Book: Woman and Womanhood

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One more point may be conveniently considered here, though it is not
strictly a matter of the marriage age for girls. The point is as to the
most generally desirable age relation between husband and wife. Here,
again, we must remind ourselves that it is impossible to lay down the
law for any case, and that that is not what we are now attempting to do.

As every one knows, there is an average disparity of some few years in
the ages of husband and wife. This may be referred probably to economic
conditions in part, and also to the fact that girlhood becomes womanhood
at a somewhat earlier age than boyhood becomes manhood. The girl is more
precocious. Thus though she be twenty and her husband twenty-three, she
is as mature.

It is probable that the economic tendencies of the day are in the
direction of increasing this disparity, since more is demanded of the
man in the material sense, and he therefore must delay. Some authorities
consider that seniority of six or eight years on the part of the husband
constitutes the desirable average. But there are considerations commonly
ignored that should qualify this opinion in my judgment.

It is not that science has any information regarding the consequence
upon the sex or quality of offspring of any one age ratio in marriage
rather than another. On subjects like this wild statements are
incessantly being made, and we are often told that certain consequences
in offspring follow when the husband is older than the wife, and others
when he is younger, and so forth. As to this, nothing is known, and it
is improbable that there is anything to know. But it has usually been
forgotten, so far as I am aware, that the disparity of age has a very
marked and real consequence, which is, in its turn, the cause of many
more consequences.

We have seen that the male death-rate is higher than the female
death-rate. At all ages, whether before birth or after it, the male
expectation of life is less than the female. This is more conspicuously
true than ever now that the work of Lord Lister, based upon that of
Pasteur, has so enormously lowered the mortality in childbirth. Even
now that mortality is falling, and will rapidly fall for some time to
come, still further increasing the female advantage in expectation of
life; the more especially this applies to married women. If now, this
being the natural fact, we have most husbands older than their wives,
it follows that in a great preponderance of cases the husband will die
first; and so we have produced the phenomenon of widowhood. The greater
the seniority of the husband, the more widowhood will there be in a
society. Every economic tendency, every demand for a higher standard of
life, every aggravation for the struggle for existence, every increment
of the burden of the defective-minded, tending to increase the man's age
at marriage, which, on the whole, involves also increasing his
seniority--contributes to the amount of widowhood in a nation.

We therefore see that, as might have been expected, this question of the
age ratio in marriage, though first to be considered from the average
point of view of the girl, has a far wider social significance. First,
for herself, the greater her husband's seniority, the greater are her
chances of widowhood, which is in any case the destiny of an enormous
preponderance of married women. But further, the existence of widowhood
is a fact of great social importance because it so often means unaided
motherhood, and because, even when it does not, the abominable economic
position of woman in modern society bears hardly upon her. It is not
necessary to pursue this subject further at the present time. But it is
well to insist that this seniority of the husband has remoter
consequences far too important to be so commonly overlooked.




CHAPTER XV

THE FIRST NECESSITY


At this stage in our discussion it is necessary to consider a subject
which ought rightly to come foremost in the provident study of the facts
that precede marriage--a subject which craven fear and ignorance combine
to keep out of sight, yet which must now see the light of day. For the
writer would be false to his task, and guilty of a mere amateur trifling
with the subject, who should spend page after page in discussing the
choice of marriage, the best age for marriage, and so forth, without
declaring that as an absolutely essential preliminary it is necessary
that the girl who mates shall at least, whatever else be or be not
possible, mate with a man who is free from gross and foul disease.

The two forms of disease to which we must refer are appalling in their
consequences, both for the individual and the future. In technical
language they are called contagious; meaning that the infection is
conveyed not through the air as, say, in the case of measles or
small-pox, but by means of contact with some infected surface--it may be
a lip in the act of kissing, a cup in drinking, a towel in washing, and
so forth. Of both these terrible diseases this is true. They therefore
rank, like leprosy, as amongst the most eminently preventable diseases.
Leprosy has in consequence been completely exterminated in England, but
though venereal disease--the name of the two contagions considered
together--diminishes, it is still abundant everywhere and in all classes
of society. Here regarding it only from the point of view of the girl
who is about to mate, I declare with all the force of which I am capable
that, many and daily as are the abominations for which posterity will
hold us up to execration, there is none more abominable in its immediate
and remote consequences, none less capable of apology than the daily
destruction of healthy and happy womanhood, whether in marriage or
outside it, by means of these diseases. At all times this is horrible,
and it is more especially horrible when the helpless victim is destroyed
with the blessing of the Church and the State, parents and friends;
everyone of whom should ever after go in sackcloth and ashes for being
privy to such a deed.

The present writer, for one, being a private individual, the servant of
the public, and responsible to no body smaller than the public, has long
declined and will continue to decline to join the hateful conspiracy of
silence, in virtue of which these daily horrors lie at the door of the
most honoured and respected individuals and professions in the
community. More especially at the doors of the Church and the medical
profession there lies the burden of shame that, as great organized
bodies having vast power, they should concern themselves, as they daily
do, with their own interests and honour, without realizing that where
things like these are permitted by their silence, their honour is
smirched beyond repair in whatever Eyes there be that regard.

I propose therefore to say in this chapter that which at the least
cannot but have the effect of saving at any rate a few girls somewhere
throughout the English-speaking world from one or other or both of these
diseases, and their consequences. Let those only who have ever saved a
single human being from either syphilis or gonorrh[oe]a dare to utter a
word against the plain speaking which may save one woman now.

The task may be much lightened by referring the reader to a play by the
bravest and wisest of modern dramatists, M. Brieux, more especially
because the reader of "Les Avaries" will be enabled to see the sequence
of causation in its entirety. When first our attention is called to
these evils, we are apt to blame the individuals concerned. The parents
of youths, finding their sons infected, will blame neither their guilty
selves nor their sons, but those who tempted them. It is constantly
forgotten that the unfortunate woman who infected the boy was herself
first infected by a man. Either she was betrayed by an individual
blackguard, or our appalling carelessness regarding girlhood, and the
economic conditions which, for the glory of God and man, simultaneously
maintain Park Lane and prostitution, forced her into the circumstances
which brought infection. But she was once as harmless and innocent as
the girl child of any reader of this book; and it was man who first
destroyed her and made her the instrument of further destruction.

Ask how this came to be so, and the answer is that he in his turn was
infected by some woman.

It is time, then, that we ceased to blame youth of either sex, and laid
the onus where it lies--upon the shoulders of older people, and more
especially upon those who by education and profession, or by the
functions they have undertaken, such as parenthood, ought to know the
facts and ought to act upon their knowledge. It is necessary to proceed,
therefore: though perfectly aware that in many ways this chapter will
have to be paid for by the writer: that he has yet to meet the eye of
his publisher; that there will be abundance of abuse from those "whose
sails were never to the tempest given": but aware also that in time to
come those few who dared speak and take their chance in this matter,
whether remembered or not, will have been the pioneers in reforming an
abuse which daily makes daylight hideous. He who does betray the future
for fear of the present should tread timidly upon his Mother Earth lest
he awake her to gape and bury her treacherous son.

Something is known by the general public of the individual consequences
of syphilis. It is known by many, also, that there is such a thing as
hereditary syphilis--babies being born alive but rotted through for
life. Further, it is not at all generally known, though the fact is
established, that of the comparatively few survivors to adult life from
amongst such babies, some may transmit the disease even to the third
generation. There is a school of so-called moralists who regard all this
as the legitimate and providential punishment for vice, even though ten
innocent be destroyed for one guilty. Such moralists, more loathsome
than syphilis itself, may be left in the gathering gloom to the company
of their ghastly creed. Love and man and woman are going forward to the
dawn, and if they inherit from the past no God that is fit to be their
companion, they and the Divine within them will not lose heart.

The public knowledge of syphilis, though far short of the truth, is not
merely so inadequate as that of gonorrh[oe]a.

"No worse than a bad cold" is the kind of lie with which youth is
fooled. The disease may sometimes be little worse than a bad cold in
men, though very often it is far more serious; it may kill, may cause
lasting damage to the coverings of the heart and to the joints, and
often may prevent all possibility of future fatherhood.

These evils sink almost into insignificance when compared with the far
graver consequences of gonorrh[oe]a in woman. Our knowledge of this
subject is comparatively recent, being necessarily based upon the
discovery of the microbe that causes the disease. Now that it can be
identified, we learn that a vast proportion of the illnesses and
disorders peculiar to women have this cause, and it constantly leads to
the operations, now daily carried out in all parts of the world, which
involve opening the body, and all that that may entail. Curable in its
early stages in men, gonorrh[oe]a is scarcely curable in women except
by means of a grave abdominal operation, involving much risk to life and
only to be undertaken after much suffering has failed to be met by less
drastic means. The various consequences of gonorrh[oe]a in other parts
of the body may and do occur in women as in men. Perhaps the most
characteristic consequence of the disease in both sexes is sterility;
this being much more conspicuously the case in women, and being the more
cruel in their case.

Of course large numbers of women are infected with these diseases before
marriage and apart from it, but one or both of them constitute the most
important of the bridegroom's wedding presents, in countless cases every
year, all over the world. The unfortunate bride falls ill after
marriage; she may be speedily cured; very often she is ill for life,
though major surgery may relieve her; and in a large number of cases she
goes forever without children. One need scarcely refer to the remoter
consequences of syphilis to the nervous system, including such diseases
as locomotor ataxia, and general paralysis of the insane; the latter of
which is known to be increasing amongst women. Even in these few words,
which convey to the layman no idea whatever of the pains and horrors,
the shocking erosion of beauty, the deformities, the insanities,
incurable blindness of infants, and so forth, that follow these
diseases, enough will yet have been said to indicate the importance of
what is to follow. Medical works abound in every civilized language
which, especially as illustrated either by large masses of figures or by
photographs of cases, will far more than justify to the reader
everything that has been said.

And now for the whole point of this chapter. We are not here concerned
to deal with prostitution or its possible control. We are dealing with
girlhood before marriage and in relation to marriage, and the plea is
Goethe's--for _more light_. There is no need to horrify or scandalize or
disgust young womanhood, but it is perfectly possible in the right way
and at the right time to give instruction as to certain facts, and
whilst quite admitting that there are hosts of other things which we
must desire to teach, I maintain that this also must we do and not leave
the others undone. It is untrue that it is necessary to excite morbid
curiosity, that there is the slightest occasion to give nauseous or
suggestive details, or that the most scrupulous reticence in handling
the matter is incompatible with complete efficiency. Such assertions
will certainly be made by those who have done nothing, never will do
anything, and desire that nothing shall be done; they are nothing, let
them be treated as nothing.

It is supposed by some that instruction in these matters must be useless
because, in point of fact, imperious instincts will have their way. It
is nonsense. Here, as in so many other cases, the words of Burke are
true--Fear is the mother of safety. It is always the tempter's business
to suggest to his victim that there is no danger. Often and often, if
convinced there is danger, and danger of another kind than any he refers
to, she will be saved. This may be less true of young men. In them the
racial instinct is stronger, and perhaps a smaller number will be
protected by fear, but no one can seriously doubt that the fear born of
knowledge would certainly protect many young women.

There is also the possible criticism, made by a school of moralists for
whom I have nothing but contempt so entire that I will not attempt to
disguise it, who maintain that these are unworthy motives to which to
appeal, and that the good act or the refraining from an evil one,
effected by means of fear, is of no value to God. In the same breath,
however, these moralists will preach the doctrine of hell. We reply that
we merely substitute for their doctrine of hell--which used to be
somewhere under the earth, but is now who knows where--the doctrine of a
hell upon the earth, which we wish youth of both sexes to fear; and that
if the life of this world, both present and to come, be thereby served,
we bow the knee to no deity whom that service does not please.

How then should we proceed?

It seems to me that instruction in this matter may well be delayed until
the danger is near at hand. This is not really education for parenthood
in the more general sense. That, on the principles of this book, can
scarcely begin too soon; it is, further, something vastly more than mere
instruction, though instruction is one of its instruments. But here what
we require is simply definite instruction to a definite end and in
relation to a definite danger. At some stage or other, before emerging
into danger, youth of both sexes must learn the elements of the
physiology of sex, and must be made acquainted with the existence and
the possible results of venereal disease. A father or a teacher may
very likely find it almost impossible to speak to a boy; even though he
has screwed his courage up almost to the sticking place, the boy's
bright and innocent eyes disarm him. Unfortunately boys are often less
innocent than they look. There exists far more information among youth
of both sexes than we suppose; only it is all coloured by pernicious and
dangerous elements, the fruit of our cowardice and neglect. Let us
confine ourselves to the case of the girl.

Before a girl of the more fortunate classes goes out into society, she
must be protected in some way or another. If she be, for instance,
convent bred, or if she come from an ideal home, it may very well be and
often is that she needs no instruction whatever, because she is in fact
already made unapproachable by the tempter. Fortunate indeed is such a
girl. But those forming this well-guarded class are few, and parents and
guardians may often be deceived and assume more than they are entitled
to. At any rate, for the vast majority of girls some positive
instruction is necessary. It is the mother who must undertake this
responsible and difficult task before she admits the girl to the perils
of the world. Further, by some means or other, instruction must be
afforded for the ever-increasing army of girls who go out to business.
It is to me a never ceasing marvel that loving parents, devoted to their
daughters' welfare, should fail in this cardinal and critical point of
duty, so constantly as they do.

Many employers of female labour nowadays show a genuine and effective
interest in the welfare of their employees. As one might expect, this
is notably the case with the Quaker manufacturers of chocolate and
cocoa. I have visited the works of one of these firms, and can testify
to the splendidly intelligent and scrupulous care which is taken of the
girls' general health, their eye-sight, their reading, and many aspects
of their moral welfare. Yet there still remains something to be done in
regard to protection from venereal disease, and surely the suggestion
that conscientious employers should have instruction given in these
matters is one which is well worthy of consideration.

It is known by all observers--but it is a very meagre "all"--of the
realities of politics that in Great Britain, at any rate, there is an
increase of drinking amongst women and girls. This is doubtless in
considerable measure due to the increase of work in factories, and the
greater liberty enjoyed by adolescence--liberty too often to become
enslaved. This bears directly upon our present subject. In a very large
number of cases, the first lapse from self-restraint in young people of
both sexes occurs under the influence of alcohol, the most pre-eminent
character of whose action upon the nervous system is the paralysis of
inhibition or control. Not only is alcohol responsible in this way, but
also in any given case it renders infection more probable for more
reasons than one. This abominable thing--in itself the immediate cause
of many evils and, except as a fuel for lifeless machines and for
industrial purposes, of no good--is thus the direct ally of the venereal
diseases as of consumption and many more. We must return to this
important subject later: meanwhile let it be noted that the influence
of alcohol upon youth of both sexes greatly favours not only immorality
but also venereal disease. The girl, therefore, who would protect
herself directly will avoid this thing, and the girl who desires that
neither she nor her children shall be destroyed after marriage, will
exact from the man she chooses the highest possible standard of conduct
in this matter. A friendly critic has told me that my books would be all
very well, but that I have alcohol on the brain, and I am inclined to
reply, Better on the brain than in the brain. But a subject so serious
demands more serious treatment, and the due reply is that there is no
human prospect for which I care, no public advantage to be advocated, no
good I know, of which alcohol is not the enemy; no abomination,
physical, mental or moral, individual or social, of which it is not the
friend. Further, words like these will stand on record, and may be
remembered when there has been achieved that slow but irresistible
education of public opinion, to which some few have devoted themselves,
and of which the triumph is as certain as the triumph of all truth was
in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. To the many charges against
alcohol made by the champions of life in the past, let there be added
that on which all students of venereal diseases are agreed--that it is
the most potent ally of the most loathsome evils that afflict mankind.

This chapter is not yet complete. In many cases it may be read not by
the girl who is contemplating marriage, but by one or both of her
parents. If the reader be such an one I here charge him or her with the
solemn responsibility which is theirs whether they realize it or not.
You desire your daughter's welfare; you wish her to be healthy and happy
in her married life; perhaps your heart rejoices at the thought of
grand-children; you concern yourself with your prospective son-in-law's
character, with his income and prospects; you wish him to be steady and
sober; you would rather that he came of a family not conspicuous for
morbid tendencies. All this is well and as it should be; yet there is
that to be considered which, whilst it is only negative, and should not
have to be considered at all, yet takes precedence of all these other
questions. If the man in question is tainted with either or both of
these diseases, he is to be _summarily rejected_ at any rate until
responsible and, one may suggest, at least duplicated medical opinion
has pronounced him cured. Microscopic examination of the blood or
otherwise can now pronounce on this matter with much more definiteness
than used to be possible. But even so, there are possibilities of error,
for experts are more and more coming to recognize the existence and the
importance of latent gonorrh[oe]a, devoid of characteristic symptoms but
yet liable to wake in the individual and always dangerous from the point
of view of infection. No combination of advantages is worth the dust in
the balance when weighed against either of these diseases in a
prospective son-in-law: infection is not a matter of chance but of
certainty or little short of it. Everything may seem fair and full of
promise, yet there may be that in the case which will wreck all in the
present; not to mention destroying the chance of motherhood or bringing
rotten or permanently blinded children into the world.

It follows, therefore, that parents or guardians are guilty of a grave
dereliction of duty if they neglect to satisfy themselves in time on
this point. Doubtless, in the great majority of cases no harm will be
done. But in the rest irreparable harm is often done, and the innocent,
ignorant girl who has been betrayed by father and mother and husband
alike, may turn upon you all, perhaps on her death-bed, perhaps with the
blasted future in her arms, and say "This is _your_ doing: behold your
deed."

"_But if ye could and would not_, oh, what plea,
Think ye, shall stead you at your trial, when
The thunder-cloud of witnesses shall loom,
With Ravished Childhood on the seat of doom
At the Assizes of Eternity?"

These pages may disgust or offend nine hundred and ninety-nine readers
out of a thousand. They may yet save one girl, and will have justified
themselves.

One final word may be added on the relation of this subject to Eugenics,
to which this pen and voice have been for many years devoted. The
subject of venereal disease is one of which we Eugenists, like the rest
of the world, fight shy; yet just because the rest of the world does so,
we should not. Nevertheless I mean to see to it that this subject
becomes part of the Eugenic campaign which will yet dominate and mould
the future. For surely the present spectacle has elements in it which
would be utterly farcical if they were not so tragic. Here we have life
present and life to come being destroyed for lack of knowledge. These
horrible diseases, ravaging the guilty and the innocent, equally and
indifferently, are at present allowed to do so with scarcely a voice
raised against them. Every day husbands infect their wives, who have no
kind of protection or remedy, and the wicked, grinning face of the law
looks on, and says "She is his wife; all is well." If we had courage
instead of cowardice--the capital mark of an age that has no organ voice
but many steam whistles--we could accelerate incalculably the gradual
decrease of these diseases. The body of eugenic opinion which is being
made and multiplied might succeed in allying the Church and Medicine and
the Law, with splendid and lasting effect. But we spend thousands of
pounds in estimating correlations between hair colour and
conscientiousness, fertility and longevity, stature and the number of
domestic servants, and so forth, meanwhile protesting against too hasty
attempts to guide public opinion on these refined matters; and this
tremendous eugenic reform, which awaits the emergence of some courage
somewhere, is left altogether out of account. There was no allusion to
the existence of venereal disease, far and away the most appalling of
what I have called dysgenic forces, in any official eugenic publication
until April, 1909, when in the Eugenics Review we dared to make a
cautious and half-ashamed beginning; half-ashamed to stand up against
syphilis and gonorrh[oe]a. When one thinks of the things that we are not
ashamed to do, as individuals or as nations, it is to reflect that
perhaps we have "let the tiger die" too utterly, and that just as woman
is ceasing to be a mammal, man is perhaps ceasing to be even a
vertebrate. Is there no Archbishop or Principal of a University or Chief
Justice or popular novelist or preacher or omnipotent editor, boasting a
backbone still, who will serve not only his day and generation but all
future days and generations, by devoting himself and his powers to this
long-delayed campaign wherein, if it be but undertaken, success is
certain, and reward so glorious?[14]

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