But most mothers give the answer containing the fiction of the gooseberry bush, or whatever it may be, in a manner indicating that that is what the child must believe, and the child receives the information as a serious answer to his serious question. It is then a lie, and a pernicious lie.
Racial knowledge, instinct, whatever you like to call it, is subtler and stronger in baby minds than we dulled grown-ups are inclined to think. The youngest child has a half-consciousness that what its mother said in answer to this question was not true.
Nurse, or auntie, a friend’s governess, or any one else who seems wise and powerful, is asked the same question when mother is not there, and the chances are that if mother had given the stork version auntie gives the gooseberry bush or some other fiction which she particularly favours.
The baby ponders intermittently, inconsequently, perhaps at long intervals, perhaps after years, but ultimately it realizes that its mother lied to it.
In this way infinite injury has been done to the whole human stock, and more particularly women have suffered from the dishonesty and the inherent incapacity of our society to be frank and truthful about the most profound and the most terrible aspects of sex, namely, its diseases. A wife or a mother has the right to be told the truth.
Women, and particularly mothers, have been outrageously wronged by the deliberate lies and untruthful atmosphere about the greater problems of sex in which the learned have enshrouded them: but mothers have themselves given the first bent to the little sprouting twig of that tree of knowledge, and they have bent it away from the sunlight of truth and clean and happy understanding.
The mother’s excuse is, or would be if she felt herself in any way to blame (which, by the way, deplorably, she very seldom does) that these terrible mysteries of origin are not suitable for the little innocent child to ponder over. She thinks they would shock him. But here the mother is profoundly mistaken.
The age of innocence is the age when all knowledge is pure. At three, four, or five years old, everything is taken for granted—everything in the universe is equally a surprise, and is at the same time accepted without question as being in the natural course of events. If true answers were given to the tiny child’s questions, they would seem quite rational—not in the least more surprising than the fact that oak trees grow from acorns, or that the cook gets a jam tart out of a hot oven.
All the world’s events seem magic at that age, and if no exceptional mystery were made of the magic of his own advent, the child would feel it as natural as all the rest, and having asked the question and obtained satisfactory, simple unaccentuated answers, would let his little mind run on to the thousand other questions he wants to ask. The essential racial knowledge would slip naturally and sweetly into his mind mingled with a myriad other new impressions.