
result of our adult stupidity, and the way we have failed in training
the young. How can you expect the primitive powerful sex impulse
not to suffer? The sex emotions are among the deepest, if not the
deepest, of our nature; they exercise an influence on every phase of
development, and, in one form or another, direct the entire being of
the individual. We know this. And all the time we continue to
educate girls and boys as if they were sexless neuters. Could folly be
greater?
By our teaching and our example we are destroying for the young
the harmony of Nature. We ourselves are shame-faced because we
are still savages in sex. If not, why this awe and funk, these taboos
and mysteries, all the secretive cunning with which we hide from the
young facts that we all know, but pretend that we don’t know?
And it cannot be overlooked that this fear of sex is of very ancient
origin, which makes it the more difficult to eradicate. We have, I
believe, to allow for an ages-old, and therefore strongly rooted,
sense of separation, causing an often unconscious antagonism
between the two sexes. We see its unchecked action in many
examples in the animal kingdom, though not in all—it is quite
absent, for instance, in the family life of certain insects and in the
perfect loves of many birds, whose life-histories we examined in the
first section of this book. We see the same antagonism acting
continually among primitive peoples in the elaborate and sacred
system of taboos which separate the two sexes. Indeed, the
beginnings of the marriage system can be traced back to a primitive
conception of danger attaching to the sexual act. I am not very
hopeful that this sex separation that is a kind of antagonism can
ever be wholly eliminated; I am not even sure that it is well that it
should be eliminated. May it not be that love itself would be
withered did we take it away? I am not certain at all; I know,
however, that this fear of sex has led us into great folly.
What is the psychological meaning of the combination of man and
woman? It is the union between opposites, which, perhaps, I may
try to explain further as the union between consciousness and
unconsciousness. The man is essentially conscious, the woman
essentially unconscious; the man is concentrated in his intellect, the
woman is concentrated in her senses. These, at least, are the
nearest words in which I am able to express it. And of one thing I
am certain: the modern way of mixing the qualities of the two sexes
acts directly for unhappiness and in harm to the race. I did not
always think this: I did not want to think it. I have come slowly to be
convinced and against my own will. And I am glad to take the
opportunity now, as I near the end of my book on Motherhood—the
subject which ever has been deepest in my heart—to state this as
my later opinion, which has been made clear to me by the
experiences of my life.
There is no use in saying there is no difference between the girl
and the boy when human nature keeps asserting that there is. There
is even, as I have been forced into accepting, a natural tendency
between boys and girls to draw away from each other. You may see
this separation in every co-education school where the children, led
by deeper instincts than we have understood, bring our wisdom to
foolishness. They unconsciously feel that separation which we have
been trying to pretend does not exist. Each sex, at the very dawn of
the teens and before, is unfolding interests, tastes, plays and
ambitions of its own.
It would be interesting to follow this dissimilarity as far as it could
lead us. Sometimes it would seem that we had got to the bottom—
to what is common to the girl as to the boy; the qualities that both
sexes share as human beings, where the ties of similarity seem to
link their characters. But wait! deeper than this we must seek for the
truth. Even in this likeness there is an all-pervading unlikeness. And
it is just this: the differences, which cannot, I think, be expressed,
but which do exist—differences in souls, in minds and in bodies—as
well as a separation in the habits, the desires, and attitude to life,
that makes for such harmony in the elemental depths.
The influence of sex extends in mysterious ways that as yet we do
not understand. And the variation between the girl and the boy is far
greater, I believe, than has ever in modern times been recognised.
The longer I live, and the more life teaches me, the more strongly I
am convinced of this fact: you do not make the girl into the boy by
ignoring her special functions; you do not lessen sexuality by
pretending it is not there.
From the start of puberty this difference between the girl and the
boy should be faced; great is the harm that follows from our
pretending it is not there. And the hurt suffered in my opinion, is
almost always more serious to the girl than to the boy.
Many women are blindly prejudiced on this question as, indeed, I
myself once was. The reason of such mistake is plain. This breaking
down or lessening of the differences between the two sexes may be,
and is, possible. By means of education and the action of habit a
child may be impressed with characteristics normally foreign to its
sex, qualities and tendencies are thus developed which ordinarily
appear only in a child of the opposite sex. I would refer the reader
back to the early section of this book for examples, most curious and
suggestive, of such complete transposition of the female and male
characters.[103] Things are not quite so obviously plain in the human
world, but they are not less fateful, less significant.
 We touch here the real weakness in the position of the modern
girl: the profound distrust that she has of herself. I do not mean, of
course, intellectually or as a worker, but a distrust of herself as
Woman. I believe it results directly from educational influences. All
our effort is directed to repress from the consciousness of the girl
the realities of her own sexual nature; and what we do is to hinder
her deepest instincts so that often they fail in finding a healthy
expression.
In our schools the educational system is founded on the needs of
boys and not on the needs of girls. I regard this as a great crime.
For one thing, the development of the girl is more obscure and
difficult than the development of the boy; in her sex-life there are
finer balances, which opens up the way to greater evils. There is
every possibility of morbid disturbance from any mistakes in the
training. The girl has more that she needs to learn to establish her
health and sexual happiness than has the boy; the pubescent period
lasts longer with her and is more unsettling; while the greatest
difficulty of all, perhaps, arises from the fact that her conduct is
more ruled by deep unconscious instincts. Every girl lives a hidden
life of her own, and it is within this shrine of her individuality that
the primitive and fierce instincts of her sex struggle to find
expression; and though always unacknowledged and often, indeed,
unrecognised, alike by the girl herself as well as by her elders, it is
these instincts that direct her growth and are the determining
influence of her life, far more important than the actions directed by
her conscious self, which is occupied in learning lessons, in play, and
all the outward interests of the daily life.
And it is this deeper ego that suffers from our educational system
and the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life are hidden
and glossed over. Girls in our schools, and also in our homes, are
trained to become secretive about themselves, treating their special
sexual functions as a mystery and a shame. Truth-telling is
inculcated in all matters except sex, and here there is an unceasing
evasion, which prepares disharmonies at the very dawn of sexual
consciousness.
 Let us understand what harm we are doing. Do we know? Do we
care? We have, I suppose, a certain vague ideal as to what Woman
should be, but as far as I can see we give no kind of training to help
a girl in any way to live healthily and fully her life as a woman. As it
is, one is tempted to say that it is rather in spite of than by means of
her education that any modern girl arrives at any conception of her
womanly nature and her tasks. We really seem to be proclaiming a
sense of injury because there is such a fact in the girl’s nature as
sex.
Again I assert that our crime is manifest. We have set up an
educational system that is blind to the needs of girls and the facts of
their sexual life. How many among us women of this generation
have suffered hurt—thousands of women defrauded of happiness
and of health, bearing with them year after year the mark of lost
instincts, stifled desires, and natures in part murdered. Do I write
strongly? Yes, I do; but I write of what I know to be true.
Mothers, wrapped in the long trance of complacent living, remain
indifferent, or are themselves too ignorant and dead to life to give
help. As their daughters come to consciousness, as they begin to
suffer their own fulfilment, they can do nothing and they cast them
off. Hard shut down and silent in themselves, how many girls suffer
the anguish of youth reaching out for the unknown ideal that they
can’t grasp, can’t even distinguish or conceive. What we call
education helps them not at all, for how can any educational system
succeed when it runs contrary to nature? All the larger intimate
problems that encompass life are neglected, while the intellect is
crammed with a store of quite useless facts. Real education would
lead to emancipation, but instead we prepare girls for examinations.
And what we have to fear is a deadening of physical and spiritual
response that must tend to follow from this suppression. For what is
a girl’s life? She works and rests from work, eats, and sleeps, and
plays, and all the while she remains wrapped in the closest egoism,
her strongest instincts smouldering beneath the dull weight of an
education that is not an education, but an unstimulating and
conforming pretence, and not fitted to the needs, of living. Even
when she is free and is turned out at last, apathetic and obliterated,
she carries with her vague dreads of positive acts and new ideas.
How seldom does she succeed in urging out of herself the inmost
vital part she has stifled. She is compacted of numbed faculties and
inhibited desires.
The inmost Self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find
its due share in the ever-creating life. But the confidence and
possession of the Self has been destroyed; the ego is left alone with
its dread, with the distrust of desires not understood and instincts
thrust back within.
And do you not see the result of this conflict to the sensitive soul
of the adolescent? The terrible evil of disharmonies first started
during these pregnant and inceptive years that should be the infancy
of the higher powers of womanhood? Robbed of a just confidence
and pride in her sex, her own stifled instincts become to a girl
hateful and as something of which she should be ashamed; she
begins to chafe against her womanhood and spurn it, bemoaning
the limitations of her sex. She lapses into boy’s ways, methods of
work and ideals; she comes to live gaily enough and to laugh
carelessly, not knowing what she has lost; to care nothing to be
herself—content to choke the vision in her own life.
So it has been with you, with me, with all of us. Are we content
that this blighting shall be suffered by our daughters?
The evil is happening for want of a generous guidance from us
who have gone before. I write of what I know. Great and unending
is the misery that we make possible by our folly, sickness of body
and soul, so that the repressed nature rots away and doubt eats into
natural faith. Nature is violated at every step, and after we have
educated her, in nine cases out of ten, the girl emerges a mere
residuum of decent minor dispositions. There is need to change.
Much that is said or done, both consciously and unconsciously, by
the adult will torture the adolescent’s sensitiveness much more than
is conceivable to any one who has no insight to the curious
psychology of girls in these difficult years. There is as a rule at this
period of life a painful dualisation of the soul; thus, while seeking to
know about sex, many girls will turn violently from the truth, so that
any guidance we may give now will be very likely to arouse anger
and disgust. And I know of no safeguard except a full knowledge of
the physical facts of sex—of begetting and of birth, that has been
gained earlier in the play period of childhood, in years when such
knowledge can be assimilated unconsciously and its deep
significance causes no response of personal disturbance.
We have to remember that these are the years of romance and
idealism, when the always strong tendency among girls to sublimate
and spiritualise love is at its highest. Sex knowledge could not
possibly be given at a worse time than now, when the young soul is
passing through its difficult birth and the conscious self seethes and
teems with emotional ferment. If at this period the physical side of
love is brought for the first time into notice there will be a
withdrawal of the girl’s ever-sensitive confidence, and worse, an ebb
of the nerves, caused by distrust liberating the demon of fear; an
almost certain reaction of incredulity and disillusionment will follow,
with after results that may prove to be deep and far-reaching in their
danger to healthy life.
We find then, contrary to the usual opinion, that an early and full
instruction in the physical facts of sex is more necessary for girls
even than it is for boys. The dangers of ignorance, or of sudden and
too late knowledge, are greater. For any primary reaction of
aversion, which is rarely absent, will in many cases strengthen into
disgust and a curious horror that is partly fear and partly
strengthened desire. For at the same time there will very likely be a
strong attractive element in the form of intensely excited curiosity,
which may be active and experimenting, but more often and with
even greater danger is kept hidden, but yet spies and clutches for
new evidence. Such unhealthy curiosity, remaining for long
unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied, almost necessarily sets up
morbid reactions, causing many sexual evils.
 You may say, of course, that I am mistaken; that these things do
not happen—at least, not in the case of your daughter or of any nice
girls. I can answer only, that it is you—the mother or the teacher—
who, I fear, are wrong, living in the paradise of the fool. I am not
exaggerating at all. I have tried to show how serious is the shock
and how severe the disillusionment that may follow to the
adolescent on a too sudden meeting with the physical facts of sex. It
is time for us to cease pretending. We must realise that the
mutilating or slaying of sex is followed always by disaster.
Instincts which have been prevented from their natural expression
must tend to escape and find expression in abnormal forms that
may, and often do, give rise to greater devastation. We have to face
these things: there is no use in turning from them because they are
horrid and in fear of giving offence.
Let me take but one fact. Masturbation is of very frequent
occurrence among girls and among women, and this form of erotic
indulgence acts directly in lowering sexual sensibility, and not only
limits the desire for love, but prevents a right physical response so
that satisfaction may be gained from the normal sexual act.
Is it not time that we women began to be frank? We have
pretended to ourselves, and argued away from these questions far
too long. Love cries out against our denials. Extreme passion may
work ill, but the opposite extreme of the sacrifice of healthy natural
instincts is as great an evil.
I am driven back always to this: the immense danger of
repression. For our hindrances lead inevitably to repressions, always
dangerous; and these tend to set up deep indwelling disharmonies,
and then the way is opened up to manifold evils that may be traced
into many by-paths of the after sexual life. And though I know there
are many among my readers impatiently exclaiming that I am
constantly dragging sex into everything, I assert that I do not drag it
in: it is there. And for this reason alone it is certain that to formulate
a system of education which ignores sex must lead to disaster.
 I would call attention again to the fact noted in the previous
chapter that the sex impulse is never absent in any child, however
young. The transformation of puberty is really a co-ordination of the
individual sex-life that already exists. With the development of the
bodily structure and the marked changes in the sexual organs, there
takes place a psychic growth which causes a perfectly natural
seeking out of the young soul for experience and love. There is
every possibility of morbid disturbance should this new order of
development be hindered and not take place. And if this beautiful
natural transformation is to succeed there must be no forcing back
of the nature upon itself. The period of adolescence should crown
and complete every organ and every faculty. No over-emphasis can
be laid on the fateful issues that may follow to each girl from any
mistakes in training at this period of adult birth, when the nature
must find its new expression in the right direction of health or in the
wrong direction of the abnormal.
We are deceived so often by the outside appearance of things.
The painful experiences of youth may disappear from the conscious
memory, but they do not thereby cease to act as an influence
directing the after life. Every mother and every teacher ought to
understand this. Any hurt now done by our folly can never be
undone. No experience is entirely lost. What seems to have vanished
from the consciousness has really passed into a sub-consciousness,
where it lives on in an organised form as real as if it were still part of
the conscious personality; and although any experience may lie
dormant, unknown to the conscious self, it may, and almost certainly
will at some time, cause emotional reactions that continue without a
known reason to excite and direct the outward ordinary life.
Our easy, complacent and devastating folly in ignoring the special
physical nature of girls, and the elaborate ingenuity with which the
facts of life are hidden from them or glossed over by unhealthy
sentiment, is the true cause of the physical and spiritual etiolation of
womanhood. There is, I allege, murder to the girl’s power to be
herself—to fulfil her woman’s destiny—in our evasions, our deadly
silences, and sham presentation of life, conditioned in all cases by
theory and never by the act of living.
It is because I believe this that I am writing with all the power
that I have against our schools which show the most coarse lack of
understanding of the nature of the girl. I want new schools fitted to
the needs of girls. The aim of education should be a general
cohesion in all the different elements of the personality. And if the
method is right, it will prove a way to greater happiness and fulness
of growth. No longer will sex be held as a hindrance to life. I believe
that almost everything in the future depends upon this.
Life would be liberated. An instinct that continually is hindered and
denied cannot easily develop for health; and often, owing to these
hindrances, the sexual life is stunted; then later the right and simple
impulse to the performance of the sex act and its final
consummation and enjoyment may be interfered with for ever and
even prevented. Will you think what this means. In plain words, we
are, by our false ideals and the wrong attitude towards the sexual
life which conditions our system of education for girls, doing all that
we can to prevent them from being women. I am not exaggerating;
I am trying to make you see what it is that is wrong with life.
Every one who refuses to blink facts knows that the vast majority
of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. It is
certain that sexual anæsthesia to-day is present in many women,
and there would seem, indeed, to be an increasing diminution of the
strength of the sexual impulse. Any number of women are unable to
give themselves up to the sex act in such a way as to derive from it
real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. This
is a very grave matter. The evil would be less if these frigid women
did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. It is a curious fact that
women who sexually are cold are sought as wives with greater
frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their
easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man. Men are
persistently blind in these matters. They want response to their own
desire in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any