Introduction to Safe marriages
At present marriage is easily the most dangerous of all our social institutions. This is partly due to the colossal ignorance of the public in regard to sex, and partly due to the fact that marriage is mainly controlled by lawyers and priests instead of by women and doctors. The legal and religious aspects of marriage are not the primary ones. A marriage may be legal—and miserable; religious—and diseased. The law pays no heed to the suitability of the partners, and the Church takes no regard for their health. Nevertheless, the basis of marriage is obviously mating, or sexual intercourse. Without that there is no marriage, and with it come not merely health and happiness but life itself. Cut out sexual intercourse, and society becomes extinct in one generation. Every generation must, of necessity, pass through the bodies of its women; there is no other way of obtaining entry into the world. Hence, it is clearly the duty of women to understand precisely the processes involved, from beginning to end.
With the lower animals sexual intercourse is desired only seasonally, and only for the purpose of reproduction. With the higher animals—man and women—sexual intercourse is desired more or less continuously throughout adult life, and desired much more for romantic than for reproductive considerations—that is, for the sake of health and happiness rather than for the sake of procreation only. A few women, and still fewer men, have no sexual desires. To them sexual abstinence seems more natural than sexual satisfaction. But for the majority of mankind and womankind—for all normally healthy men and women—there is this continuous desire to be happily mated.
For the sake of health and happiness there is everything to be said for early marriage, but better late than never.[A] The chief obstacles to early and happy marriage are financial, and these would largely disappear if women were able to control fecundity. The chief obstacles to healthy marriage are the venereal diseases, and these could be extirpated in two or three generations if sexual cleanliness was properly taught to all adults, and if promiscuous intercourse was properly regulated during the same period. Unfortunately most women's idea of regulating promiscuous intercourse is to have none of it. This is impossible in the present stage of moral evolution, but it will become increasingly possible as we succeed in extirpating the venereal diseases, particularly syphilis. Syphilis is the one great cause of immorality, because persons born with a syphilitic taint (and what family is entirely free from this hereditary disease?) are apt to be mentally and morally deficient; hence, tend to indulge in anti-social and unnatural practices, such as engaging in promiscuous intercourse.
The normally healthy man is a highly selective creature, and the normally healthy woman still more fastidiously selective in romantic relationship. Neither man nor woman is naturally in the least attracted by promiscuous intercourse. On the contrary, it is repugnant to both. Both regard the elements of romance, reciprocity and permanence as essential. These elements are present in marriage and absent in prostitution. Therefore, it is beneath the dignity of any decent, intelligent woman to suppose that promiscuous relationship can ever be as happy and satisfying and attractive as marriage. This, apart altogether from the fact that marriage is fertile and prostitution infertile. No, both man and woman desire love-relationship, not loveless-relationship; and they are really quite fit to be trusted with the evolution of the race through passionate love and the worship of beauty, as soon as society makes harmonious provision for their normal sexual needs. Until society does make early marriage practicable for all healthy adult men and women, say between twenty and twenty-five years of age, extra-marital relationship, however undesirable, is inevitable, because there are many men to whom, at times, any woman is better than no woman.
But extra-marital relationship is never even safe, because of its promiscuity and impermanence, except in properly conducted and effectively supervised tolerated houses. The tolerated house is absolutely necessary at present to protect women from disease and immorality, by confining this kind of intercourse as far as possible in certain definite channels. The abolition of the tolerated house spreads both disease and immorality into classes of women who would otherwise be immune, and enormously increases the dangers of promiscuous intercourse. Separated from their toilet equipment the women cannot make and keep themselves clean; on the streets they are not taught to refuse intercourse with diseased men; thus their occupation becomes more and more dangerous as medical supervision is removed. They inevitably become diseased; sometimes contract mixed infections, which they pass on to their clients—the future husbands and fathers of the nation—and "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation." All this would be impossible if women generally would recognise the primary fact that because a man is immoral that it is no reason why he should become syphilitic. We all want to abolish sin, but failing that we must cease wanting to poison the sinner. We must actively work to save him from the penalties of his folly, for that is the only way in which we can save his victims and succeed ultimately in "Making Marriage Safe."
Similarly every effort should be made to prevent women becoming diseased, no matter how immoral they may be. The prostitute is very often a woman of peculiar mentality or overdeveloped animal instincts; and many women are driven to prostitution by drink and poverty. The prostitute class is largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents. Prostitution is the effect—not the cause—of anti-social acts and conditions. We must remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects. Under present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature of a room by smashing the thermometer. All we can do is to make and keep these women clean. If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men in sexual cleanliness.[B]
And again, just as the medical prevention of venereal disease was not proposed, and has not been applied for the purpose of fostering or condoning promiscuous intercourse,[C] so the conscious control of fecundity by contraception must not be applied in such a way as to lessen the proportion of well-born citizens in the nation taken as a whole. Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses, must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character, brains and physique. It is a form of reverse selection—the responsible being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded and unfit.
Enthusiastic advocates of birth-control claim it as a means of improving the race. It is not necessarily anything of the kind. You cannot improve a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle by letting all the individuals breed; whether each individual has a small number or a large number of offspring makes comparatively little difference. The way to improve the flock or herd is to breed only from the best and eliminate the unfit as breeding material. Changes in environment may improve or deteriorate the individuals of one generation, but such changes are not inheritable, excepting in the case of venereal disease. Syphilis, e.g., may damage the germ-cells of a man's body, and thus lead to his procreating diseased and damaged offspring—idiots, imbeciles, mental or moral deficients, and so forth, who unfortunately are fertile. Thus the prevention of venereal disease is a eugenic force. It is in fact the only eugenic force in operation at present. Generally speaking, it is the well-developed and high-spirited and enterprising young men who travel most, and who, therefore, are most likely to contract and spread venereal disease. They come in contact with a much larger number of women than those who stay at home instead of wandering abroad. These well-to-do young travellers often marry the finest of our women, and later in life damage or sterilise them through latent or chronic venereal disease. Hence many one-child marriages—due not to the use of contraceptives, but to the action of the gonococcus transferred to the body of the wife.
But there is this hope. It is among the mentally alert and well-informed men and women that birth-control is first understood and applied, and it is among this very same class that the medical prevention of venereal disease is also first understood and applied. Thus, there will tend to be less disease among this class than among the mentally torpid and ill-informed masses of the community. This in itself will not improve the race, but it will prevent the deterioration of certain classes and increase their numbers. Nevertheless, so long as the irresponsible and feeble-minded and diseased are permitted to multiply indiscriminately, as at present, they must ultimately outnumber and overwhelm the classes which are practising self-restraint or applying birth-control. This process may even be hastened by a political enfranchisement, which enables twelve feeble-minded persons to outvote two wise men six times over. Thus, to succeed democracy must raise and maintain the general average of brains and character throughout the community. In so far as it permits low-grade individuals to be born in the homes of the masses, and high-grade individuals in the homes of the classes, it is manufacturing a rod to thrash its own back, successful rebellion against which mode of Government ends in mere anarchy and chaos.[D]
One duty at any rate is quite clear. No woman should run any chance of conception unless she is certain of her own health and the health of her partner—the man who is to be the father of the child she is to bring into the world. If her husband's health is unsound, and she cannot avoid intercourse, she can certainly take precautions against conception and against infection. The control of fecundity and the control of infection are parallel problems, and generally speaking, the measures a woman takes to prevent conception will also prevent infection. If these precautions are not taken, a woman may not only become seriously ill herself, but she may blast the health of her unborn babe—or infect it herself during or after birth. Clearly then it is her personal, as well as her maternal and national, duty to apply preventive measures.
Women should understand that there is always a great deal of venereal disease—millions of fresh cases every year in the British Empire. During the war there were about half-a-million fresh infections per annum among the soldiers in the British armies alone—about two million men infected altogether at the very least.[E] Some were cured, others patched up; some very badly treated; some not treated at all; many demobilised while in an infective condition, and thus liable to come home and sow in the bodies of clean women the seeds of diseases picked up in foreign lands in moments of excitement and folly. Blame these men if we must, but in all fairness let us ask ourselves: Who infected them? And the answer is: Diseased women.
The venereal diseases are passed on from one sex to the other in a continuous chain, but the chain can be broken at any time by either sex. And now it is the married women on whom we must rely to see that these infections are stopped. Leaving women to the chance protection of their partners is demonstrably a failure. Here is an extract from a letter sent me recently by an old and experienced medical practitioner:—
"I have had many women under treatment who have been continually re-infected by their husbands."
Men and women must both seek knowledge and both accept responsibility for the venereal problem. They must face this problem independently and in co-operation, and above all—face it honestly. There is no other way.
It is all very well to say that the man is responsible. That is only a partial truth.[F] The woman is equally responsible as soon as she is equally well informed. A woman's body is her own, and she will never be really free until she knows how to look after it properly. If she is fit to vote, fit to pay taxes, fit to hold her own estate under the Married Women's Property Act, why should she not learn to exercise intelligent and responsible control over her own self? Why do so many women allow themselves to be impregnated and infected against their will? Because they do not understand the construction and functions of their own body. When they do understand this, they will guard their own health as carefully as they guard their reputation. They will then not only keep their own sexual organs scrupulously clean, but they will encourage their husbands to do the same. Sexual intercourse is far more refreshing and exhilarating in every way when both husband and wife have cleansed their parts immediately before enjoying it. It is only natural that both should wish to be sweet and clean before approaching the closest of all bodily intimacies.
But more than this. Every well-informed woman knows that there is far more venereal disease in the world to-day, among men and among women, than there was before the war, and she should train all the members of her household in habits of strict cleanliness. Instinctively they will then avoid risking their health by contact with a possible source of defilement, or if the risk has most unfortunately been taken, they will instantly and instinctively remove and destroy the possible infection, in the same rapid and effective way as they would cleanse their boot from filth accidentally coming in contact with it. By all means let the mothers continue to inculcate virtue, but they should also teach sexual cleanliness directly and indirectly, themselves setting the example. After all, the microbes of venereal disease grow almost exclusively in the genital passages, and if these were kept sweet and clean there would soon be an end to venereal disease. It is not a matter of making vice safe: it is a matter of making marriage safe: a matter of restoring and maintaining physical health, family and national, and above all, of protecting innocent women and children, for if vice has its dangers so also in these days has innocence its own peculiar perils, and it is the cry of these victims—often so young and so fair—that must affect us most deeply.
More than fourteen years ago, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, in the Preface to "Getting Married," wrote the following regarding "The Pathology of Marriage":—
"As to the evils of disease and contagion, our consciences are sound enough: what is wrong with us is ignorance of the facts. No doubt this is a very formidable ignorance in a country where the first cry of the soul is, 'Don't tell me: I don't want to know,' and where frantic denials and furious suppressions indicate everywhere the cowardice and want of faith which conceives life as something too terrible to be faced. In this particular case, 'I don't want to know' takes a righteous air, and becomes 'I don't want to know anything about the diseases which are the just punishment of wretches who should not be mentioned in my presence or in any book that is intended for family reading.' Wicked and foolish as the spirit of this attitude is, the practice of it is so easy and lazy and uppish that it is very common, but its cry is drowned by a louder and more sincere one. We who do not want to know, also do not want to go blind, to go mad, to be disfigured, to be barren, to become pestiferous, or to see such things happening to our children. We learn, at last, that the majority of the victims are not the people of whom we so glibly say, 'Serve them right,' but quite innocent children and innocent parents, smitten by a contagion which, no matter in what vice it may or may not have originated, contaminates the innocent and the guilty alike, once it is launched, exactly as any other contagious disease does; that indeed it often hits the innocent and misses the guilty, because the guilty know the danger and take elaborate precautions against it, whilst the innocent, who have been either carefully kept from any knowledge of their danger, or erroneously led to believe that contagion is possible through misconduct only, run into danger blindfold. Once knock this fact into people's minds, and their self-righteous indifference and intolerance soon change into lively concern for themselves and their families."
The facts seem so plain, and yet there is still great opposition to the promotion of a knowledge of sexual cleanliness and self-disinfection. Only a short time ago (the end of 1920), Sir Frederick Mott, the great authority on syphilis, felt obliged to oppose some opponents of self-disinfection at a public enquiry in London in this fashion:—
"The point is that large numbers of innocent women have suffered from disease. They are rendered sterile, have miscarriages and abortions, and large numbers have been ruined. I have been connected with the London County Asylums for twenty-five years, and I have seen in those asylums people from all states of society, and I have seen them die of general paralysis. Five per cent. of the people who get syphilis, in spite of treatment, develop this disease. That is only one aspect of it. I was on the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease, and Sir William Osier, who was a great authority, said that he could teach medicine on syphilis alone, because every tissue in the body is affected by it, and that the diseases of blindness, deafness, insanity and every form of disease may be due to syphilis. You have only to consider the effect that it had upon the army, and I understand that more than two army corps were invalided during the war on account of venereal disease. What have you to say to that? Does not that create some anxiety?"
It is difficult even to read this eloquent appeal—the more eloquent perhaps because it was quite unpremeditated—without being deeply moved. Yet the witnesses opposing Sir Frederick Mott were apparently unaffected. Of them, as of men of old, it might justly be said:—
"He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted."
And now large numbers of hospitals all over the Empire are issuing appeals for the means to treat venereal disease.
"It is tragic," says one London hospital, "to see the sufferers—men, women and even little children—innocent little mites, knowing not from what they suffer or why they should. It is thought by many that venereal disease is a sign of guilt, but large numbers of our patients are innocent victims."
Is it not time then that we all stopped repeating timid platitudes about making vice safe, and did something practical to make marriage safe?
Why don't we?
Is it because we are afraid to define the terms we use so glibly? We talk of promoting chastity, for example. What is chastity? Surely chastity is happy, healthy sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who love one another; and unchastity is sexual intercourse between those who do not love one another. No sexual intercourse at all is neither chastity nor unchastity; it is the negation of both, and it ends in extinction. Why trouble so much about a negation that inevitably means racial death? Why not devote ourselves to life and love; to the building of a happy healthy human family—a family that instinctively realises that the clean blood-stream of a nation is its most priceless possession?
But the national blood-stream can never be clean until there is a complete knowledge of sexual control and sanitation among all of us, and especially among women. One of the very first things which women must learn to understand is the control of conception and the control of venereal diseases. They must learn how to prevent the birth of the unfit; how to secure the birth of the fit; and even though their husbands are infective they must learn how to break the chain of infection in their own bodies, so that what is bad for the race does not become worse. If women are brave enough and wise enough, they can in most cases wipe out the scourge of venereal diseases from their own hearths and homes, and ensure that every child born is at least physically fit. But this cannot be done without knowledge, and that knowledge is at present lacking.
The following pages are written with the object of imparting useful, practical knowledge to sensible and serious women. The women who accept and apply this knowledge can rest calm in the sure and certain faith that it is their offspring who will build up the coming race.
