sexual education with special reference to the adolescent girl

“but, alas! a hindrance ever lurketh in our way; it is the leaven in the dough, the deadly flies that invert the sweetness of the fragrant wine; … thus … the wrongful thoughts ferment. evil plougheth in and urgeth as a task-master. he wasteth and destroyeth, and, lo! we are taken captive in this thraldom; he giveth over the innocent and pure to death; defilement spreadeth, and of joy there is naught left.”—(eng. trans., jewish prayer for the day of atonement.)

now, because i desire sexual enlightenment for all children, and, in particular, for all girls, and seek as a reformer the re-shaping of education in the home and in the school, it does not follow that i am so over-presumptuous as to believe it possible in this way quickly to remedy all sexual mistakes, or that i do not realise how our policy of muddle and leaving these matters alone has not always been as disastrous as, indeed, we might expect. i know that in many cases and among numerous young people the sexual life follows a healthy and beautiful unfolding, in spite of anything we may do or may leave undone. and it needs but a cursory view to see that all is not confused and an aimless conflict of waste, but that the wonderful beauty of youth often will triumph over the meanness of our fears, our subterfuges and blind blunderings. one perceives something that goes on, something that is continually working in the child to make order out of our muddle,[330] beauty out of our defacements: to force light, frankness and purity in place of our shams and our lies.

doubtless to the theoretical teacher eager to reform the world on paper, it seems a very easy matter to lay down rules for mothers and teachers regarding sexual instruction—new finger-posts to conduct, whereby the young generation may be guarded from making the mistakes that we ourselves have made. but can we do this? for in sex we have as yet learnt very little, and i doubt sometimes if we can ever learn very much, except each one of us for ourselves out of our own experience. we of an older generation cannot save our children very far, or hold them back from life. and it may be well that at once we realise and acknowledge the very narrow limits of our power.

but this is not to say that we are to shirk and continue to act as if all were well when we know that it is not so. the manner in which, up to the present day, we have completely ignored the very fact of sex in our educational system is almost incredible. there has been in many directions a vast range of betrayal and baseness in our treatment of youth.

no other emotion is so hindered, opposed, and loaded with material and moral fetters. we know how education makes a beginning in this way, and how life continues the process. perhaps some of these hindrances are inevitable; but many are the direct result of our adult stupidity, and the way we have failed in training the young. how can you expect the primitive powerful sex impulse not to suffer? the sex emotions are among the deepest, if not the deepest, of our nature; they exercise an influence on every phase of development, and, in one form or another, direct the entire being of the individual. we know this. and all[331] the time we continue to educate girls and boys as if they were sexless neuters. could folly be greater?

by our teaching and our example we are destroying for the young the harmony of nature. we ourselves are shame-faced because we are still savages in sex. if not, why this awe and funk, these taboos and mysteries, all the secretive cunning with which we hide from the young facts that we all know, but pretend that we don’t know?

and it cannot be overlooked that this fear of sex is of very ancient origin, which makes it the more difficult to eradicate. we have, i believe, to allow for an ages-old, and therefore strongly rooted, sense of separation, causing an often unconscious antagonism between the two sexes. we see its unchecked action in many examples in the animal kingdom, though not in all—it is quite absent, for instance, in the family life of certain insects and in the perfect loves of many birds, whose life-histories we examined in the first section of this book. we see the same antagonism acting continually among primitive peoples in the elaborate and sacred system of taboos which separate the two sexes. indeed, the beginnings of the marriage system can be traced back to a primitive conception of danger attaching to the sexual act. i am not very hopeful that this sex separation that is a kind of antagonism can ever be wholly eliminated; i am not even sure that it is well that it should be eliminated. may it not be that love itself would be withered did we take it away? i am not certain at all; i know, however, that this fear of sex has led us into great folly.

what is the psychological meaning of the combination of man and woman? it is the union between opposites, which, perhaps, i may try to explain further as the union between consciousness and unconsciousness. the man is[332] essentially conscious, the woman essentially unconscious; the man is concentrated in his intellect, the woman is concentrated in her senses. these, at least, are the nearest words in which i am able to express it. and of one thing i am certain: the modern way of mixing the qualities of the two sexes acts directly for unhappiness and in harm to the race. i did not always think this: i did not want to think it. i have come slowly to be convinced and against my own will. and i am glad to take the opportunity now, as i near the end of my book on motherhood—the subject which ever has been deepest in my heart—to state this as my later opinion, which has been made clear to me by the experiences of my life.

there is no use in saying there is no difference between the girl and the boy when human nature keeps asserting that there is. there is even, as i have been forced into accepting, a natural tendency between boys and girls to draw away from each other. you may see this separation in every co-education school where the children, led by deeper instincts than we have understood, bring our wisdom to foolishness. they unconsciously feel that separation which we have been trying to pretend does not exist. each sex, at the very dawn of the teens and before, is unfolding interests, tastes, plays and ambitions of its own.

it would be interesting to follow this dissimilarity as far as it could lead us. sometimes it would seem that we had got to the bottom—to what is common to the girl as to the boy; the qualities that both sexes share as human beings, where the ties of similarity seem to link their characters. but wait! deeper than this we must seek for the truth. even in this likeness there is an all-pervading unlikeness. and it is just this: the differences, which cannot, i think,[333] be expressed, but which do exist—differences in souls, in minds and in bodies—as well as a separation in the habits, the desires, and attitude to life, that makes for such harmony in the elemental depths.

the influence of sex extends in mysterious ways that as yet we do not understand. and the variation between the girl and the boy is far greater, i believe, than has ever in modern times been recognised. the longer i live, and the more life teaches me, the more strongly i am convinced of this fact: you do not make the girl into the boy by ignoring her special functions; you do not lessen sexuality by pretending it is not there.

from the start of puberty this difference between the girl and the boy should be faced; great is the harm that follows from our pretending it is not there. and the hurt suffered in my opinion, is almost always more serious to the girl than to the boy.

many women are blindly prejudiced on this question as, indeed, i myself once was. the reason of such mistake is plain. this breaking down or lessening of the differences between the two sexes may be, and is, possible. by means of education and the action of habit a child may be impressed with characteristics normally foreign to its sex, qualities and tendencies are thus developed which ordinarily appear only in a child of the opposite sex. i would refer the reader back to the early section of this book for examples, most curious and suggestive, of such complete transposition of the female and male characters.[103] things are not quite so obviously plain in the human world, but they are not less fateful, less significant.

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we touch here the real weakness in the position of the modern girl: the profound distrust that she has of herself. i do not mean, of course, intellectually or as a worker, but a distrust of herself as woman. i believe it results directly from educational influences. all our effort is directed to repress from the consciousness of the girl the realities of her own sexual nature; and what we do is to hinder her deepest instincts so that often they fail in finding a healthy expression.

in our schools the educational system is founded on the needs of boys and not on the needs of girls. i regard this as a great crime. for one thing, the development of the girl is more obscure and difficult than the development of the boy; in her sex-life there are finer balances, which opens up the way to greater evils. there is every possibility of morbid disturbance from any mistakes in the training. the girl has more that she needs to learn to establish her health and sexual happiness than has the boy; the pubescent period lasts longer with her and is more unsettling; while the greatest difficulty of all, perhaps, arises from the fact that her conduct is more ruled by deep unconscious instincts. every girl lives a hidden life of her own, and it is within this shrine of her individuality that the primitive and fierce instincts of her sex struggle to find expression; and though always unacknowledged and often, indeed, unrecognised, alike by the girl herself as well as by her elders, it is these instincts that direct her growth and are the determining influence of her life, far more important than the actions directed by her conscious self, which is occupied in learning lessons, in play, and all the outward interests of the daily life.

and it is this deeper ego that suffers from our educational[335] system and the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life are hidden and glossed over. girls in our schools, and also in our homes, are trained to become secretive about themselves, treating their special sexual functions as a mystery and a shame. truth-telling is inculcated in all matters except sex, and here there is an unceasing evasion, which prepares disharmonies at the very dawn of sexual consciousness.

let us understand what harm we are doing. do we know? do we care? we have, i suppose, a certain vague ideal as to what woman should be, but as far as i can see we give no kind of training to help a girl in any way to live healthily and fully her life as a woman. as it is, one is tempted to say that it is rather in spite of than by means of her education that any modern girl arrives at any conception of her womanly nature and her tasks. we really seem to be proclaiming a sense of injury because there is such a fact in the girl’s nature as sex.

again i assert that our crime is manifest. we have set up an educational system that is blind to the needs of girls and the facts of their sexual life. how many among us women of this generation have suffered hurt—thousands of women defrauded of happiness and of health, bearing with them year after year the mark of lost instincts, stifled desires, and natures in part murdered. do i write strongly? yes, i do; but i write of what i know to be true.

mothers, wrapped in the long trance of complacent living, remain indifferent, or are themselves too ignorant and dead to life to give help. as their daughters come to consciousness, as they begin to suffer their own fulfilment, they can do nothing and they cast them off. hard shut down and silent in themselves, how many girls suffer the anguish of[336] youth reaching out for the unknown ideal that they can’t grasp, can’t even distinguish or conceive. what we call education helps them not at all, for how can any educational system succeed when it runs contrary to nature? all the larger intimate problems that encompass life are neglected, while the intellect is crammed with a store of quite useless facts. real education would lead to emancipation, but instead we prepare girls for examinations.

and what we have to fear is a deadening of physical and spiritual response that must tend to follow from this suppression. for what is a girl’s life? she works and rests from work, eats, and sleeps, and plays, and all the while she remains wrapped in the closest egoism, her strongest instincts smouldering beneath the dull weight of an education that is not an education, but an unstimulating and conforming pretence, and not fitted to the needs, of living. even when she is free and is turned out at last, apathetic and obliterated, she carries with her vague dreads of positive acts and new ideas. how seldom does she succeed in urging out of herself the inmost vital part she has stifled. she is compacted of numbed faculties and inhibited desires.

the inmost self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the ever-creating life. but the confidence and possession of the self has been destroyed; the ego is left alone with its dread, with the distrust of desires not understood and instincts thrust back within.

and do you not see the result of this conflict to the sensitive soul of the adolescent? the terrible evil of disharmonies first started during these pregnant and inceptive years that should be the infancy of the higher powers of womanhood?[337] robbed of a just confidence and pride in her sex, her own stifled instincts become to a girl hateful and as something of which she should be ashamed; she begins to chafe against her womanhood and spurn it, bemoaning the limitations of her sex. she lapses into boy’s ways, methods of work and ideals; she comes to live gaily enough and to laugh carelessly, not knowing what she has lost; to care nothing to be herself—content to choke the vision in her own life.

so it has been with you, with me, with all of us. are we content that this blighting shall be suffered by our daughters?

the evil is happening for want of a generous guidance from us who have gone before. i write of what i know. great and unending is the misery that we make possible by our folly, sickness of body and soul, so that the repressed nature rots away and doubt eats into natural faith. nature is violated at every step, and after we have educated her, in nine cases out of ten, the girl emerges a mere residuum of decent minor dispositions. there is need to change.

much that is said or done, both consciously and unconsciously, by the adult will torture the adolescent’s sensitiveness much more than is conceivable to any one who has no insight to the curious psychology of girls in these difficult years. there is as a rule at this period of life a painful dualisation of the soul; thus, while seeking to know about sex, many girls will turn violently from the truth, so that any guidance we may give now will be very likely to arouse anger and disgust. and i know of no safeguard except a full knowledge of the physical facts of sex—of begetting and of birth, that has been gained earlier in the play period of childhood, in years when such knowledge can[338] be assimilated unconsciously and its deep significance causes no response of personal disturbance.

we have to remember that these are the years of romance and idealism, when the always strong tendency among girls to sublimate and spiritualise love is at its highest. sex knowledge could not possibly be given at a worse time than now, when the young soul is passing through its difficult birth and the conscious self seethes and teems with emotional ferment. if at this period the physical side of love is brought for the first time into notice there will be a withdrawal of the girl’s ever-sensitive confidence, and worse, an ebb of the nerves, caused by distrust liberating the demon of fear; an almost certain reaction of incredulity and disillusionment will follow, with after results that may prove to be deep and far-reaching in their danger to healthy life.

we find then, contrary to the usual opinion, that an early and full instruction in the physical facts of sex is more necessary for girls even than it is for boys. the dangers of ignorance, or of sudden and too late knowledge, are greater. for any primary reaction of aversion, which is rarely absent, will in many cases strengthen into disgust and a curious horror that is partly fear and partly strengthened desire. for at the same time there will very likely be a strong attractive element in the form of intensely excited curiosity, which may be active and experimenting, but more often and with even greater danger is kept hidden, but yet spies and clutches for new evidence. such unhealthy curiosity, remaining for long unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied, almost necessarily sets up morbid reactions, causing many sexual evils.

you may say, of course, that i am mistaken; that these[339] things do not happen—at least, not in the case of your daughter or of any nice girls. i can answer only, that it is you—the mother or the teacher—who, i fear, are wrong, living in the paradise of the fool. i am not exaggerating at all. i have tried to show how serious is the shock and how severe the disillusionment that may follow to the adolescent on a too sudden meeting with the physical facts of sex. it is time for us to cease pretending. we must realise that the mutilating or slaying of sex is followed always by disaster.

instincts which have been prevented from their natural expression must tend to escape and find expression in abnormal forms that may, and often do, give rise to greater devastation. we have to face these things: there is no use in turning from them because they are horrid and in fear of giving offence.

let me take but one fact. masturbation is of very frequent occurrence among girls and among women, and this form of erotic indulgence acts directly in lowering sexual sensibility, and not only limits the desire for love, but prevents a right physical response so that satisfaction may be gained from the normal sexual act.

is it not time that we women began to be frank? we have pretended to ourselves, and argued away from these questions far too long. love cries out against our denials. extreme passion may work ill, but the opposite extreme of the sacrifice of healthy natural instincts is as great an evil.

i am driven back always to this: the immense danger of repression. for our hindrances lead inevitably to repressions, always dangerous; and these tend to set up deep indwelling disharmonies, and then the way is opened up to manifold evils that may be traced into many by-paths of[340] the after sexual life. and though i know there are many among my readers impatiently exclaiming that i am constantly dragging sex into everything, i assert that i do not drag it in: it is there. and for this reason alone it is certain that to formulate a system of education which ignores sex must lead to disaster.

i would call attention again to the fact noted in the previous chapter that the sex impulse is never absent in any child, however young. the transformation of puberty is really a co-ordination of the individual sex-life that already exists. with the development of the bodily structure and the marked changes in the sexual organs, there takes place a psychic growth which causes a perfectly natural seeking out of the young soul for experience and love. there is every possibility of morbid disturbance should this new order of development be hindered and not take place. and if this beautiful natural transformation is to succeed there must be no forcing back of the nature upon itself. the period of adolescence should crown and complete every organ and every faculty. no over-emphasis can be laid on the fateful issues that may follow to each girl from any mistakes in training at this period of adult birth, when the nature must find its new expression in the right direction of health or in the wrong direction of the abnormal.

we are deceived so often by the outside appearance of things. the painful experiences of youth may disappear from the conscious memory, but they do not thereby cease to act as an influence directing the after life. every mother and every teacher ought to understand this. any hurt now done by our folly can never be undone. no experience is entirely lost. what seems to have vanished from[341] the consciousness has really passed into a sub-consciousness, where it lives on in an organised form as real as if it were still part of the conscious personality; and although any experience may lie dormant, unknown to the conscious self, it may, and almost certainly will at some time, cause emotional reactions that continue without a known reason to excite and direct the outward ordinary life.

our easy, complacent and devastating folly in ignoring the special physical nature of girls, and the elaborate ingenuity with which the facts of life are hidden from them or glossed over by unhealthy sentiment, is the true cause of the physical and spiritual etiolation of womanhood. there is, i allege, murder to the girl’s power to be herself—to fulfil her woman’s destiny—in our evasions, our deadly silences, and sham presentation of life, conditioned in all cases by theory and never by the act of living.

it is because i believe this that i am writing with all the power that i have against our schools which show the most coarse lack of understanding of the nature of the girl. i want new schools fitted to the needs of girls. the aim of education should be a general cohesion in all the different elements of the personality. and if the method is right, it will prove a way to greater happiness and fulness of growth. no longer will sex be held as a hindrance to life. i believe that almost everything in the future depends upon this.

life would be liberated. an instinct that continually is hindered and denied cannot easily develop for health; and often, owing to these hindrances, the sexual life is stunted; then later the right and simple impulse to the performance of the sex act and its final consummation and enjoyment may be interfered with for ever and even prevented. will[342] you think what this means. in plain words, we are, by our false ideals and the wrong attitude towards the sexual life which conditions our system of education for girls, doing all that we can to prevent them from being women. i am not exaggerating; i am trying to make you see what it is that is wrong with life.

every one who refuses to blink facts knows that the vast majority of marriages are unhappy owing to the coldness of the wife. it is certain that sexual an?sthesia to-day is present in many women, and there would seem, indeed, to be an increasing diminution of the strength of the sexual impulse. any number of women are unable to give themselves up to the sex act in such a way as to derive from it real satisfaction and the gladness and health that it should give. this is a very grave matter. the evil would be less if these frigid women did not marry, but as a rule they do marry. it is a curious fact that women who sexually are cold are sought as wives with greater frequency than are more passionate women, probably because their easily maintained reserve acts as a stimulus to the man. men are persistently blind in these matters. they want response to their own desire in their wives, but most of them are very much afraid of any woman who possesses the strong passion to enable them to give such response. the woman gains her fulfilment from the man when he gives her his child, but when she turns from him she leaves him unsatisfied.[104] the drama and the novel are burdened with this problem, which, indeed, intrudes itself on every hand. we are, by our wrong ideals, inducing an entirely perverted view, which regards physical desire as something of which women should be ashamed, and the sex act as a[343] thing in itself degrading and even disgusting—the nasty side of love; something to be submitted to, indeed, in order to bear children, or for the sake of the loved man, whose passions must be allowed, but not for the health and desire, the delight and perfectment of the woman herself. this false view, i affirm again, is the blight that has been, and still is, the destroyer of woman, and through her, equally the destroyer of man.

and this fear and denial of love, this separation between the sexes, is the serious side of the problem of marriage. for the hideous disguises and constant lying often made necessary to the husband, owing to the wife’s entire failure to realise the physical necessities of love, makes domestic life an organised hypocrisy. we fight, and fight to be free, yet ever anew the antagonism lays fresh hold, it crops up in many and curious ways, imposing its poison and destroying love—the deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied men against women. the need for love will not often allow itself to be inhibited without claiming payment. and if desire so frequently manifests itself in abnormal forms of the coarsest and commonest dissipation, this is almost always to be explained by some hindrance opposed to its normal expression. when women face facts and realise this truth, many things in men’s conduct will be clear that hitherto have been hidden from them.

again it may be thought that i am exaggerating; and there are, i know, other aspects of this question which just now i am neglecting. but the unreal and abysmal misconception into which one sex has fallen with regard to the other—this horrible, grasping, backwash of shame—is, in large measure, the result of our pretence and the way in which women have been kept living with blinds drawn down[344] upon most of the unruly turbulence and elemental forces of life. it may also be held mistakenly that in what i have said i am writing against women; that i am raising a belated cry for masculine prerogatives and standards of sexual conduct. but that is not so. i am, it is undeniable, writing against the attitude of the modern woman towards marriage, her coldness of response to passion and her suppression of the realities of sex; an attitude i deplore and hold to be destructive alike to the happiness of women and men and to the health of the race, as also to any practical moral life. but such coldness and atrophy of instinct, i believe, has been imposed upon women by wrong education, the conditions of ignorance under which they marry and become mothers, and all the hindrances set around them, preventing them living out their lives from a sexual point of view.

it is example and the ideal set before us which produces the formation of opinion and of character, and few mothers remember the inner discord which exists between what they teach their daughters about love and what they act themselves in the daily life. and if the home is wrong, the school is, i think, much worse. in olden times, and still among primitive peoples—whose unconsidered actions are in many directions so much wiser than is our knowledge—girls were early given by matrons all the gathered wisdom of their sex pertaining to wifehood and motherhood; just the knowledge that we make it hard for them to gain. could folly be greater than this?

with the decay of the specific traditions of the ideal of womanhood the idea of a general culture, neither male nor female, has tended to prevail. we touch here the deep roots of the evil. and what i wish to make plain is the inevitable failure of an educational system which makes no[345] kind of arrangement for the special care and training of girls during the most critical years of their growth. there is, i allege, in all our educational establishments a strange and most culpable lack of understanding of the nature of the girl and her functions as a woman. they model brains without proper consideration of bodies, and with frightful convention repress from the seeking young the realities of love, and treat as secret, almost as something to be ignored, the functions connected with a girl’s sexual life.

the mistake here is so far-reaching that i find it difficult to write calmly. for again i must assert that what we are doing is really to teach our girls a shameful denial of their womanhood. i wish that the power of my pen was stronger, so that i might bring a stinging consciousness of all the terrible mischief that is being done to the knowledge of every mother and every teacher.

how many of us have ourselves suffered? but our memories are strangely short. we forget, in our complacence and lazy, vicarious optimism, the dark places that imprisoned our young growing souls, haunts of gloom and despair that were never lit by a ray of sympathetic enlightenment from our sadder and wiser, but so forgetful, elders. we forget the grievous wounds to our self-respect. we forget the duality of soul; those oscillations between fear and disgust and curiosity and desire, with, perhaps, furtive trembling concessions to a power we did not understand, to be followed by morbid reactions of loathing, both of the mysterious impulse and of ourselves, that survive in those deadly disharmonies that are beginning to engage the attention of modern psychologists, and act to-day in our adult consciousness to war with the sum of unity which is happiness.

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yes, we all have forgotten. yet none the less has this shameful early struggle left us fettered and seeking, and we have no window to inform us we are in prison. it has warped our natures, till, when in after years we look at love, we behold, not the shining impersonation of the life-force, but seeing double, view a monstrous siamese twin of two figures, lust and sentimentality, a satyr bound to a wan angel by a navel-cord of procreative necessity. and often there is no rest, no cessation from a conflict that has left us helpless, so that for us love is moulded round a core of diseased desires.

it makes us examine our hearts. is it to be so for ever?

we forget that perhaps four-fifths of the misery that follows in the train of sex-fulfilment is due to this mental and moral “diphobia” acquired in the days of adolescence in the unassisted struggle with the awakening and entirely misunderstood sex-impulse. we may forget, but few and happy are they who escape the effects of that encounter. according to our temperaments it has made us sedulous puritans and unconscious hypocrites, passionless neuters, or careless cynics and voluptuaries. and we are all of us to some extent marked and dirtied for ever. deep and ineffaceable in us are the records of our disastrous early grapple with a great organic impulse which no one taught us to understand.

i am strongly of opinion that the tendency, so prevalent among women, to regard love as a twofold thing, one part of which is physical and evil and the other part spiritual and good, is almost diagnostic in an individual of a disharmony arising from an ancient reaction against sex, caused by some hindering influence or shock, encountered at the opening of the conscious sexual life.

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the tremendous force that awakens in soul and body in these early years, and that with wise control and comprehension might be tended till in due course it flowers into love, is early shorn of its splendour. its whispered intimations of wondrous things to come fall on deaf ears. taught to regard it as a malignant enemy that may destroy, instead of the most sacred and wonderful agency in human life, we enter into a hopeless struggle to eliminate the most basal part of our nature, or fawn before it in furtive and shameful surrender.

so most of us, embittered by the degradation of this struggle, whether it be won or lost, grow up to view with distrust what we absurdly call the “physical side of love.” we, and especially women, accept it resignedly as an unavoidable baseness in the grain of love. we forget that the baseness is in us and not in love. love has no physical side, or mental side, or spiritual side. it is a unity upon which we lay sacrilegious hands when we make an artificial separation into physical and spiritual.

we do this because of our own impurity, and because of the hurts we have suffered. we can no longer look at love without furtively scanning his garments for the stains of lust. we have created lust. lust is a morbid by-product in the evolution of love.

it is this that we have suffered.