"While these savages attach so little importance to the purity of their women", etc. In what does the "purity" of woman consist? With us, the word means conformity to the standards we have set up for women. If the women of these tribes conformed to their standards, each one to that of her tribe, were they not "pure", measured by those standards? Then did not these savages attach just as much importance to the "purity" of their women as we do to that of ours? Did they not, do not the survivors now, punish departures from their standards just as rigorously, to say the least, as we do departures from ours? The truth is, we are trying to test their conceptions of purity by the conventional social acids with which we test our own.
But when we rise above conventions and seek the essentials of sexual purity,
we are sure to discover that very often our claims are as unfounded as many of theirs would
be seen to be could they be brought to formulate them in the terms of our psychology. If we
define "pure" sexual relations as the unbought, unsold, associations of a man and a woman
who love each other and how else could any rational, self respecting, ethical man or women
define them we are shocked to realize how much sexual impurity there is in nominally
monogamic lands; and so great a proportion of it sheltered under the sacred roof trees of
monogamic homes.
Lecky's famous paragraph always has seemed to me very suggestive of implications that
he did not perceive. "On that one ignoble and degraded form (the prostitute's) are
concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame". But is not the world
filled with shame as it is? Is not prostitution itself a shame and a reproach to civilization? And
what shall we say of the homes it has not saved, of the homes into which from its altars have
been carried the horrors of venereal disease, bringing the aftermath of wrecked and shamed
wives and blinded children? Paraphrasing Lecky, the prostitute, "herself the supreme type of
vice", "is ultimately the efficient" excuse of the popular moralist in refusing to look the sexual
problem squarely in the face.
"Action is ever followed by reaction. After centuries of extreme discrimination against
women in matters of individual liberty, we are now witnessing a return swing of the
pendulum, which threatens to carry us to the opposite extreme of unlimited license", says Dr.
But there are two reactions, and the one not named is the really retrogressive one. The
reaction from the restriction of woman's liberty in the past to the restriction of man's liberty
in the present and future is proceeding swiftly and widely in sentiment and far from negligibly
in law.
It is not at all strange that with few exceptions the most active workers in ascetic
"moral reforms", usually wrongly called moral and reforms, are middle aged and old men and
women, probably never overly strong in observation and ratiocination, and who now have
well equipped fotrgetteries. What they do not wish or need now they are quite sure they
never needed or wished, or, if they did wish it, the desire was an evidence of their then
unregenerate state; and they are positive they are doing righteous work when they force all
others, regardless of the wishes and needs of the others, to conform to the present standards
of the atrophied censors.
In a new direction, in the misused name of science, they are blithely
demanding the enactment of laws about the ultimate effects of which they are in total
ignorance, because, if for no other reason, there is such an entangled mass of causes that not
even the most earnest and thoro student of science is prepared to hazard positive assertions,
much less to take any but the most cautious and tentative steps in social experimentation.
But the aged and forgetful panaceists rush heedlessly along, having little difficulty in finding
legislators as ignorant and irresponsible as themselves to abet them in their reckless and
irremediable tinkering Jacobi.