"A diploma for motherhood!" I repeated; but he corrected me.
"Not at all. Any woman can be a mother—if she's normal. I said she had to have a diploma as a child-culturist—quite a different matter."
"I don't see the difference."
"No, I suppose not. I didn't, once," he said. "Any and every mother was supposed to be competent to 'raise' children—and look at the kind of people we raised! You see, we are beginning to learn—just beginning. You needn't imagine that we are in a state of perfection—there are more new projects up for discussion than ever before. We've only made a start. The consequences, so far, are so good that we are boiling over with propositions for future steps."
"Go on about the women," I said. "I want to know the worst and become resigned."
"There's nothing very bad to tell," he continued cheerfully. "When a girl is born she is treated in all ways as if she was a boy; there is no hint made in any distinction between them except in the perfectly open physiological instruction as to their future duties. Children, young humans, grow up under precisely the same conditions. I speak, of course, of the most advanced people—there are still backward places—there's plenty to do yet.
"Then the growing girls are taught of their place and power as mothers—and they have tremendously high ideals. That's what has done so much to raise the standard in men. It came hard, but it worked."
I raised my head with keen interest, remarking, "I've glimpsed a sort of 'iron hand in a velvet glove' back of all this. What did they do?"
Owen looked rather grim for a moment.
"The worst of it was twenty or twenty-five years back. Most of those men are dead. That new religious movement stirred the socio-ethical sense to sudden power; it coincided with the women's political movement, urging measures for social improvement; its enormous spread, both by preaching and literature, lit up the whole community with new facts, ideas and feelings. Health—physical purity—was made a practical ideal. The young women learned the proportion of men with syphilis and gonorrhea and decided it was wrong to marry them. That was enough. They passed laws in every State requiring a clean bill of health with every marriage license. Diseased men had to die bachelors—that's all."