It is, of course, easy to understand the attitude taken up by women. Blame of men is not easily avoided; yet is there not confusion in women’s minds?
The sin that a husband commits against his wife, a man against the girl he is to marry—yes, and a son against the trust of his mother—is in being unfaithful. Having caught the disease is a misfortune. The effect must not be blamed by itself.
Let me illustrate this point of view by considering a different case. Your child gets scarlet fever by an act of direct disobedience—the sin of his age. He stays from school, without leave of absence, and goes to play at a house he has been forbidden to enter. Would you, because of his disobedience, refuse to pity and nurse him? Rather, would you not forget his sin and desire only to help and heal him?
Do you see what I mean now? It is not that I would condone immoral conduct in the husband or the lover that I plead for pity and understanding on the part of women who love them.
Few men are intentionally evil. They do not even always act foolishly in this question of infectious diseases because they are wantonly careless. Often they are fully alive to the danger that may result to their wives, or the girl they wish to make their wife, from their own infection.
I repeat, they are not necessarily bad men, and they love their wives and children; but they are cowards. All men are cowards when it comes to facing the blame and misunderstanding of the woman they love.
If they cannot rely on the woman’s pity and help, few men will dare to tell the truth; nor will they be willing to let the doctor tell the facts for them. And if the truth cannot be told, it is very unlikely that the infection will not be spread to others. This may lead to the birth of diseased children, and who may say that in this case the crime is the man’s alone?
Why can’t we face the situation now, when we are trying to tidy up our social life? Concealments that may have been necessary in the old time of ignorance are surely impossible now.
Is the evil to remain hidden, uncorrected, from one generation to another? Hidden evil multiplies itself, and the sum is national deterioration.
The mistake has been the muddleheaded thinking that has obscured the plain and comparatively simple question of cure with the entirely opposed problem of moral appraisement and punishment: a confusion and losing of the way that has led us all inevitably into a forest-tangle of difficulty, of lies and silences, and unanswerable questions.