Women, Children, Love, and Marriage

by C. Gasquoine Hartley

No, I believe we have to look deeper for the reason to explain this attitude of medical hiding.

These diseases are set apart from all other sicknesses of our bodies. For this reason, in considering them, moral considerations become confused with practical values. And I do not see quite how this is to be avoided. There is however, the gravest danger from such an attitude which rests upon hidden personal prejudices, and is not dependent on the facts of the case. Such an attitude leads inevitably to concealment of truth, which is specially disastrous here, because it is absolutely essential that these diseases, if they are to be cured, should be met in the open and grappled with methodically and thoroughly.

For greater clearness, I may state the matter thus: There are three attitudes that may be adopted towards sexual disease. First, that of the pure moralist, who says only “This is a sin to be punished.” On the opposite side is the purely utilitarian, who says, “This is only a disease to be cured.” But both attitudes may be alike wrong or, more correctly, the truth lies midway between the two. The disease, as a disease, needs to be cured. This is the first step with which nothing should interfere. But far different and much more complex is the treatment required to alter the actions that lead to the disease.

As a first step, public opinion ought to condemn too late marriage, instead of recommending it on economic grounds. The mania for making economics the deciding factor in conduct should surely cease: the falsity of this view has been exposed by many great writers, but much stronger is the condemnation that must be given here by all who can understand the evils that it has wrought in our sexual lives. Late marriages must be one of the causes contributing to men’s use of prostitutes before marriage.

We have to find a way out, to silence our shrieks of blame, and to give up many of our old pretences. You can never get things right until you honestly face them.

Women are the worst sinners. And I say, without hesitation, that it is men’s fear of women, especially the husband’s fear of his wife, that is the greatest hindrance to openness in this connection. It is women’s attitude which holds us back in progress towards health.

Let me give an illustration. I attended recently a meeting where a paper was read on the morals of men, in connection with the alarming increase of venereal diseases since the war. The reader of the paper, being a woman doctor as well as a feminist, took the wise view that the most urgent question was not the reform of the men, but staying the spread of the diseases. In the discussion that followed it was plainly evident that few of the audience—all women—agreed with her. These were women workers, who had read about, and to some limited extent, at any rate, thought and studied, these questions. Yet the general view was that men ought to be punished. One speaker, who stated that she was married, said that no true woman could or ought to forgive a husband who had become infected with a contagious disease.

Now, it is this view, here so crudely expressed, that has done so much harm in the past. It explains also the continuance of the medical secrecy that has acted so strongly against the stamping out of this scourge of civilisation. Such an attitude of blame and unforgiveness on the part of women has to be changed before the truth can be told safely.

Women are mainly responsible for the secrecy of these diseases. And what is the result? Because these infectious diseases are secret they are largely uncured.