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.
CONTENTS OF CHAPTER XVI
A CONTINUATION OF THE LAST CHAPTER, WITH AN ATTEMPT TO SUGGEST A REMEDY
An attempt to find the remedy—What is the real root of the evil—The young woman of the new generation—The years since the war began—An examination of present conditions—What is likely to happen when peace comes—The independent woman—The Commissioner’s Report of the National Birth-Rate Investigation, 1916—The failure in our lives—Where is the real root of the evil—The whole educational system of girls in our homes and in our schools is wrong—The importance of menstruation—Influence of conventionality—Wrong ideals set before girls—The destruction working in our midst—Fear of sex directs our educational system—The remedy to begin in our schools—We must educate girls to be women—Menstruation and the girl’s special sexual life must be emphasised and not as now ignored—Adolescent schools—The sexual life of the adolescent girl—The difficulties that must be faced—Opposition on the part of women—Motherhood to be saved—Regeneration of the girl’s instincts through consciousness—The hope with which we may look to the future—Motherhood will triumph.