Like that of the child, the immature, susceptible mind of a girl, incapable of apprehending the sex-factor in its true perspective with the other factors of life, becomes unduly dominated by consideration thereof when too early instructed. She is far better left, for so long as is practicable, ignorant or hazy concerning this vital phenomenon, in place of being fully informed, as girls are now-a-days. So that they know all that there is to be known about sex—except its seriousness and sacredness. And divorced from the seriousness and sacredness of Love and Birth—which mere knowledge of biological fact is wholly inadequate to impart—such knowledge of fact presents a crude and bald distortion of the truth; only too often imparting an ugly and demoralising warp to mind and conduct. Ignorance is not Innocence, 'tis true, but it serves the same purpose in safeguarding innocence that clothes do in safeguarding modesty. And for one girl who falls in consequence of innocence, twenty fall from sophistication.
Unless masculine traits have been over-developed in her by abnormal training, in which case (as occurs sometimes in the quasi-masculine woman of middle-age) sex-instinct may acquire an unnatural and quasi-masculine insistence, this instinct is, in the normal girl, responsive rather than initiative. (Wherein she differs diametrically from the male.) And such natural dormancy may be advantageously preserved by haziness of knowledge, and by the careful surveillance required for protection of immature minds and powers. The bald, matter-of-course view-point of many modern girls with regard to sex, their knowledge of vice, and their cynical acceptance and discussion thereof, as too of the vulgar intrigues of notorious dancers and peeresses, to say nothing of the ugly and debasing personal experiences only too many of them have incurred, are among the evils of the injurious licence at present accorded to young persons.
Feminism, having thrust such disastrous liberty on creatures as eager to grasp as they are unfitted to cope with the dangers thereof, is striving now, by way of women-patrols and police-women, to stem the evil with one hand—while with the other, it continues to open the flood-gates still wider. The only way to stem the evil is to stem it at its source. The home, with the vigilant supervision and guidance of a mother whose duty is publicly recognised and her authority strengthened thereby, whose time and faculties are devoted mainly to the making of home and to the safeguarding and disciplining of the young creatures she has brought into existence, is environment and shelter as indispensable to the impressionable youth of both sexes—but more particularly to the impressionable youth of one—as it is for the rearing of infancy and childhood. Such home-influences, reinforced by the strong hand of a father who likewise recognises his parental responsibilities, are the first of all the rights that matter for young womanhood.
Later, should come a term of domestic service. Mistresses of households should realise not only their human but likewise their national responsibility to these young humbler members thereof. No other public service possible to them would equally conduce to national progress.
As fathers are legally responsible for debts of sons under age, mothers should be responsible to the State for the virtue of daughters under sixteen.
In the personal, vastly more than in any other field of operation, woman's chiefest value lies. When she exchanges it for public functions, and seeks to further progress by officialdom and politics, by institution of women-patrols, police-women, Mayoresses, and so forth, the supreme importance of the personal factor becomes impressed by the discovery of the utter inadequacy of any substitute to take its place. "If mothers did their duty, there would be no need for us," a woman-patrol stated recently.
By the time young women have reached such phases of demoralisation that their conduct in public demands the intervention of police-women, it is too late to reform them, moreover. They will have lost the best promise and hope of their womanhood.
And so it is and must be ever all along the line. The home and the family are the nursery of civic as they are of racial progress. We regard it as proof of civilisation that Law-Courts for Children have been instituted. Yet what a blot it is, in truth, upon both parentage and parenthood that, in our day of enlightenment, such should have become necessary.
So have mother influences and maternal sense of responsibility declined, however, that mothers on all sides openly confess their utter lack of power to control boys and girls just in their 'teens.
VIII