Facts and Fictions of Life

by Helen H. Gardener

Read before the World's Congress of Representative Women, Chicago, 1893

Ladies and Gentlemen:—As a student of Anthropology and Heredity one is sometimes compelled to make statements which seem to the thoughtless listener either too radical or too horrible to be true. If I were to assert, for example, that good men, men who have the welfare of the community at heart, men who are kind fathers and indulgent husbands, men who believe in themselves as pure, upright and good citizens, if I were to say that even such men are thorough believers in and supporters of the theory that it is right and wise to sacrifice the liberty, purity, health and life of young girls and women and, through the terrible power of heredity, to curse the race, rather than permit men and boys to suffer in their own persons the results of their own misdeeds, mistakes or crimes, I would be accused of being "morbid" and a "man hater." But let us see if the above statement is not quite within the facts.

I shall take as an illustration the words and arguments of a man who stands second, only, to our Chief Police officer in the largest city in the United States, and since he was permitted to present his arguments in the most widely read journals of the country it seems fitting that these opinions be dealt with as of unusual importance. All the more is this the case since they were intended to influence legislation in the interest of State-regulated vice.

Among other things he said:

"Of course there are disorderly houses, but they are more hidden, and less of that vice is flaunted, than in any other city in the world. Such places have existed since the world began and men of observation know that this fact is a safe-guard around their homes and daughters. Men of candid judgment, religious men, know, too, that they had ten thousand times rather have their live, robust boys err in this indulgence, than think of them in the places of those unfortunates on the island, whose hands are muffled or tied behind them. This is a desperately practical question with more than a theoretical and sentimental side. It ought to be talked about and better understood among fathers.

"Thank God that vice is so hidden that Dr. Park-hurst has to get detectives to find disorderly houses, and that thousands of wives and daughters do not know even of their existence. Such horrible disclosures as were made before innocent women and girls in Dr. Parkhurst's audience do vastly more harm in arousing their curiosity and polluting their minds than a host of sin that is compelled to hide its head. When I was Captain of the Twenty-ninth Precinct, I went with Dr. Talmage on his errand for sensational information for his sermons. I know, from observation and from reports which I was careful to gather, that never in their history were the places he described as thronged by patrons, largely from Brooklyn, or so much money spent there for debauchery as after those sermons."

Now I assume that this Police Inspector is a good citizen, father, husband and man. I assume that he is sincere and earnest in his desire and efforts to suppress crime and promote—so far as he is able—the welfare of the community. I assume, in short, that he is, in intent and in fact, a loyal citizen and a conscientious officer. I have no reason to believe that he is not doing what he conceives is best and right, and yet even he is quoted as advocating the sacrifice of purity to impurity, the creating of moral and social lepers in one sex in order that moral and social lepers or the ignorantly vicious of the other sex may escape the results of their own mistakes or vice. It impresses me anew that such teaching, from such authority, is not only the most unfortunate that can be put before a boy but that it goes farther perhaps than anything else can to confirm in men that conditions of sex mania which the Inspector says is more desirable should be cultivated by means of regularly recognized state institutions for the utter sacrifice and death of young girls than that it should end in the wreck of the sex maniac himself and in his own destruction.

But were our statesmen students of heredity, they would not need to be told that there is, there can be, no "safeguards around wives and daughters" so long as their husbands, fathers and sons are polluting the streams of life before they transmit that life itself to those who are to be "our daughters and wives."

But not going so deeply into the subject, for the moment, as to deal with its hereditary bearings; upon what principle his argument can be valid, I fail to see. Why is it better that some girl shall be sacrificed, body, mind and soul; why is it better that she shall be his victim than that he shall be his own? And then again, the problem is not solved when she is sacrificed. He has simply changed the form of his disease, and in the change, while it is possible that he has delayed for himself the day of destruction, he has, in the process, corrupted not only his victim but the social conscience, as well. Were this all perhaps it would be still thought wise to follow the advice of the Inspector—and alas, of some physicians—and continue to sacrifice under the bestial wheel of sex power those who are from first to last prey to the conditions of social and legal environment in which they are allowed no voice.

But this is not all. The seeming "cure" is no cure at all. It is simply a postponement of the awful day for the sex maniac himself and, worse than this—more terrible than this—it is the cause of the continuance of the mania not only in himself but in his children. He marries some honest girl by and by and thus associates, with the burnt-out dregs of his life, one who would loathe him did she know his true character and his concealed but burning flame of insanely inherited, insanely indulged, bestially developed disease. But he is now—under the shadow of social respectability and church sanction—to perpetuate his unfortunate mania in those who are helpless—the unborn. Heredity is not a slip-shod thing. It does not follow One parent and one alone. The children of a father who "sowed his wild oats" by the method prescribed by the Inspector (and alas, by social custom) are as truly his victims as is the pariah of humanity who is to be quarantined in some given locality, made a social leper and a physical wreck that he, personally, may be neither the one nor the other. But nature is a terrible antagonist. She bides her time and when she strikes she does not forget to strike a harder, wider-reaching, more terrible blow than can be compassed by a single individuality or a single generation. This is the lesson that, so far, we have absolutely refused to learn. I do not hesitate to take issue with the Inspector, therefore, and say that it is far better for society, far better for the fathers of unfortunate victims of sex mania, far better for the victim himself that he be "on the Island with hands muffled or tied behind him," where death to one will end the misery to all, than that by applying the remedy which the Inspector recommends, the result should be, as it is, a future generation of sex maniacs, scrofulous, epileptic or simply constitutionally undermined weaklings.