An Ancient Evil

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. · Jul 11, 1912

The tacit understanding among respectable people that certain forms of vice are to be kept from the knowledge of young women and to be ignored in public discussion is the last surviving trace of the ancient heresy of the inherent vileness of the body and of its appetites. Children who are to feel the tempestuous force of passion are left in dense ignorance of its nature, and allowed to receive their first knowledge of the great and sacred functions of the body surreptitiously, and in forms which are vulgar, if not corrupting. Girls are sent to great cities to earn their living, in dense ignorance of the moral dangers that will surround them, left to walk alone along paths so perilous that a single false step may commit them to a life of shame. It is a terrible fact that the ranks of the unhappy women who sell, not their time nor labor, but themselves, are augmented by the silence of unwise mothers, whose false modesty sends their daughters to the awful fate of the prostitute.

The stupidity of giving boys and girls the most careful training of brain and taste and muscle, and ignoring instruction in the matter most vital to their health of body and of soul, would be inexplicable if one did not remember the false ideas of modesty in which so many persons have been bred. To leave young people in ignorance of the forces and laws of the physical life is a crime on the part of parents. This knowledge ought always to be given by fathers and mothers; it is almost impossible to give it wisely through books, though a few books convey it without dangerous suggestion. A great step is being taken in the schools which teach sex hygiene, although even this step is being fought by the ignorance of good people. But this does not relieve fathers and mothers of one of their greatest responsibilities. A physician was once asked why a beautiful young woman had died. He answered promptly, "Because her mother was too refined to be intelligent."

Behind much of this betrayal of ignorant girls lies the blindness of mothers in not giving their daughters some knowledge of the perils of city life, and the neglect of such girls when they arrive in the cities where vile men and women wait to betray them. Much has been done of late to protect these girls, but the quarantine which keeps out disease ought to be paralleled by the systematic protection which keeps health from contamination. The approaches to every city ought to be guarded by good women.

Excessive fatigue in shops and factories; underfeeding; loneliness; the desire for companionship and pleasure, which is strong in all normal young people; the unguarded dancing places; the miscellaneous excursions; the unwatched amusement parks, are among the open gates through which an army of girls pass without knowing whither they are going, and in blind ignorance take that first step which lands them in the underworld, whence escape is almost as difficult as from prisons of stone. The thought of the girls whose unguarded innocence makes it possible in a brief hour to blacken their natures and condemn them to a life of infamy ought to shame good men and women out of their sham delicacy of feeling in dealing with this evil.—The Outlook, May 18, 1912.