Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity

by Ettie Annie Rout

With the lower animals sexual intercourse is desired only seasonally, and only for the purpose of reproduction. With the higher animals—man and women—sexual intercourse is desired more or less continuously throughout adult life, and desired much more for romantic than for reproductive considerations—that is, for the sake of health and happiness rather than for the sake of procreation only. A few women, and still fewer men, have no sexual desires. To them sexual abstinence seems more natural than sexual satisfaction. But for the majority of mankind and womankind—for all normally healthy men and women—there is this continuous desire to be happily mated.

For the sake of health and happiness there is everything to be said for early marriage, but better late than never.[A] The chief obstacles to early and happy marriage are financial, and these would largely disappear if women were able to control fecundity. The chief obstacles to healthy marriage are the venereal diseases, and these could be extirpated in two or three generations if sexual cleanliness was properly taught to all adults, and if promiscuous intercourse was properly regulated during the same period. Unfortunately most women's idea of regulating promiscuous intercourse is to have none of it. This is impossible in the present stage of moral evolution, but it will become increasingly possible as we succeed in extirpating the venereal diseases, particularly syphilis. Syphilis is the one great cause of immorality, because persons born with a syphilitic taint (and what family is entirely free from this hereditary disease?) are apt to be mentally and morally deficient; hence, tend to indulge in anti-social and unnatural practices, such as engaging in promiscuous intercourse.

The normally healthy man is a highly selective creature, and the normally healthy woman still more fastidiously selective in romantic relationship. Neither man nor woman is naturally in the least attracted by promiscuous intercourse. On the contrary, it is repugnant to both. Both regard the elements of romance, reciprocity and permanence as essential. These elements are present in marriage and absent in prostitution. Therefore, it is beneath the dignity of any decent, intelligent woman to suppose that promiscuous relationship can ever be as happy and satisfying and attractive as marriage. This, apart altogether from the fact that marriage is fertile and prostitution infertile. No, both man and woman desire love-relationship, not loveless-relationship; and they are really quite fit to be trusted with the evolution of the race through passionate love and the worship of beauty, as soon as society makes harmonious provision for their normal sexual needs. Until society does make early marriage practicable for all healthy adult men and women, say between twenty and twenty-five years of age, extra-marital relationship, however undesirable, is inevitable, because there are many men to whom, at times, any woman is better than no woman.

But extra-marital relationship is never even safe, because of its promiscuity and impermanence, except in properly conducted and effectively supervised tolerated houses. The tolerated house is absolutely necessary at present to protect women from disease and immorality, by confining this kind of intercourse as far as possible in certain definite channels. The abolition of the tolerated house spreads both disease and immorality into classes of women who would otherwise be immune, and enormously increases the dangers of promiscuous intercourse. Separated from their toilet equipment the women cannot make and keep themselves clean; on the streets they are not taught to refuse intercourse with diseased men; thus their occupation becomes more and more dangerous as medical supervision is removed. They inevitably become diseased; sometimes contract mixed infections, which they pass on to their clients—the future husbands and fathers of the nation—and "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation." All this would be impossible if women generally would recognise the primary fact that because a man is immoral that it is no reason why he should become syphilitic. We all want to abolish sin, but failing that we must cease wanting to poison the sinner. We must actively work to save him from the penalties of his folly, for that is the only way in which we can save his victims and succeed ultimately in "Making Marriage Safe."

Similarly every effort should be made to prevent women becoming diseased, no matter how immoral they may be. The prostitute is very often a woman of peculiar mentality or overdeveloped animal instincts; and many women are driven to prostitution by drink and poverty. The prostitute class is largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents. Prostitution is the effect—not the cause—of anti-social acts and conditions. We must remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects. Under present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature of a room by smashing the thermometer. All we can do is to make and keep these women clean. If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men in sexual cleanliness.[B]

And again, just as the medical prevention of venereal disease was not proposed, and has not been applied for the purpose of fostering or condoning promiscuous intercourse,[C] so the conscious control of fecundity by contraception must not be applied in such a way as to lessen the proportion of well-born citizens in the nation taken as a whole. Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses, must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character, brains and physique. It is a form of reverse selection—the responsible being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded and unfit.

Enthusiastic advocates of birth-control claim it as a means of improving the race. It is not necessarily anything of the kind. You cannot improve a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle by letting all the individuals breed; whether each individual has a small number or a large number of offspring makes comparatively little difference. The way to improve the flock or herd is to breed only from the best and eliminate the unfit as breeding material. Changes in environment may improve or deteriorate the individuals of one generation, but such changes are not inheritable, excepting in the case of venereal disease. Syphilis, e.g., may damage the germ-cells of a man's body, and thus lead to his procreating diseased and damaged offspring—idiots, imbeciles, mental or moral deficients, and so forth, who unfortunately are fertile. Thus the prevention of venereal disease is a eugenic force. It is in fact the only eugenic force in operation at present. Generally speaking, it is the well-developed and high-spirited and enterprising young men who travel most, and who, therefore, are most likely to contract and spread venereal disease. They come in contact with a much larger number of women than those who stay at home instead of wandering abroad. These well-to-do young travellers often marry the finest of our women, and later in life damage or sterilise them through latent or chronic venereal disease. Hence many one-child marriages—due not to the use of contraceptives, but to the action of the gonococcus transferred to the body of the wife.

But there is this hope. It is among the mentally alert and well-informed men and women that birth-control is first understood and applied, and it is among this very same class that the medical prevention of venereal disease is also first understood and applied. Thus, there will tend to be less disease among this class than among the mentally torpid and ill-informed masses of the community. This in itself will not improve the race, but it will prevent the deterioration of certain classes and increase their numbers. Nevertheless, so long as the irresponsible and feeble-minded and diseased are permitted to multiply indiscriminately, as at present, they must ultimately outnumber and overwhelm the classes which are practising self-restraint or applying birth-control. This process may even be hastened by a political enfranchisement, which enables twelve feeble-minded persons to outvote two wise men six times over. Thus, to succeed democracy must raise and maintain the general average of brains and character throughout the community. In so far as it permits low-grade individuals to be born in the homes of the masses, and high-grade individuals in the homes of the classes, it is manufacturing a rod to thrash its own back, successful rebellion against which mode of Government ends in mere anarchy and chaos.[D]

One duty at any rate is quite clear. No woman should run any chance of conception unless she is certain of her own health and the health of her partner—the man who is to be the father of the child she is to bring into the world. If her husband's health is unsound, and she cannot avoid intercourse, she can certainly take precautions against conception and against infection. The control of fecundity and the control of infection are parallel problems, and generally speaking, the measures a woman takes to prevent conception will also prevent infection. If these precautions are not taken, a woman may not only become seriously ill herself, but she may blast the health of her unborn babe—or infect it herself during or after birth. Clearly then it is her personal, as well as her maternal and national, duty to apply preventive measures.

Women should understand that there is always a great deal of venereal disease—millions of fresh cases every year in the British Empire. During the war there were about half-a-million fresh infections per annum among the soldiers in the British armies alone—about two million men infected altogether at the very least.[E] Some were cured, others patched up; some very badly treated; some not treated at all; many demobilised while in an infective condition, and thus liable to come home and sow in the bodies of clean women the seeds of diseases picked up in foreign lands in moments of excitement and folly. Blame these men if we must, but in all fairness let us ask ourselves: Who infected them? And the answer is: Diseased women.