Thus Boris Sidis has recorded a case illustrating the disastrous
results of inculcating on a morbidly sensitive girl the doctrine
of the impurity of women. She was educated in a convent. "While
there she was impressed with the belief that woman is a vessel of
vice and impurity. This seemed to have been imbued in her by one
of the nuns who was very holy and practiced self-mortification.
With the onset of her periods, and with the observation of the
same in the other girls, this doctrine of female impurity was all
the stronger impressed on her sensitive mind." It lapsed,
however, from conscious memory and only came to the foreground in
subsequent years with the exhaustion and fatigue of prolonged
office work. Then she married. Now "she has an extreme abhorrence
of women. Woman, to the patient, is impurity, filth, the very
incarnation of degradation and vice. The house wash must not be
given to a laundry where women work. Nothing must be picked up in
the street, not even the most valuable object, perchance it might
have been dropped by a woman" (Boris Sidis, "Studies in
Psychopathology," _Boston Medical and Surgical Journal_, April 4,
1907). That is the logical outcome of much of the traditional
teaching which is given to girls. Fortunately, the healthy mind
offers a natural resistance to its complete acceptation, yet it
usually, in some degree, persists and exerts a mischievous
influence.

It is, however, not only in her relations to herself and to her sex that a
girl's thoughts and feelings tend to be distorted by the ignorance or the
false traditions by which she is so often carefully surrounded. Her
happiness in marriage, her whole future career, is put in peril. The
innocent young woman must always risk much in entering the door of
indissoluble marriage; she knows nothing truly of her husband, she knows
nothing of the great laws of love, she knows nothing of her own
possibilities, and, worse still, she is even ignorant of her ignorance.
She runs the risk of losing the game while she is still only beginning to
learn it. To some extent that is quite inevitable if we are to insist
that a woman should bind herself to marry a man before she has experienced
the nature of the forces that marriage may unloose in her. A young girl
believes she possesses a certain character; she arranges her future in
accordance with that character; she marries. Then, in a considerable
proportion of cases (five out of six, according to the novelist Bourget),
within a year or even a week, she finds she was completely mistaken in
herself and in the man she has married; she discovers within her another
self, and that self detests the man to whom she is bound. That is a
possible fate against which only the woman who has already been aroused to
love is entitled to regard herself as fairly protected.

There is, however, a certain kind of protection which it is possible to
afford the bride, even without departing from our most conventional
conceptions of marriage. We can at least insist that she shall be
accurately informed as to the exact nature of her physical relations to
her future husband and be safeguarded from the shocks or the disillusions
which marriage might otherwise bring. Notwithstanding the decay of
prejudices, it is probable that even to-day the majority of women of the
so-called educated class marry with only the vaguest and most inaccurate
notions, picked up more or less clandestinely, concerning the nature of
the sexual relationships. So highly intelligent a woman as Madame Adam has
stated that she believed herself bound to marry a man who had kissed her
on the mouth, imagining that to be the supreme act of sexual union,[34]
and it has frequently happened that women have married sexually inverted
persons of their own sex, not always knowingly, but believing them to be
men, and never discovering their mistake; it is not long indeed since in
America three women were thus successively married to the same woman, none
of them apparently ever finding out the real sex of the "husband." "The
civilized girl," as Edward Carpenter remarks, "is led to the 'altar'
often in uttermost ignorance and misunderstanding of the sacrificial rites
about to be consummated." Certainly more rapes have been effected in
marriage than outside it.[35] The girl is full of vague and romantic faith
in the promises of love, often heightened by the ecstasies depicted in
sentimental novels from which every touch of wholesome reality has been
carefully omitted. "All the candor of faith is there," as Senancour puts
it in his book _De l'Amour_, "the desires of inexperience, the needs of a
new life, the hopes of an upright heart. She has all the faculties of
love, she must love; she has all the means of pleasure, she must be loved.
Everything expresses love and demands love: this hand formed for sweet
caresses, an eye whose resources are unknown if it must not say that it
consents to be loved, a bosom which is motionless and useless without
love, and will fade without having been worshipped; these feelings that
are so vast, so tender, so voluptuous, the ambition of the heart, the
heroism of passion! She needs must follow the delicious rule which the law
of the world has dictated. That intoxicating part, which she knows so
well, which everything recalls, which the day inspires and the night
commands, what young, sensitive, loving woman can imagine that she shall
not play it?" But when the actual drama of love begins to unroll before
her, and she realizes the true nature of the "intoxicating part" she has
to play, then, it has often happened, the case is altered; she finds
herself altogether unprepared, and is overcome with terror and alarm. All
the felicity of her married life may then hang on a few chances, her
husband's skill and consideration, her own presence of mind. Hirschfeld
records the case of an innocent young girl of seventeen--in this case, it
eventually proved, an invert--who was persuaded to marry but on
discovering what marriage meant energetically resisted her husband's
sexual approaches. He appealed to her mother to explain to her daughter
the nature of "wifely duties." But the young wife replied to her mother's
expostulations, "If that is my wifely duty then it was your parental duty
to have told me beforehand, for, if I had known, I should never have
married." The husband in this case, much in love with his wife, sought for
eight years to over-persuade her, but in vain, and a separation finally
took place.[36] That, no doubt, is an extreme case, but how many innocent
young inverted girls never realize their true nature until after marriage,
and how many perfectly normal girls are so shocked by the too sudden
initiation of marriage that their beautiful early dreams of love never
develop slowly and wholesomely into the acceptance of its still more
beautiful realities?

Before the age of puberty it would seem that the sexual initiation of the
child--apart from such scientific information as would form part of school
courses in botany and zooelogy--should be the exclusive privilege of the
mother, or whomever it may be to whom the mother's duties are delegated.
At puberty more authoritative and precise advice is desirable than the
mother may be able or willing to give. It is at this age that she should
put into her son's or daughter's hands some one or other of the very
numerous manuals to which reference has already been made (page 53),
expounding the physical and moral aspects of the sexual life and the
principles of sexual hygiene. The boy or girl is already, we may take it,
acquainted with the facts of motherhood, and the origin of babies, as well
as, more or less precisely, with the father's part in their procreation.
Whatever manual is now placed in his or her hands should at least deal
summarily, but definitely, with the sexual relationship, and should also
comment, warningly but in no alarmist spirit, with the chief auto-erotic
phenomena, and by no means exclusively with masturbation. Nothing but good
can come of the use of such a manual, if it has been wisely selected; it
will supplant what the mother has already done, what the teacher may still
be doing, and what later may be done by private interview with a doctor.
It has indeed been argued that the boy or girl to whom such literature is
presented will merely make it an opportunity for morbid revelry and
sensual enjoyment. It can well be believed that this may sometimes happen
with boys or girls from whom all sexual facts have always been
mysteriously veiled, and that when at last they find the opportunity of
gratifying their long-repressed and perfectly natural curiosity they are
overcome by the excitement of the event. It could not happen to children
who have been naturally and wholesomely brought up. At a later age, during
adolescence, there is doubtless great advantage in the plan, now
frequently adopted, especially in Germany, of giving lectures, addresses,
or quiet talks to young people of each sex separately. The speaker is
usually a specially selected teacher, a doctor or other qualified person
who may be brought in for this special purpose.

Stanley Hall, after remarking that sexual education should be
chiefly from fathers to sons and from mothers to daughters, adds:
"It may be that in the future this kind of initiation will again
become an art, and experts will tell us with more confidence how
to do our duty to the manifold exigencies, types and stages of
youth, and instead of feeling baffled and defeated, we shall see
that this age and theme is the supreme opening for the highest
pedagogy to do its best and most transforming work, as well as
being the greatest of all opportunities for the teacher of
religion" (Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 469). "At
Williams College, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Clark," the same
distinguished teacher observes (ib., p. 465), "I have made it a
duty in my departmental teaching to speak very briefly, but
plainly to young men under my instruction, personally if I deemed
it wise, and often, though here only in general terms, before
student bodies, and I believe I have nowhere done more good, but
it is a painful duty. It requires tact and some degree of hard
and strenuous common sense rather than technical knowledge."

It is scarcely necessary to say that the ordinary teacher of
either sex is quite incompetent to speak of sexual hygiene. It is
a task to which all, or some, teachers must be trained. A
beginning in this direction has been made in Germany by the
delivery to teachers of courses of lectures on sexual hygiene in
education. In Prussia the first attempt was made in Breslau when
the central school authorities requested Dr. Martin Chotzen to
deliver such a course to one hundred and fifty teachers who took
the greatest interest in the lectures, which covered the anatomy
of the sexual organs, the development of the sexual instinct, its
chief perversions, venereal diseases, and the importance of the
cultivation of self-control. In _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_
(Bd. i, Heft 7) Dr. Fritz Reuther gives the substance of lectures
which he has delivered to a class of young teachers; they cover
much the same ground as Chotzen's.

There is no evidence that in England the Minister of Education
has yet taken any steps to insure the delivery of lectures on
sexual hygiene to the pupils who are about to leave school. In
Prussia, however, the Ministry of Education has taken an active
interest in this matter, and such lectures are beginning to be
commonly delivered, though attendance at them is not usually
obligatory. Some years ago (in 1900), when it was proposed to
deliver a series of lectures on sexual hygiene to the advanced
pupils in Berlin schools, under the auspices of a society for the
improvement of morals, the municipal authorities withdrew their
permission to use the classrooms, on the ground that "such
lectures would be extremely dangerous to the moral sense of an
audience of the young." The same objection has been made by
municipal officials in France. In Germany, at all events,
however, opinion is rapidly growing more enlightened. In England
little or no progress has yet been made, but in America steps are
being taken in this direction, as by the Chicago Society for
Social Hygiene. It must, indeed, be said that those who oppose
the sexual enlightenment of youth in large cities are directly
allying themselves, whether or not they know it, with the
influences that make for vice and immorality.

Such lectures are also given to girls on leaving school, not only
girls of the well-to-do, but also those of the poor class, who
need them fully as much, and in some respects more. Thus Dr. A.
Heidenhain has published a lecture (_Sexuelle Belehrung der aus
den Volksschule entlassenen Maedchen_, 1907), accompanied by
anatomical tables, which he has delivered to girls about to leave
school, and which is intended to be put into their hands at this
time. Salvat, in a Lyons thesis (_La Depopulation de la France_,
1903), insists that the hygiene of pregnancy and the care of
infants should form part of the subject of such lectures. These
subjects might well be left, however, to a somewhat later period.

Something is clearly needed beyond lectures on these matters. It should be
the business of the parents or other guardians of every adolescent youth
and girl to arrange that, once at least at this period of life, there
should be a private, personal interview with a medical man to afford an
opportunity for a friendly and confidential talk concerning the main
points of sexual hygiene. The family doctor would be the best for this
duty because he would be familiar with the personal temperament of the
youth and the family tendencies.[37] In the case of girls a woman doctor
would often be preferred. Sex is properly a mystery; and to the unspoilt
youth, it is instinctively so; except in an abstract and technical form it
cannot properly form the subject of lectures. In a private and
individualized conversation between the novice in life and the expert, it
is possible to say many necessary things that could not be said in public,
and it is possible, moreover, for the youth to ask questions which shyness
and reserve make it impossible to put to parents, while the convenient
opportunity of putting them naturally to the expert otherwise seldom or
never occurs. Most youths have their own special ignorances, their own
special difficulties, difficulties and ignorances that could sometimes be
resolved by a word. Yet it by no means infrequently happens that they
carry them far on into adult life because they have lacked the
opportunity, or the skill and assurance to create the opportunity, of
obtaining enlightenment.

It must be clearly understood that these talks are of medical, hygienic,
and physiological character; they are not to be used for retailing moral
platitudes. To make them that would be a fatal mistake. The young are
often very hostile to merely conventional moral maxims, and suspect their
hollowness, not always without reason. The end to be aimed at here is
enlightenment. Certainly knowledge can never be immoral, but nothing is
gained by jumbling up knowledge and morality together.

In emphasizing the nature of the physician's task in this matter as purely
and simply that of wise practical enlightenment, nothing is implied
against the advantages, and indeed the immense value in sexual hygiene, of
the moral, religious, ideal elements of life. It is not the primary
business of the physician to inspire these, but they have a very intimate
relation with the sexual life, and every boy and girl at puberty, and
never before puberty, should be granted the privilege--and not the duty or
the task--of initiation into those elements of the world's life which are,
at the same time, natural functions of the adolescent soul. Here, however,
is the sphere of the religious or ethical teacher. At puberty he has his
great opportunity, the greatest he can ever obtain. The flower of sex that
blossoms in the body at puberty has its spiritual counterpart which at the
same moment blossoms in the soul. The churches from of old have recognized
the religious significance of this moment, for it is this period of life
that they have appointed as the time of confirmation and similar rites.
With the progress of the ages, it is true, such rites become merely formal
and apparently meaningless fossils. But they have a meaning nevertheless,
and are capable of being again vitalized. Nor in their spirit and essence
should they be confined to those who accept supernaturally revealed
religion. They concern all ethical teachers, who must realize that it is
at puberty that they are called upon to inspire or to fortify the great
ideal aspirations which at this period tend spontaneously to arise in the
youth's or maiden's soul.[38]

The age of puberty, I have said, marks the period at which this new kind
of sexual initiation is called for. Before puberty, although the psychic
emotion of love frequently develops, as well as sometimes physical sexual
emotions that are mostly vague and diffused, definite and localized sexual
sensations are rare. For the normal boy or girl love is usually an
unspecialized emotion; it is in Guyau's words "a state in which the body
has but the smallest place." At the first rising of the sun of sex the
boy or girl sees, as Blake said he saw at sunrise, not a round yellow body
emerging above the horizon, or any other physical manifestation, but a
great company of singing angels. With the definite eruption of physical
sexual manifestation and desire, whether at puberty or later in
adolescence, a new turbulent disturbing influence appears. Against the
force of this influence, mere intellectual enlightenment, or even loving
maternal counsel--the agencies we have so far been concerned with--may be
powerless. In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact
that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new
psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl
at puberty. The magic of beauty, the instinct of modesty, the naturalness
of self-restraint, the idea of unselfish love, the meaning of duty, the
feeling for art and poetry, the craving for religious conceptions and
emotions--all these things awake spontaneously in the unspoiled boy or
girl at puberty. I say "unspoiled," for if these things have been thrust
on the child before puberty when they have yet no meaning for him--as is
unfortunately far too often done, more especially as regards religious
notions--then it is but too likely that he will fail to react properly at
that moment of his development when he would otherwise naturally respond
to them. Under natural conditions this is the period for spiritual
initiation. Now, and not before, is the time for the religious or ethical
teacher as the case may be--for all religions and ethical systems may
equally adapt themselves to this task--to take the boy or girl in hand,
not with any special and obtrusive reference to the sexual impulses but
for the purpose of assisting the development and manifestation of this
psychic puberty, of indirectly aiding the young soul to escape from sexual
dangers by harnessing his chariot to a star that may help to save it from
sticking fast in any miry ruts of the flesh.

Such an initiation, it is important to remark, is more than an
introduction to the sphere of religious sentiment. It is an initiation
into manhood, it must involve a recognition of the masculine even more
than of the feminine virtues. This has been well understood by the finest
primitive races. They constantly give their boys and girls an initiation
at puberty; it is an initiation that involves not merely education in the
ordinary sense, but a stern discipline of the character, feats of
endurance, the trial of character, the testing of the muscles of the soul
as much as of the body.

Ceremonies of initiation into manhood at puberty--involving
physical and mental discipline, as well as instruction, lasting
for weeks or months, and never identical for both sexes--are
common among savages in all parts of the world. They nearly
always involve the endurance of a certain amount of pain and
hardship, a wise measure of training which the softness of
civilization has too foolishly allowed to drop, for the ability
to endure hardness is an essential condition of all real manhood.
It is as a corrective to this tendency to flabbiness in modern
education that the teaching of Nietzsche is so invaluable.

The initiation of boys among the natives of Torres Straits has
been elaborately described by A.C. Haddon (_Reports
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Chs. VII
and XII). It lasts a month, involves much severe training and
power of endurance, and includes admirable moral instruction.
Haddon remarks that it formed "a very good discipline," and adds,
"it is not easy to conceive of a more effectual means for a rapid
training."

Among the aborigines of Victoria, Australia, the initiatory
ceremonies, as described by R.H. Mathews ("Some Initiation
Ceremonies," _Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie_, 1905, Heft 6), last
for seven months, and constitute an admirable discipline. The
boys are taken away by the elders of the tribe, subjected to many
trials of patience and endurance of pain and discomfort,
sometimes involving even the swallowing of urine and excrement,
brought into contact with strange tribes, taught the laws and
folk-lore, and at the end meetings are held at which betrothals
are arranged.

Among the northern tribes of Central Australia the initiation
ceremonies involve circumcision and urethral subincision, as well
as hard manual labor and hardships. The initiation of girls into
womanhood is accompanied by cutting open of the vagina. These
ceremonies have been described by Spencer and Gillen (_Northern
Tribes of Central Australia_, Ch. XI). Among various peoples in
British East Africa (including the Masai) pubertal initiation is
a great ceremonial event extending over a period of many months,
and it includes circumcision in boys, and in girls
clitoridectomy, as well as, among some tribes, removal of the
nymphae. A girl who winces or cries out during the operation is
disgraced among the women and expelled from the settlement. When
the ceremony has been satisfactorily completed the boy or girl is
marriageable (C. Marsh Beadnell, "Circumcision and Clitoridectomy
as Practiced by the Natives of British East Africa," _British
Medical Journal_, April 29, 1905).

Initiation among the African Bawenda, as described by a
missionary, is in three stages: (1) A stage of instruction and
discipline during which the traditions and sacred things of the
tribe are revealed, the art of warfare taught, self-restraint and
endurance borne; then the youths are counted as full-grown. (2)
In the next stage the art of dancing is practiced, by each sex
separately, during the day. (3) In the final stage, which is that
of complete sexual initiation, the two sexes dance together by
night; the scene, in the opinion of the good missionary, "does
not bear description;" the initiated are now complete adults,
with all the privileges and responsibilities of adults (Rev. E.
Gottschling, "The Bawenda," _Journal Anthropological
Institution_, July to Dec., 1905, p. 372. Cf., an interesting
account of the Bawenda Tondo schools by another missionary,
Wessmann, _The Bawenda_, pp. 60 et seq.).

The initiation of girls in Azimba Land, Central Africa, has been
fully and interestingly described by H. Crawford Angus ("The
Chensamwali' or Initiation Ceremony of Girls," _Zeitschrift fuer
Ethnologie_, 1898, Heft 6). At the first sign of menstruation the
girl is taken by her mother out of the village to a grass hut
prepared for her where only the women are allowed to visit her.
At the end of menstruation she is taken to a secluded spot and
the women dance round her, no men being present. It was only with
much difficulty that Angus was enabled to witness the ceremony.
The girl is then informed in regard to the hygiene of
menstruation. "Many songs about the relations between men and
women are sung, and the girl is instructed as to all her duties
when she becomes a wife.... The girl is taught to be faithful to
her husband, and to try and bear children. The whole matter is
looked upon as a matter of course, and not as a thing to be
ashamed of or to hide, and being thus openly treated of and no
secrecy made about it, you find in this tribe that the women are
very virtuous, because the subject of married life has no glamour
for them. When a woman is pregnant she is again danced; this time
all the dancers are naked, and she is taught how to behave and
what to do when the time of her delivery arrives."

Among the Yuman Indians of California, as described by Horatio
Rust ("A Puberty Ceremony of the Mission Indians," _American
Anthropologist_, Jan. to March, 1906, p. 28) the girls are at
puberty prepared for marriage by a ceremony. They are wrapped in
blankets and placed in a warm pit, where they lie looking very
happy as they peer out through their covers. For four days and
nights they lie here (occasionally going away for food), while
the old women of the tribe dance and sing round the pit
constantly. At times the old women throw silver coins among the
crowd to teach the girls to be generous. They also give away
cloth and wheat, to teach them to be kind to the old and needy;
and they sow wild seeds broadcast over the girls to cause them to
be prolific. Finally, all strangers are ordered away, garlands
are placed on the girls' heads, and they are led to a hillside
and shown the large and sacred stone, symbolical of the female
organs of generation and resembling them, which is said to
protect women. Then grain is thrown over all present, and the
ceremony is over.

The Thlinkeet Eskimo women were long noted for their fine
qualities. At puberty they were secluded, sometimes for a whole
year, being kept in darkness, suffering, and filth. Yet defective
and unsatisfactory as this initiation was, "Langsdorf suggests,"
says Bancroft (_Native Races of Pacific_, vol. i, p. 110),
referring to the virtues of the Thlinkeet woman, "that it may be
during this period of confinement that the foundation of her
influence is laid; that in modest reserve and meditation her
character is strengthened, and she comes forth cleansed in mind
as well as body."

We have lost these ancient and invaluable rites of initiation into manhood
and womanhood, with their inestimable moral benefits; at the most we have
merely preserved the shells of initiation in which the core has decayed.
In time, we cannot doubt, they will be revived in modern forms. At present
the spiritual initiation of youths and maidens is left to the chances of
some happy accident, and usually it is of a purely cerebral character
which cannot be perfectly wholesome, and is at the best absurdly
incomplete.

This cerebral initiation commonly occurs to the youth through the medium
of literature. The influence of literature in sexual education thus
extends, in an incalculable degree, beyond the narrow sphere of manuals on
sexual hygiene, however admirable and desirable these may be. The greater
part of literature is more or less distinctly penetrated by erotic and
auto-erotic conceptions and impulses; nearly all imaginative literature
proceeds from the root of sex to flower in visions of beauty and ecstasy.
The Divine Comedy of Dante is herein the immortal type of the poet's
evolution. The youth becomes acquainted with the imaginative
representations of love before he becomes acquainted with the reality of
love, so that, as Leo Berg puts it, "the way to love among civilized
peoples passes through imagination." All literature is thus, to the
adolescent soul, a part of sexual education.[39] It depends, to some
extent, though fortunately not entirely, on the judgment of those in
authority over the young soul whether the literature to which the youth or
girl is admitted is or is not of the large and humanizing order.

All great literature touches nakedly and sanely on the central
facts of sex. It is always consoling to remember this in an age
of petty pruderies. And it is a satisfaction to know that it
would not be possible to emasculate the literature of the great
ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more
degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature
against the young. All our religious and literary traditions
serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare.
"So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man,
"gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament,
that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of
either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that
the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and
his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused
speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the
sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of
the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out
erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a
Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with
their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same
way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read
the glowing erotic poetry of _Venus and Adonis_, which her
friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model
introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even
its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so
unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and
concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by
showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those
everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of
the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to
conventional pruderies.

We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion
whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to
immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in
what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of
Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of
Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord
Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He
could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare
more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works."
The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an
incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have
been a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of his argument, but it
does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into
which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the
nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds
is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar
interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere
there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be
said that the statements of the great writers about natural
things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the
young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her
delight when a child in the historical books of the Old
Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the
faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is
equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that
these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if
only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love
and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's
shop window.

This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on
sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft
zur Bekaempfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin,
speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of
bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and
thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual
impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same
time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of
the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as
children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt
them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit
them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human
emotion" (_Sexualpaedagogik_, p. 60). Professor Schaefenacker (id.,
p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the
method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in
the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters,
are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every
healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty may be
safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its
contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a
much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the
emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are
realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast
aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental
texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance,
doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become
much less acute.

Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her _Century of the Child_ well summarizes
the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books
that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one
of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to
read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put
aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are
undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while
even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great
literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which
is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure
taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a
state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the
senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative
food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too
brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key
remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since
they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it
in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in _Sesame and Lilies_,
had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to
range freely in libraries.

What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well
as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in
the task of sexual enlightenment and sexual hygiene. Modern art may,
indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but
children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the
nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the
Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses
it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the
baser instincts. Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time
an aid to the attainment of a proper attitude towards purity in nature.
"He who has once learnt," as Hoeller remarks, "to enjoy peacefully
nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work
of art."

Casts of classic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures
of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be
used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction
as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become
familiarized. In Italy it is said to be usual for school classes
to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good
results; such visits form part of the official scheme of
education.

There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty
of nudity in classic art is widely needed among all social
classes and in many countries. It is to this defect of our
education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in
America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as
petitions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in
art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's
"Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping
of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in
architectural street decoration. So imperfect is still the
education of the multitude that in these matters the ill-bred
fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will. Such a state of
things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral
atmosphere of the community in which it is possible. Even from
the religious point of view, prurient prudery is not justifiable.
Northcote has very temperately and sensibly discussed the
question of the nude in art from the standpoint of Christian
morality. He points out that not only is the nude in art not to
be condemned without qualification, and that the nude is by no
means necessarily the erotic, but he also adds that even erotic
art, in its best and purest manifestations, only arouses emotions
that are the legitimate object of man's aspirations. It would be
impossible even to represent Biblical stories adequately on
canvas or in marble if erotic art were to be tabooed (Rev. H.
Northcote, _Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. XIV).

Early familiarity with the nude in classic and early Italian art
should be combined at puberty with an equal familiarity with
photographs of beautiful and naturally developed nude models. In
former years books containing such pictures in a suitable and
attractive manner to place before the young were difficult to
procure. Now this difficulty no longer exists. Dr. C.H. Stratz,
of The Hague, has been the pioneer in this matter, and in a
series of beautiful books (notably in _Der Koerper des Kindes, Die
Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers_ and _Die Rassenschoenheit des
Weibes_, all published by Enke in Stuttgart), he has brought
together a large number of admirably selected photographs of nude
but entirely chaste figures. More recently Dr. Shufeldt, of
Washington (who dedicates his work to Stratz), has published his
_Studies of the Human Form_ in which, in the same spirit, he has
brought together the results of his own studies of the naked
human form during many years. It is necessary to correct the
impressions received from classic sources by good photographic
illustrations on account of the false conventions prevailing in
classic works, though those conventions were not necessarily
false for the artists who originated them. The omission of the
pudendal hair, in representations of the nude was, for instance,
quite natural for the people of countries still under Oriental
influence are accustomed to remove the hair from the body. If,
however, under quite different conditions, we perpetuate that
artistic convention to-day, we put ourselves into a perverse
relation to nature. There is ample evidence of this. "There is
one convention so ancient, so necessary, so universal," writes
Mr. Frederic Harrison (_Nineteenth Century and After_, Aug.,
1907), "that its deliberate defiance to-day may arouse the bile
of the least squeamish of men and should make women withdraw at
once." If boys and girls were brought up at their mother's knees
in familiarity with pictures of beautiful and natural nakedness,
it would be impossible for anyone to write such silly and
shameful words as these.

There can be no doubt that among ourselves the simple and direct
attitude of the child towards nakedness is so early crushed out
of him that intelligent education is necessary in order that he
may be enabled to discern what is and what is not obscene. To the
plough-boy and the country servant-girl all nakedness, including
that of Greek statuary, is alike shameful or lustful. "I have a
picture of women like that," said a countryman with a grin, as he
pointed to a photograph of one of Tintoret's most beautiful
groups, "smoking cigarettes." And the mass of people in most
northern countries have still passed little beyond this stage of
discernment; in ability to distinguish between the beautiful and
the obscene they are still on the level of the plough-boy and the
servant-girl.


FOOTNOTES:

[18] These manifestations have been dealt with in the study of Autoerotism
in vol. i of the present _Studies_. It may be added that the sexual life
of the child has been exhaustively investigated by Moll, _Das Sexualleben
des Kindes_, 1909.

[19] This genital efflorescence in the sexual glands and breasts at birth
or in early infancy has been discussed in a Paris thesis, by Camille
Renouf (_La Crise Genital et les Manifestations Connexes chez le Foetus et
le Nouveau-ne_, 1905); he is unable to offer a satisfactory explanation of
these phenomena.

[20] Amelineau, _La Morale des Egyptiens_, p. 64.

[21] "The Social Evil in Philadelphia," _Arena_, March, 1896.

[22] Moll, _Kontraere Sexualempfindung_, third edition, p. 592.

[23] This powerlessness of the law and the police is well recognized by
lawyers familiar with the matter. Thus F. Werthauer (_Sittlichkeitsdelikte
der Grosstadt_, 1907) insists throughout on the importance of parents and
teachers imparting to children from their early years a progressively
increasing knowledge of sexual matters.

[24] "Parents must be taught how to impart information," remarks E.L.
Keyes ("Education upon Sexual Matters," _New York Medical Journal_, Feb.
10, 1906), "and this teaching of the parent should begin when he is
himself a child."

[25] Moll (op. cit., p. 224) argues well how impossible it is to preserve
children from sights and influence connected with the sexual life.

[26] Girls are not even prepared, in many cases, for the appearance of the
pubic hair. This unexpected growth of hair frequently causes young girls
much secret worry, and often they carefully cut it off.

[27] G.S. Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. i, p. 511. Many years ago, in 1875,
the late Dr. Clarke, in his _Sex in Education_, advised menstrual rest for
girls, and thereby aroused a violent opposition which would certainly not
be found nowadays, when the special risks of womanhood are becoming more
clearly understood.

[28] For a summary of the physical and mental phenomena of the menstrual
period, see Havelock Ellis: _Man and Woman_, Ch. XI. The primitive
conception of menstruation is briefly discussed in Appendix A to the first
volume of these _Studies_, and more elaborately by J.G. Frazer in _The
Golden Bough_. A large collection of facts with regard to the menstrual
seclusion of women throughout the world will be found in Ploss and
Bartels, _Das Weib_. The pubertal seclusion of girls at Torres Straits has
been especially studied by Seligmann, _Reports Anthropological Expedition
to Torres Straits_, vol. v, Ch. VI.

[29] Thus Miss Lura Sanborn, Director of Physical Training at the Chicago
Normal School, found that a bath once a fortnight was not unusual. At the
menstrual period especially there is still a superstitious dread of water.
Girls should always be taught that at this period, above all, cleanliness
is imperatively necessary. There should be a tepid hip bath night and
morning, and a vaginal douche (which should never be cold) is always
advantageous, both for comfort as well as cleanliness. There is not the
slightest reason to dread water during menstruation. This point was
discussed a few years ago in the _British Medical Journal_ with complete
unanimity of opinion. A distinguished American obstetrician, also, Dr. J.
Clifton Edgar, after a careful study of opinion and practice in this
matter ("Bathing During the Menstrual Period," _American Journal
Obstetrics_, Sept., 1900), concludes that it is possible and beneficial to
take cold baths (though not sea-baths) during the period, provided due
precautions are observed, and that there are no sudden changes of habits.
Such a course should not be indiscriminately adopted, but there can be no
doubt that in sturdy peasant women who are inured to it early in life even
prolonged immersion in the sea in fishing has no evil results, and is even
beneficial. Houzel (_Annales de Gynecologie_, Dec., 1894) has published
statistics of the menstrual life of 123 fisherwomen on the French coast.
They were accustomed to shrimp for hours at a time in the sea, often to
above the waist, and then walk about in their wet clothes selling the
shrimps. They all insisted that their menstruation was easier when they
were actively at work. Their periods are notably regular, and their
fertility is high.

[30] J.H. McBride, "The Life and Health of Our Girls in Relation to Their
Future," _Alienist and Neurologist_, Feb., 1904.

[31] W.G. Chambers, "The Evolution of Ideals," _Pedagogical Seminary_,
March, 1903; Catherine Dodd, "School Children's Ideals," _National
Review_, Feb. and Dec., 1900, and June, 1901. No German girls acknowledged
a wish to be men; they said it would be wicked. Among Flemish girls,
however, Varendonck found at Ghent (_Archives de Psychologie_, July, 1908)
that 26 per cent. had men as their ideals.