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.
“But, alas! a hindrance ever lurketh in our way; it is the leaven in the dough, the deadly flies that invert the sweetness of the fragrant wine; … Thus … the wrongful thoughts ferment. Evil plougheth in and urgeth as a task-master. He wasteth and destroyeth, and, lo! we are taken captive in this thraldom; he giveth over the innocent and pure to death; defilement spreadeth, and of joy there is naught left.”—(Eng. trans., Jewish Prayer for the Day of Atonement.)
Now, because I desire sexual enlightenment for all children, and, in particular, for all girls, and seek as a reformer the re-shaping of education in the home and in the school, it does not follow that I am so over-presumptuous as to believe it possible in this way quickly to remedy all sexual mistakes, or that I do not realise how our policy of muddle and leaving these matters alone has not always been as disastrous as, indeed, we might expect. I know that in many cases and among numerous young people the sexual life follows a healthy and beautiful unfolding, in spite of anything we may do or may leave undone. And it needs but a cursory view to see that all is not confused and an aimless conflict of waste, but that the wonderful beauty of youth often will triumph over the meanness of our fears, our subterfuges and blind blunderings. One perceives something that goes on, something that is continually working in the child to make order out of our muddle, beauty out of our defacements: to force light, frankness and purity in place of our shams and our lies.
Doubtless to the theoretical teacher eager to reform the world on paper, it seems a very easy matter to lay down rules for mothers and teachers regarding sexual instruction—new finger-posts to conduct, whereby the young generation may be guarded from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made. But can we do this? For in sex we have as yet learnt very little, and I doubt sometimes if we can ever learn very much, except each one of us for ourselves out of our own experience. We of an older generation cannot save our children very far, or hold them back from life. And it may be well that at once we realise and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.
But this is not to say that we are to shirk and continue to act as if all were well when we know that it is not so. The manner in which, up to the present day, we have completely ignored the very fact of sex in our educational system is almost incredible. There has been in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in our treatment of youth.
No other emotion is so hindered, opposed, and loaded with material and moral fetters. We know how education makes a beginning in this way, and how life continues the process. Perhaps some of these hindrances are inevitable; but many are the direct result of our adult stupidity, and the way we have failed in training the young. How can you expect the primitive powerful sex impulse not to suffer? The sex emotions are among the deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature; they exercise an influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or another, direct the entire being of the individual. We know this. And all the time we continue to educate girls and boys as if they were sexless neuters. Could folly be greater?
By our teaching and our example we are destroying for the young the harmony of Nature. We ourselves are shame-faced because we are still savages in sex. If not, why this awe and funk, these taboos and mysteries, all the secretive cunning with which we hide from the young facts that we all know, but pretend that we don’t know?
And it cannot be overlooked that this fear of sex is of very ancient origin, which makes it the more difficult to eradicate. We have, I believe, to allow for an ages-old, and therefore strongly rooted, sense of separation, causing an often unconscious antagonism between the two sexes. We see its unchecked action in many examples in the animal kingdom, though not in all—it is quite absent, for instance, in the family life of certain insects and in the perfect loves of many birds, whose life-histories we examined in the first section of this book. We see the same antagonism acting continually among primitive peoples in the elaborate and sacred system of taboos which separate the two sexes. Indeed, the beginnings of the marriage system can be traced back to a primitive conception of danger attaching to the sexual act. I am not very hopeful that this sex separation that is a kind of antagonism can ever be wholly eliminated; I am not even sure that it is well that it should be eliminated. May it not be that love itself would be withered did we take it away? I am not certain at all; I know, however, that this fear of sex has led us into great folly.
What is the psychological meaning of the combination of man and woman? It is the union between opposites, which, perhaps, I may try to explain further as the union between consciousness and unconsciousness. The man is essentially conscious, the woman essentially unconscious; the man is concentrated in his intellect, the woman is concentrated in her senses. These, at least, are the nearest words in which I am able to express it. And of one thing I am certain: the modern way of mixing the qualities of the two sexes acts directly for unhappiness and in harm to the race. I did not always think this: I did not want to think it. I have come slowly to be convinced and against my own will. And I am glad to take the opportunity now, as I near the end of my book on Motherhood—the subject which ever has been deepest in my heart—to state this as my later opinion, which has been made clear to me by the experiences of my life.
There is no use in saying there is no difference between the girl and the boy when human nature keeps asserting that there is. There is even, as I have been forced into accepting, a natural tendency between boys and girls to draw away from each other. You may see this separation in every co-education school where the children, led by deeper instincts than we have understood, bring our wisdom to foolishness. They unconsciously feel that separation which we have been trying to pretend does not exist. Each sex, at the very dawn of the teens and before, is unfolding interests, tastes, plays and ambitions of its own.
It would be interesting to follow this dissimilarity as far as it could lead us. Sometimes it would seem that we had got to the bottom—to what is common to the girl as to the boy; the qualities that both sexes share as human beings, where the ties of similarity seem to link their characters. But wait! deeper than this we must seek for the truth. Even in this likeness there is an all-pervading unlikeness. And it is just this: the differences, which cannot, I think, be expressed, but which do exist—differences in souls, in minds and in bodies—as well as a separation in the habits, the desires, and attitude to life, that makes for such harmony in the elemental depths.
The influence of sex extends in mysterious ways that as yet we do not understand. And the variation between the girl and the boy is far greater, I believe, than has ever in modern times been recognised. The longer I live, and the more life teaches me, the more strongly I am convinced of this fact: you do not make the girl into the boy by ignoring her special functions; you do not lessen sexuality by pretending it is not there.
From the start of puberty this difference between the girl and the boy should be faced; great is the harm that follows from our pretending it is not there. And the hurt suffered in my opinion, is almost always more serious to the girl than to the boy.
Many women are blindly prejudiced on this question as, indeed, I myself once was. The reason of such mistake is plain. This breaking down or lessening of the differences between the two sexes may be, and is, possible. By means of education and the action of habit a child may be impressed with characteristics normally foreign to its sex, qualities and tendencies are thus developed which ordinarily appear only in a child of the opposite sex. I would refer the reader back to the early section of this book for examples, most curious and suggestive, of such complete transposition of the female and male characters.[103] Things are not quite so obviously plain in the human world, but they are not less fateful, less significant.
We touch here the real weakness in the position of the modern girl: the profound distrust that she has of herself. I do not mean, of course, intellectually or as a worker, but a distrust of herself as Woman. I believe it results directly from educational influences. All our effort is directed to repress from the consciousness of the girl the realities of her own sexual nature; and what we do is to hinder her deepest instincts so that often they fail in finding a healthy expression.
In our schools the educational system is founded on the needs of boys and not on the needs of girls. I regard this as a great crime. For one thing, the development of the girl is more obscure and difficult than the development of the boy; in her sex-life there are finer balances, which opens up the way to greater evils. There is every possibility of morbid disturbance from any mistakes in the training. The girl has more that she needs to learn to establish her health and sexual happiness than has the boy; the pubescent period lasts longer with her and is more unsettling; while the greatest difficulty of all, perhaps, arises from the fact that her conduct is more ruled by deep unconscious instincts. Every girl lives a hidden life of her own, and it is within this shrine of her individuality that the primitive and fierce instincts of her sex struggle to find expression; and though always unacknowledged and often, indeed, unrecognised, alike by the girl herself as well as by her elders, it is these instincts that direct her growth and are the determining influence of her life, far more important than the actions directed by her conscious self, which is occupied in learning lessons, in play, and all the outward interests of the daily life.
And it is this deeper ego that suffers from our educational system and the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life are hidden and glossed over. Girls in our schools, and also in our homes, are trained to become secretive about themselves, treating their special sexual functions as a mystery and a shame. Truth-telling is inculcated in all matters except sex, and here there is an unceasing evasion, which prepares disharmonies at the very dawn of sexual consciousness.
Let us understand what harm we are doing. Do we know? Do we care? We have, I suppose, a certain vague ideal as to what Woman should be, but as far as I can see we give no kind of training to help a girl in any way to live healthily and fully her life as a woman. As it is, one is tempted to say that it is rather in spite of than by means of her education that any modern girl arrives at any conception of her womanly nature and her tasks. We really seem to be proclaiming a sense of injury because there is such a fact in the girl’s nature as sex.
Again I assert that our crime is manifest. We have set up an educational system that is blind to the needs of girls and the facts of their sexual life. How many among us women of this generation have suffered hurt—thousands of women defrauded of happiness and of health, bearing with them year after year the mark of lost instincts, stifled desires, and natures in part murdered. Do I write strongly? Yes, I do; but I write of what I know to be true.
Mothers, wrapped in the long trance of complacent living, remain indifferent, or are themselves too ignorant and dead to life to give help. As their daughters come to consciousness, as they begin to suffer their own fulfilment, they can do nothing and they cast them off. Hard shut down and silent in themselves, how many girls suffer the anguish of youth reaching out for the unknown ideal that they can’t grasp, can’t even distinguish or conceive. What we call education helps them not at all, for how can any educational system succeed when it runs contrary to nature? All the larger intimate problems that encompass life are neglected, while the intellect is crammed with a store of quite useless facts. Real education would lead to emancipation, but instead we prepare girls for examinations.
And what we have to fear is a deadening of physical and spiritual response that must tend to follow from this suppression. For what is a girl’s life? She works and rests from work, eats, and sleeps, and plays, and all the while she remains wrapped in the closest egoism, her strongest instincts smouldering beneath the dull weight of an education that is not an education, but an unstimulating and conforming pretence, and not fitted to the needs, of living. Even when she is free and is turned out at last, apathetic and obliterated, she carries with her vague dreads of positive acts and new ideas. How seldom does she succeed in urging out of herself the inmost vital part she has stifled. She is compacted of numbed faculties and inhibited desires.
The inmost Self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the ever-creating life. But the confidence and possession of the Self has been destroyed; the ego is left alone with its dread, with the distrust of desires not understood and instincts thrust back within.
And do you not see the result of this conflict to the sensitive soul of the adolescent? The terrible evil of disharmonies first started during these pregnant and inceptive years that should be the infancy of the higher powers of womanhood? Robbed of a just confidence and pride in her sex, her own stifled instincts become to a girl hateful and as something of which she should be ashamed; she begins to chafe against her womanhood and spurn it, bemoaning the limitations of her sex. She lapses into boy’s ways, methods of work and ideals; she comes to live gaily enough and to laugh carelessly, not knowing what she has lost; to care nothing to be herself—content to choke the vision in her own life.
So it has been with you, with me, with all of us. Are we content that this blighting shall be suffered by our daughters?
The evil is happening for want of a generous guidance from us who have gone before. I write of what I know. Great and unending is the misery that we make possible by our folly, sickness of body and soul, so that the repressed nature rots away and doubt eats into natural faith. Nature is violated at every step, and after we have educated her, in nine cases out of ten, the girl emerges a mere residuum of decent minor dispositions. There is need to change.
Much that is said or done, both consciously and unconsciously, by the adult will torture the adolescent’s sensitiveness much more than is conceivable to any one who has no insight to the curious psychology of girls in these difficult years. There is as a rule at this period of life a painful dualisation of the soul; thus, while seeking to know about sex, many girls will turn violently from the truth, so that any guidance we may give now will be very likely to arouse anger and disgust. And I know of no safeguard except a full knowledge of the physical facts of sex—of begetting and of birth, that has been gained earlier in the play period of childhood, in years when such knowledge can be assimilated unconsciously and its deep significance causes no response of personal disturbance.
We have to remember that these are the years of romance and idealism, when the always strong tendency among girls to sublimate and spiritualise love is at its highest. Sex knowledge could not possibly be given at a worse time than now, when the young soul is passing through its difficult birth and the conscious self seethes and teems with emotional ferment. If at this period the physical side of love is brought for the first time into notice there will be a withdrawal of the girl’s ever-sensitive confidence, and worse, an ebb of the nerves, caused by distrust liberating the demon of fear; an almost certain reaction of incredulity and disillusionment will follow, with after results that may prove to be deep and far-reaching in their danger to healthy life.
We find then, contrary to the usual opinion, that an early and full instruction in the physical facts of sex is more necessary for girls even than it is for boys. The dangers of ignorance, or of sudden and too late knowledge, are greater. For any primary reaction of aversion, which is rarely absent, will in many cases strengthen into disgust and a curious horror that is partly fear and partly strengthened desire. For at the same time there will very likely be a strong attractive element in the form of intensely excited curiosity, which may be active and experimenting, but more often and with even greater danger is kept hidden, but yet spies and clutches for new evidence. Such unhealthy curiosity, remaining for long unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied, almost necessarily sets up morbid reactions, causing many sexual evils.
You may say, of course, that I am mistaken; that these things do not happen—at least, not in the case of your daughter or of any nice girls. I can answer only, that it is you—the mother or the teacher—who, I fear, are wrong, living in the paradise of the fool. I am not exaggerating at all. I have tried to show how serious is the shock and how severe the disillusionment that may follow to the adolescent on a too sudden meeting with the physical facts of sex. It is time for us to cease pretending. We must realise that the mutilating or slaying of sex is followed always by disaster.
Instincts which have been prevented from their natural expression must tend to escape and find expression in abnormal forms that may, and often do, give rise to greater devastation. We have to face these things: there is no use in turning from them because they are horrid and in fear of giving offence.
Let me take but one fact. Masturbation is of very frequent occurrence among girls and among women, and this form of erotic indulgence acts directly in lowering sexual sensibility, and not only limits the desire for love, but prevents a right physical response so that satisfaction may be gained from the normal sexual act.
Is it not time that we women began to be frank? We have pretended to ourselves, and argued away from these questions far too long. Love cries out against our denials. Extreme passion may work ill, but the opposite extreme of the sacrifice of healthy natural instincts is as great an evil.
I am driven back always to this: the immense danger of repression. For our hindrances lead inevitably to repressions, always dangerous; and these tend to set up deep indwelling disharmonies, and then the way is opened up to manifold evils that may be traced into many by-paths of the after sexual life. And though I know there are many among my readers impatiently exclaiming that I am constantly dragging sex into everything, I assert that I do not drag it in: it is there. And for this reason alone it is certain that to formulate a system of education which ignores sex must lead to disaster.
I would call attention again to the fact noted in the previous chapter that the sex impulse is never absent in any child, however young. The transformation of puberty is really a co-ordination of the individual sex-life that already exists. With the development of the bodily structure and the marked changes in the sexual organs, there takes place a psychic growth which causes a perfectly natural seeking out of the young soul for experience and love. There is every possibility of morbid disturbance should this new order of development be hindered and not take place. And if this beautiful natural transformation is to succeed there must be no forcing back of the nature upon itself. The period of adolescence should crown and complete every organ and every faculty. No over-emphasis can be laid on the fateful issues that may follow to each girl from any mistakes in training at this period of adult birth, when the nature must find its new expression in the right direction of health or in the wrong direction of the abnormal.
We are deceived so often by the outside appearance of things. The painful experiences of youth may disappear from the conscious memory, but they do not thereby cease to act as an influence directing the after life. Every mother and every teacher ought to understand this. Any hurt now done by our folly can never be undone. No experience is entirely lost. What seems to have vanished from the consciousness has really passed into a sub-consciousness, where it lives on in an organised form as real as if it were still part of the conscious personality; and although any experience may lie dormant, unknown to the conscious self, it may, and almost certainly will at some time, cause emotional reactions that continue without a known reason to excite and direct the outward ordinary life.
Our easy, complacent and devastating folly in ignoring the special physical nature of girls, and the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life are hidden from them or glossed over by unhealthy sentiment, is the true cause of the physical and spiritual etiolation of womanhood. There is, I allege, murder to the girl’s power to be herself—to fulfil her woman’s destiny—in our evasions, our deadly silences, and sham presentation of life, conditioned in all cases by theory and never by the act of living.
It is because I believe this that I am writing with all the power that I have against our schools which show the most coarse lack of understanding of the nature of the girl. I want new schools fitted to the needs of girls. The aim of education should be a general cohesion in all the different elements of the personality. And if the method is right, it will prove a way to greater happiness and fulness of growth. No longer will sex be held as a hindrance to life. I believe that almost everything in the future depends upon this.
Life would be liberated. An instinct that continually is hindered and denied cannot easily develop for health; and often, owing to these hindrances, the sexual life is stunted; then later the right and simple impulse to the performance of the sex act and its final consummation and enjoyment may be interfered with for ever and even prevented. Will you think what this means. In plain words, we are, by our false ideals and the wrong attitude towards the sexual life which conditions our system of education for girls, doing all that we can to prevent them from being women. I am not exaggerating; I am trying to make you see what it is that is wrong with life.
Every one who refuses to blink facts knows that the vast majority of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. It is certain that sexual anæsthesia to-day is present in many women, and there would seem, indeed, to be an increasing diminution of the strength of the sexual impulse. Any number of women are unable to give themselves up to the sex act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. This is a very grave matter. The evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. It is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold are sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man. Men are persistently blind in these matters. They want response to their own desire in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable them to give such response. The woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child, but when she turns from him she leaves him unsatisfied.[104] The drama and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes itself on every hand. We are, by our wrong ideals, inducing an entirely perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a thing in itself degrading and even disgusting—the nasty side of love; something to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children, or for the sake of the loved man, whose passions must be allowed, but not for the health and desire, the delight and perfectment of the woman herself. This false view, I affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still is, the destroyer of woman, and through her, equally the destroyer of man.
And this fear and denial of love, this separation between the sexes, is the serious side of the problem of marriage. For the hideous disguises and constant lying often made necessary to the husband, owing to the wife’s entire failure to realise the physical necessities of love, makes domestic life an organised hypocrisy. We fight, and fight to be free, yet ever anew the antagonism lays fresh hold, it crops up in many and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying love—the deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied men against women. The need for love will not often allow itself to be inhibited without claiming payment. And if desire so frequently manifests itself in abnormal forms of the coarsest and commonest dissipation, this is almost always to be explained by some hindrance opposed to its normal expression. When women face facts and realise this truth, many things in men’s conduct will be clear that hitherto have been hidden from them.
Again it may be thought that I am exaggerating; and there are, I know, other aspects of this question which just now I am neglecting. But the unreal and abysmal misconception into which one sex has fallen with regard to the other—this horrible, grasping, backwash of shame—is, in large measure, the result of our pretence and the way in which women have been kept living with blinds drawn down upon most of the unruly turbulence and elemental forces of life. It may also be held mistakenly that in what I have said I am writing against women; that I am raising a belated cry for masculine prerogatives and standards of sexual conduct. But that is not so. I am, it is undeniable, writing against the attitude of the modern woman towards marriage, her coldness of response to passion and her suppression of the realities of sex; an attitude I deplore and hold to be destructive alike to the happiness of women and men and to the health of the race, as also to any practical moral life. But such coldness and atrophy of instinct, I believe, has been imposed upon women by wrong education, the conditions of ignorance under which they marry and become mothers, and all the hindrances set around them, preventing them living out their lives from a sexual point of view.
It is example and the ideal set before us which produces the formation of opinion and of character, and few mothers remember the inner discord which exists between what they teach their daughters about love and what they act themselves in the daily life. And if the home is wrong, the school is, I think, much worse. In olden times, and still among primitive peoples—whose unconsidered actions are in many directions so much wiser than is our knowledge—girls were early given by matrons all the gathered wisdom of their sex pertaining to wifehood and motherhood; just the knowledge that we make it hard for them to gain. Could folly be greater than this?
With the decay of the specific traditions of the ideal of womanhood the idea of a general culture, neither male nor female, has tended to prevail. We touch here the deep roots of the evil. And what I wish to make plain is the inevitable failure of an educational system which makes no kind of arrangement for the special care and training of girls during the most critical years of their growth. There is, I allege, in all our educational establishments a strange and most culpable lack of understanding of the nature of the girl and her functions as a woman. They model brains without proper consideration of bodies, and with frightful convention repress from the seeking young the realities of love, and treat as secret, almost as something to be ignored, the functions connected with a girl’s sexual life.
The mistake here is so far-reaching that I find it difficult to write calmly. For again I must assert that what we are doing is really to teach our girls a shameful denial of their womanhood. I wish that the power of my pen was stronger, so that I might bring a stinging consciousness of all the terrible mischief that is being done to the knowledge of every mother and every teacher.
How many of us have ourselves suffered? But our memories are strangely short. We forget, in our complacence and lazy, vicarious optimism, the dark places that imprisoned our young growing souls, haunts of gloom and despair that were never lit by a ray of sympathetic enlightenment from our sadder and wiser, but so forgetful, elders. We forget the grievous wounds to our self-respect. We forget the duality of soul; those oscillations between fear and disgust and curiosity and desire, with, perhaps, furtive trembling concessions to a power we did not understand, to be followed by morbid reactions of loathing, both of the mysterious impulse and of ourselves, that survive in those deadly disharmonies that are beginning to engage the attention of modern psychologists, and act to-day in our adult consciousness to war with the sum of unity which is happiness.
Yes, we all have forgotten. Yet none the less has this shameful early struggle left us fettered and seeking, and we have no window to inform us we are in prison. It has warped our natures, till, when in after years we look at Love, we behold, not the shining impersonation of the Life-force, but seeing double, view a monstrous Siamese twin of two figures, Lust and Sentimentality, a satyr bound to a wan angel by a navel-cord of procreative necessity. And often there is no rest, no cessation from a conflict that has left us helpless, so that for us love is moulded round a core of diseased desires.
It makes us examine our hearts. Is it to be so for ever?
We forget that perhaps four-fifths of the misery that follows in the train of sex-fulfilment is due to this mental and moral “diphobia” acquired in the days of adolescence in the unassisted struggle with the awakening and entirely misunderstood sex-impulse. We may forget, but few and happy are they who escape the effects of that encounter. According to our temperaments it has made us sedulous puritans and unconscious hypocrites, passionless neuters, or careless cynics and voluptuaries. And we are all of us to some extent marked and dirtied for ever. Deep and ineffaceable in us are the records of our disastrous early grapple with a great organic impulse which no one taught us to understand.
I am strongly of opinion that the tendency, so prevalent among women, to regard love as a twofold thing, one part of which is physical and evil and the other part spiritual and good, is almost diagnostic in an individual of a disharmony arising from an ancient reaction against sex, caused by some hindering influence or shock, encountered at the opening of the conscious sexual life.
The tremendous force that awakens in soul and body in these early years, and that with wise control and comprehension might be tended till in due course it flowers into Love, is early shorn of its splendour. Its whispered intimations of wondrous things to come fall on deaf ears. Taught to regard it as a malignant enemy that may destroy, instead of the most sacred and wonderful agency in human life, we enter into a hopeless struggle to eliminate the most basal part of our nature, or fawn before it in furtive and shameful surrender.
So most of us, embittered by the degradation of this struggle, whether it be won or lost, grow up to view with distrust what we absurdly call the “physical side of love.” We, and especially women, accept it resignedly as an unavoidable baseness in the grain of Love. We forget that the baseness is in us and not in Love. Love has no physical side, or mental side, or spiritual side. It is a unity upon which we lay sacrilegious hands when we make an artificial separation into physical and spiritual.
We do this because of our own impurity, and because of the hurts we have suffered. We can no longer look at Love without furtively scanning his garments for the stains of Lust. We have created Lust. Lust is a morbid by-product in the evolution of Love.
It is this that we have suffered.
An attempt to find the remedy—What is the real root of the evil—The young woman of the new generation—The years since the war began—An examination of present conditions—What is likely to happen when peace comes—The independent woman—The Commissioner’s Report of the National Birth-Rate Investigation, 1916—The failure in our lives—Where is the real root of the evil—The whole educational system of girls in our homes and in our schools is wrong—The importance of menstruation—Influence of conventionality—Wrong ideals set before girls—The destruction working in our midst—Fear of sex directs our educational system—The remedy to begin in our schools—We must educate girls to be women—Menstruation and the girl’s special sexual life must be emphasised and not as now ignored—Adolescent schools—The sexual life of the adolescent girl—The difficulties that must be faced—Opposition on the part of women—Motherhood to be saved—Regeneration of the girl’s instincts through consciousness—The hope with which we may look to the future—Motherhood will triumph.
“With fear and trembling take care of the heart of the people; that is the root of the matter in education—that is the highest in education.”—K’ung Fu ’Tzu.
It is, of course, easy to write of these evils, the difficult thing is to find the remedy. And the question I now wish to put squarely is this: Where is the real root of the evil, what is wrong in our educational ideals that accounts for our failure to develop the best and happiest type of women? You may, of course, deny this, and assert that we do not fail, but that will not alter facts. I say we are creating a race of work-efficient and highly educated, but unsatisfied women, whose very independence betrays their sorrow. This is a very serious matter. It would seem that our young women have now for the first time realised their power in outside things. War has acted quickly in facilitating their economic emancipation. But I find it hard not to think that this may involve a cost which their womanhood will not bear without injury more or less profound. Women are being sold to work in the same way that formerly men were sold. And though no one can know the results, I am very far from sharing the sense of satisfaction expressed by so many to-day: I fear for the girls I see in such numbers in every place of work a deadening of response to life—a further clog and degradation of womanly feeling and instincts. And as I have said again and again, my fear is much deeper, because this externalisation of life is no new thing. I could add more, much more; but words—what are they in the face of facts! Last week I was in conversation with a young and comely tram conductress. She was married: I asked her if she had children. She answered me: “My goodness, No!” and then added, “One doesn’t want babies on this job.” One dares not generalise too largely, yet for so long women, in this industrially blinded land, have been struggling to gain the world at the payment of losing themselves.
The young women of the new generation are full of distrust, the most demoralising of influences. By this I do not mean that they distrust themselves; they do not. What they do distrust is instinct and emotion, with a corresponding over-valuation of intellectualism and of marketable work-power; and from this distrust there has followed necessarily a breaking away from fixed standards, with a loss of any steadying ideal. This, I think, is the essential trouble, sending them very far astray from the facts of life.
Look at the women you may see in all classes of society. You may see them hastening to and from their work; you may see them in the streets each evening or in every place of amusement. How many bear upon their brows this stamp of a nature unfixed of purpose, in the expression of their face as well as the body movements, in their restlessness and noisy happiness is the sign of disharmonies aroused, a nature strained and failing in the fulfilment of its functions. One feels that as women these young girls of the present generation have lost something, lost it so completely that they know no longer what they desire.
I should, however, like to make it very clear that I am not disparaging women, nor do I fail to admire all they have achieved in difficult positions. There is no need to re-tell the oft-told and much praised facts of what they have done in these years since the war began. There can be no shadow of doubt as to the efficiency and value of the work of the thousands of women at present engaged in many and varied branches of labour. But what I fear is the waste of the struggle should it continue for any period of years. Let us except this hard working of women as a necessary evil of warfare, demanding at the same time special protection and special provision for child-bearers. But do not let us fall into the error of regarding such conditions as in themselves good and desirable, leading, as I believe must follow, to a further obliteration of sex, with its differences and wise separation.
Difficult as at present is the problem, we need to understand that we cannot afford to be wasteful of the strength of women. We are being wasteful. The physiological life even of the unmarried woman ought to handicap her in almost every kind of work. Long hours of standing, the lifting of heavy weights, any kind of drain on the nervous power, cannot fail to do harm. There are days when every young girl and woman who may have to bear children, however strong, ought to release tension, to step aside from work to maintain full health. I am filled with impatience at our pretence on this question of women’s health. There is a difference between the work capacity of the woman and the work capacity of the man. Sex must play a far larger part, making far stronger claims on the strength of the girl and the woman than it ever does in the lives of boys and men. It is vain to assume that because women are willing, and apparently able, to do the same work now as men in the past have done, that, therefore, it is wise to allow them to do it. The price of the violent energy, so wastefully being poured out, will have to be paid. Countless women and girls are using up now the nervous energy and strength of which they are merely the pilots and guardians; the health and calm of spirit which should be stored and transmitted to generations to come.
The increased activity and exertion daily demanded from child-bearers must be anti-social in its racial effects. Either these girls, constantly stimulated, over-excited, and robbed of the tranquillity they need, will bear enfeebled children, or, what is more likely, through the direct premium placed on childlessness, fewer and fewer children will be born, and from this there may tend to follow a further deadening and even a crushing out of the maternal instinct. Children will not be wanted.
I pointed out in the earlier chapters of my book[105] that such a transformation of impulse may take place. The parental instinct is not fixed, and disuse is the swiftest way to decay. Think what this must mean to the life values of the future. I believe it is not possible to estimate how far-reaching may be the results of what is now being done so quickly and so recklessly. By our absurd denials and our ignorance we shall have brought down upon us this evil—our punishment for conceiving sex in women as something too terrible to be faced in its reality.
Let us understand what it is that we shall be doing. We are built up of habits just as a house is built up of bricks. And what motherhood is going to be in the future depends on our desires and our action to-day.
A sound nation has for its essential condition healthy children—yes, and many of them—and healthy mothers to bear and to rear them. We know this. But what are the facts? We find more and more young women turning away from motherhood. They are marrying in larger numbers just now, for war has turned men into heroes and this has made marriage popular. But we may not count too much on this, for no longer does marriage mean the bearing of children and the founding of a family. The wife no longer is comparable to the fruitful vine, no longer are children like olive plants about the table of the house. The blessings of the old sweet poem fail to stir our desires. Babies are not wanted.
The volume of evidence and the observations made by the Commissioners’ Report of the National Birth-Rate Investigation, 1916, which lies upon my desk, cannot be read without a sense of almost hopeless depression. A dark picture is revealed of men and women harried and driven by the sex instinct within them; the relation of the husband and the wife made hateful from a perpetual fear of the natural consequences of birth. The struggle is but too clearly apparent in every section of society. The evidence discloses that the prevention of conception is growing steadily and rapidly, for though it began with and, for a time, was practised only by the well-to-do, it is now spreading downwards to the poorest, amongst whom the practice of abortion has for long been extensively used. Dr. Mary Scharlieb, whose report is, perhaps, the most interesting of all the Commissioners, states that in the working classes there are five abortions to every one live birth.
What sordid facts this Report reveals! What a failure it proves our life! Is there any use in talking of raising the birth-rate until these things are changed? Is our land fit to receive the children? Has not the child the right to demand from its parents that its birth shall be looked on as something more than an unfortunate mistake?
I know, of course, the difficulties which face the parents, among which economic difficulties are important, arising from the competitive capitalistic system by which all our lives are entangled. Yet I feel that these considerations, though they cannot be neglected and increase the evil, alone are not responsible; that the cause lies deeper and is dependent on the desires of the mind; that apart from any economic causes, and even assuming that every child could be better born and with a happy life secured to it, there would yet be much of the problem that would remain unsolved. And what I am trying all this time to make plain is this: If we wish to get rid of the atrophy that is increasingly present in the instincts of our young women, and quicken their response to passion, with its desire for motherhood, we must first get rid of our wrong values of what is good in life and makes for enduring happiness; and to do this we must change our educational methods, the training in the home and in the school, and conditions of work that are their parent. There can be no help and no change, at least I cannot see any, except to alter our ideals. Nothing else of any wide value can be done until these are changed.
In the name of common sense and of sanity let us get to the real bottom of this matter. To do anything at all we must begin at the beginning, where the wrong is started. It is absurd to go on crying out against the shirking of motherhood, while at the same time, in the education of our girls and afterwards in the arrangements we make for their working life, we show a complete evasion of the function most intimately connected with motherhood. That is where the clue to the trouble lies. The whole educational system in our homes and in our schools, as well as the conditions in our workshops and houses of business, is wrong. It discourages motherhood very heavily. And the rational thing for us to do in the matter is not to grow eloquent about a declining birth-rate, or to blame women for not desiring to be mothers, but rather to make intelligent changes so as to minimise to the young the discouragement that by our teaching and our actions we have hitherto given to motherhood.
And the first step towards this must be, I am certain, to banish from the consciousness of every girl all feeling of shame, and all concealments connected with her function of menstruation. In other words, we have to face the facts of a girl’s sexual life. This is not going to be easy.
In the immediate past our attitude of hiding on these questions was due to reasons of prudishness in regard to all natural functions, and notably menstruation—the rubicon in the life of every girl, which first brings or, I ought to say, should bring, full realisation that life for her is separate and needs to take a different course from the life of the boy and the man.
This truth has been disliked so much that in practice it has been disregarded. The wrong is started early and is continued throughout the sexual life. The real controlling force in the education of the girl is the mother; and motherhood has failed. Girls, with an almost criminal neglect, have been left without any wise preparation for the first menstruation, upon the regular establishment of which function their health in the future must depend. Many girls, being seriously frightened or stirred to rebellion and anger, have done foolish actions, and through neglected hygiene evil is begun that never can be undone. This is no over-statement. The first few menstruations have a far greater influence not only on the body, but also on the brain and the soul of a girl than do those that follow later when the sexual health is better established. Every mother and teacher ought to know and heed this.
At best, and even when instructed by their mothers, girls have been taught to regard this function as a troublesome illness that must be suffered with patience; such a view, of course, being a relic of the supposed curse laid upon the woman’s sex. Nor can it be said that even to-day there is any improvement when quite different ideals prevail regarding woman’s place and her vocation. For the new emancipation has brought with it a false view that girls should be educated in the same way as boys, and should be brought up in the pretence that it is right and possible for them to work and play at all times like boys and to be as independent of their sexual life as boys can afford to be.
Now, it does not need much imagination to understand the harm of such teaching. The menstrual function—which really marks the sex of the girl and fits her for motherhood—is ignored as if its occurrence were of no importance. And such an attitude of dislike and hiding necessarily causes a feeling of shame, more or less deep according to the temperament of the girl. From the very first sex is presented in the shape of something to be despised and desperately fought against, something secret and disgusting. Even at this early stage disharmony enters into the young and sensitive soul.
Some girls revolt in the very depths of their being, while the common feelings aroused are expressed by such words as aversion and dislike, anger and shame. Do you not see now the harm that is done? How sadly we are sowing for the future. For what can be the result except to teach our girls a shameful disrespect for themselves. What wonder is there that many girls are stirred to rebellion which takes the outward form of resolutely ignoring their monthly periods, and the fact that they are girls. And the immediate result is a general lowering in the standard of sexual health.
I shall be told that this is not true. But I am writing of what I know. Menstruation is a perfectly natural function and every girl should be taught so to regard it. But at its start it does exercise a very disturbing effect on the whole system and character. And the folly that pretends that in these early years special care is not required at the monthly periods cannot be too strongly condemned. For the harm is deeper and further reaching than the physical hurt, though certainly in our folly we are making invalids of the future mothers of the race. Harm in many cases is done to the after sex expression; harm which probably is never recognised, and about which the ordinary parent and teacher are densely ignorant and optimistic. How little do we consider the consequences of our acts? I say there is no limit and no end to the evil that we are permitting. And the most fearful thing about it is that it all seems so wantonly needless.
The always difficult passage of the girl into the woman is alarming only to the girl who knows nothing about herself and her sexual life. Just as far as she understands does recoil and resentment and shame become needless. Rightly taught, she will learn to regard her special function, not as something to be hidden and ignored, but as the sign of the changes that now are taking place in her body—healthy natural changes that will fit her one day for love and wifehood and motherhood. Then, indeed, her shame and her aversion will be converted into pride. Understanding, she will have a fitting reverence for herself. She will now know why she is under certain restrictions, and has at the times of her monthly periods to refrain from overwork and all strain, and to give up some pleasures and excitements; she will do this gladly in order that her development into womanhood may be without pain, healthy and complete.
I believe firmly that this change in our attitude to menstruation—a change that will emphasise its importance to health and its connection with fit motherhood—a change that must start at the beginning of the girl’s conscious sexual life, is absolutely necessary to the development of a higher motherhood. At least, if it does not come, I can have no hope at all. You cannot gather fruit from a tree that is unhealthy at its root. And you cannot have glad motherhood while you start out by despising the function most sacredly connected with motherhood. We must understand this. Until we do understand it, and then act in the practical way that will cause us to change our teaching to all young girls, we shall find women in ever-increasing numbers turning away from motherhood, and wasting in external things the realities of love and life.
How can healthy womanhood be possible within the limits and wrong ideals of our present system, and how can they fail to give rise to continuous restlessness? I declare once more and plainly that we are raising a generation of girls—those with whom the duties of wifehood and motherhood should reside—who have instincts atrophied by dull studies, to be followed by deadening work. I hold that this is a matter of the gravest concern, not only for women and men and their individual happiness in union one with the other, but is also what will decide the future of this land and empire.
But few among us understand the destruction that is working in our midst. We do not recognise the symptoms that mark the disharmony in the lives of the great majority of the girls and young women of the present generation. War has but increased the mischief. Independence in material things has given triumph to that rebellion which our mistaken training and wrong ideal had started long ago smouldering in the souls of our daughters. To-day youth is in demand; the young girl can fill every place. And youth has risen fearlessly and splendidly to every opportunity, but so quickly as not to have time to consider how much is being trampled underfoot. The danger of speed—the filling of every moment of time, always a mistake made by women—has been intensified by the war. The war race has provided the opportunity to live riotously and wastefully.
Of course, it is we of the older generation—the mothers—who are to blame. We have left our daughters in a dangerous position; we did not see where modern education, with its effort to obliterate sex, must inevitably lead.
Education may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous process. And what is most to be feared is the shut-in instincts that tend to twist the nature from its simple fulfilment. There is something essentially harmful in any failure or wrong expression of a special function. Now, we have insisted upon repressions, and what we believed to be a high moral and efficient working character for girls, not knowing that what we so mistakenly were straining for was really something very like an entire absence of any kind of womanly character. The real nature of girls is wild, and our fears have been very great. And for this reason have we held that the nakedness of the adolescent’s new-born womanhood must be clothed with conventionalities and draped with culture.
It is this fear of sex that directs our educational system: there is too much drill and too much strain. Girls’ schools are governed too much, for girls need, not less, but more liberty than boys. The teachers are dull and narrow in their own outlook and in their experience of life; they are not trained to understand the needs of adolescent girls, only to teach them facts that as a rule are of no real service; they do not trouble to train the inner and hidden instincts that really form character, they do not even look for them; they reck nothing of early development or late, of the presence of strong passion or its absence; they have no kind of understanding of the unceasing action of sex, forcing its expression in unconscious acts, which alone give the clue to character; of all this (the only knowledge that matters) the teachers are profoundly ignorant; but they measure out girl-humanity for the conventional standard of efficiency like a dressmaker measures out her material with a yard measure. There is no thought, at least none is betrayed, that the school is a preparation for living. No kind of training is given for the part the girls will have to play in the life of sex for their own health and happiness and the regeneration of the race. The sexual life is persistently ignored.
I recall reading somewhere—I do not remember the exact connection—how an official of a college for girls was questioned by a visitor as to the advantage gained by the students in their after life from a university training. She answered: “One third of the students profit by it, another third gain some little good, while the remaining third are failures.” “And what becomes of the failures?” was the question asked, while the answer given was this: “Oh, they marry!” Now, I do not know if this excellent story can be accepted as a fact, but it does point to a contempt for marriage and its duties—a contempt for woman’s sex and for her own work—which I believe is present in the thought and attitude, even if not acknowledged openly, among the majority of educationalists. This is a very serious matter.
The remedy, then, has to begin in our schools. We must control education with a finer sense of its value to life. And to do this we must accept the extreme importance of sex, and guard those differences which separate the girl from the boy.
As a first movement of reform, I would recommend one to three years’ rest from the usual school work for every girl, during the period when her sexual life is becoming established. This is not, of course, to advocate idleness. I am not upholding any form of invalidism for girls; the adolescent always should have plenty of healthy occupation, but that is a far different thing from the strain of the ordinary school course, foolishly arranged for girls on the same lines as that for boys, and without any regard to the important function of menstruation. There should be attached to every school for girls a special class for adolescents, and this should be the most important class in the school. At the onset of puberty the girls would enter this class, in which they would stay for two years or longer. The sexual life would not be, as now it is, ignored; rather the chief work of the school would be the healthy establishment of the menstrual function, upon which the future well-being of the girl depends, and to the interests of which everything else should for a time be secondary.
There must be a new valuation of education, with an entire change of attitude, which will make possible more openness between the teacher and her pupils. The difficulties here will, I know, be great. If the mothers do not know how to help their daughters, and usually they do not; if the girls do not know how to help themselves, and dumb and untaught they are helpless, the task of the teachers cannot fail to be hard. And especially will this be the case wherever the mother has failed in her duty and a girl has received no kind of sexual training in the home.
I know of what I am writing here, and how real is the prejudice that will have to be overcome. In my own school I was met with this trouble again and again. The girls resented any mention of their menstrual function, and expressed often real anger and disgust when I required them to tell me the dates of their monthly periods, so that I might see they had extra food, more rest, and lighter studies. The answer that usually was given to me was this: “My mother never wanted me to tell her; I took no notice when I was at home.” What an unconscious indictment of the mothers! Often it was after long and patient effort only that I gained my way, and brought my girls to speak to me naturally about this function. I had the very hardest work to free their thoughts from the deeply implanted feelings of shame and disgust: in many cases I failed altogether, and I cannot, indeed, be sure that I ever fully succeeded. Of course, my failures were the result of harm that had been done much earlier in the home.
It was at this time of my life, now long years ago, when these considerations were forced upon my attention by my failures with my elder pupils, that I was first led to desire special classes for girls to enter at the age of puberty, where the life, the work, and the aims were separate and quite different from the ordinary school. It is so much easier to do the wise thing, if what you are doing is a matter of course, and not something you start for yourself.
I am convinced of the value that would be gained for life from the plan I am advocating. I would begin with these special classes, but I want more than that to be done. A much better course would be that separate adolescent schools should be provided, preferably in the country, where all work as well as play could be done out of doors. All girls would enter before the commencement of puberty, and would stay in one of these special adolescent schools for two or three years or longer. The work would be organised entirely to meet the needs of the individual girl; there must be no set courses of study, no hide-bound rules, and above all no examinations to be crammed for. In my opinion, which was formed from my own experience in my school, girls should do hardly any steady work for one year before and two years after puberty; they cannot, I am certain, work continuously without peril. Mental overwork or any kind of strain destroys the nervous resistance and tends to that irritable weakness which makes the rankest ground for all sexual ill health, and may work to establish evil habits in ways not yet openly recognised. The kind of work done should be chosen by the girl herself; there should be far more opportunity for rest and for play, and, while guarding against opportunities for harmful idleness, any kind of mental or bodily strain must be avoided. Hard study, if this is necessary, will come later at the close of this special school period. But I plead for all girls during the difficult time of their metamorphosis from the girl to the woman to leave them much more largely than we do at present to nature and to themselves.
The adolescent girl often is thought to be lazy, and when called upon to work she shows an exasperating dulness and inattention. This is a natural condition when the girl is passing through the langour of physical growth; she is overcome, not by listlessness, but by the strain of her awakening senses, and the inattention of the mind is, as a rule, but a symptom of the mysterious and difficult maturing of the brain. The apparent apathy is not real: all the girl’s power, all energy of body and mind is being consumed by the overwhelming force of the half-conscious life of instincts that are ripening within. The young girl for the first time feels, though very rarely does she understand, the power of her nature stirring her soul. And any seeming backwardness in studies during these years, as should be known by the wise teacher, leads afterwards to finer progress, if only the right opportunity of unstrained development is given. But it is this harmony of growth that we have been disturbing as with persistent zeal we have educated from the outside. Little wonder that we have failed. I have spoken before of the wide difference that is present between the nature of the boy and that of the girl, and though I speak with hesitation on a question that is too complex to permit dogmatic assertions, the boy has, I think, a much more healthy and conscious knowledge of himself; a girl understands herself less, and has a very dim notion of the motives of her conduct. This leads to very certain danger. The thoughts of most girls are occupied with vague and romantic longings, much heightened by the nonsense written on love in the books girls are allowed to read, stories from which every hint of wholesome reality has been omitted. Such false feelings, dominating the girl’s mind at the time of the adolescent crisis, work grave evil.
While always thinking of love most girls know almost nothing of what love really is; and certainly the strain of any sudden chance investigation of the physical facts of sex is a very near danger.
That is one reason why, in a previous section, I have urged so strongly that sexual enlightenment be given to the girl while she is still at the age when sex has no strong personal significance.
The importance of early knowledge is not sufficiently recognised. If from childhood there has been frankness between the girl and her mother, and they have spoken together openly of sex and the facts of birth, it will certainly have happened that the chief emphasis in the mother’s instruction will have been placed upon the relation between the child and herself.[106] Such teaching may well prove a great safeguard. The personal, or “pleasure,” element in sex will in this way not be too soon forced and stamped on the girl’s consciousness; it will be, as it should, deferred until the age of passion comes. Even then the result of the earlier teaching will be present to direct the desires. Love and marriage will not be divorced entirely from the thought of motherhood, as so disastrously happens with many girls to-day.
It is a question I must leave, though it is one on which much more might be said. For I believe we have here a further explanation of the triumph of the egoistical sexual desires over the parental instincts of sacrifice. I am altogether convinced of the deep and wide-reaching harm that is done, in ways that have never yet been recognised, from the sexual ignorance of girls and our shameful concealments and untrue education. And I have felt often that the brutal frankness of boys in sex matters, bad as certainly it sometimes is in its after coarsening effect, in many ways is better in its results than the confused silence and sentiment with which most girls are surrounded; it is, at least, in nearer touch with the facts of life.
I have had considerable experience with adolescent girls. I am sure that their thoughts are more occupied with sex than they know themselves, or is recognised by the adults who are with them. I am speaking here of the normal girl in whom the sexual impulse takes definite form during the early years of puberty. It will need all our wisdom and patience to be able to help the girl now, if we have left her in the darkness of her soul before. She is suffering the anguish of youth, reaching out for the unknown ideal, which she cannot grasp, cannot even distinguish or conceive. There are, of course, other types of girls—girls of delicate and sensitive temperament in whom sexual development for long may be delayed. This may be due to various causes, but is most frequently a result of excessive mental strain from over-pressure or unsuitable work at the onset of puberty, tending to de-normalise the sex-life.
Now, to some parents and teachers, not understanding the results, it may seem that this is an end to be desired, and that such a postponement of the sex-life to the years when the girl is older will be a safeguard against evils. This, I believe, is a mistake. The sex feelings are not absent but hidden, and the result too often is a profound melancholy and a dull heaviness which may continue to spoil life. And when the time comes, as come it must, and the long-repressed feelings force an expression, the sex-strain is often very great, and troubles frequently arise that could not have happened except for our interference with the right process of nature.
Of course, whatever we do, we must expect often to fail. We are not dealing with anything that can be fixed; and our methods as well as our success must vary with each individual girl. It is this personal element that has not been considered. And this is why there is such need for a higher and different standard in our schools, and of more knowledge and understanding on the part of all who are connected with the training of girls. I know of nothing that can prepare the girl but the early teaching of the mother, but I think in the later adolescent years it is the wise teacher who can better carry on the work.
The task of the educator ought to be plain: to encourage all girls in their natural reaching out for experience and knowledge of themselves, not to smother all that is individual in them under set lessons, necessary perhaps and helpful at other periods of growth, but now I am certain harmful, dulling the character with falsehood and the bodies with constraints, and wearying the minds with overstrain through long hours of drudgery into a dull acceptance.
The worst influence of the school is its isolation from life. Consciousness, not instruction, should be the aim of education. Yet in all directions our girls have been led and forced into following material consciousness, and, at the same time, they have increasingly lost consciousness of themselves. Realisation of one’s own being—how to produce this by means of education—that is the question. What answer are we going to give?
Such a rest period in specially adapted schools as I am here advocating would serve not only to establish the health of adolescent girls and fit them for vigorous womanhood, it would, as I believe, change their ideal and remake life. In such surroundings fitted to their own needs, and with a different valuation of the future set before them, they would have a truer sense of self-consciousness; they would come to understand in quite a new way the responsibilities and high glory of being women.
The difficulties, of course, are numerous. And, first of all, it will not be easy to find the right teachers for these adolescent schools. They will need to be specially trained; but training alone will not serve. The teachers must have had a much wider experience of life than is usual to women; they ought to have genius and a passionate love of children: they need to be mothers in spirit.
Necessarily, the expense of such teachers and of these special schools, which should be established in great numbers and with no thought of sparing the cost, will be heavy. It will be thought, I know, by many that this fact alone makes the plan impracticable. I can answer only, that any expenditure that will produce fit and glad mothers for the future is an expense that will be met by a wise nation.
I would urge that this question be approached from a practical attitude. On all sides concern is being felt at the decline in the birth-rate, which has fallen one-third in the last thirty-five years. The Royal Commission that I have referred to already has made its investigation and issued its report. Much has been written on the problem, and many guesses made as to the vaguely understood causes. The economists find all the evil in economic conditions; the religious say that it is our morality that is at fault. Many are the remedies suggested, a few of which are practical and good. And so urgent is the matter felt to be, now that war with its destruction of life is teaching us a little more the value of life, that changes, long called for, but hitherto seemingly unattainable, shortly may be made in our divorce and marriage laws. The sharp and cruel line drawn between the married and the unmarried mother will at last waver and break on its rotten supports. Already the saving of child life has become a matter of such urgent need that much necessary reform is being accomplished. There is little doubt that these valuable movements will go on.