All these warnings apply to unsought advice—a dangerous thing to offer under any circumstances. Except there is a real emergency, you had better avoid it. If your nephew or little neighbor is winning along through his troubles fairly well, best keep hands off. But if you absolutely must interfere, guard yourself as I suggest, and remember that, even then, you will assuredly get burned, if you play long with that dangerous fire of maternal pride!
When your advice is sought, you are in a different position. Then you have a right to speak out, though if you are wise and loving you will temper that right with charity. No one can be too gentle in dealing with a soul that honestly asks for help; but one can easily be too timid. Think, under these circumstances, of yourself not at all; but put yourself as much as possible in her place; be led by her questions; and answer fearlessly from the depths of the best truth you hold. Then leave it. You can do no more. What becomes of that truth, once you have lovingly spoken it, is no more of your concern.
THE SEX QUESTION
Always convinced of the importance of this subject, convictions have deepened to the point of dismay since learning, through this school, of the many women who have suffered and who continue to suffer, both mentally and physically, because, in early girlhood, they were not taught those finer physiological facts upon which the very life of the race depends. Yet, strangely enough, these very victims find it almost impossible to give their children the knowledge necessary to save them from a similar fate. It is as if the lack of early training in themselves leaves them helpless before a situation from which they suffer but which they have never mastered.
Of course such feelings, in themselves morbid, are not to be trusted. Faced with a task like this we have only to ask ourselves not "Is it hard?" but "Is it in truth my task?" If it is, we may be sure that we shall be given strength to do it, provided only that we are sincere in our willingness to do it and do not count our feelings at all.
It is preposterous to have such feelings, in the first place. They are wholly the product of false teaching. For we have no right—as we recognize when we stop to think about it in calmness of spirit, and apart from our special difficult—to sit in scornful judgment upon any of the laws of nature. When we find ourselves in rebellion against them, what we have to do is to change the state of our minds, for change the laws we cannot. If we women could inaugurate a gigantic strike against the present method of bearing children—and I imagine that millions would join such a strike if it held out any promise of success!—we still could accomplish nothing. To fret ourselves into a frazzle over it, is to accomplish less than nothing;—it is to enter upon the pathway to destruction.
In teaching our children, then, we have first to conquer ourselves—that painful, reiterated, primal necessity, which must underlie all teaching. Having done so, we shall find our task easier than we supposed. The children's own questions will lead us; and if we simply make it a rule never to answer a question falsely no matter how far it may probe, we shall find ourselves not only enlightening but receiving enlightenment. For nothing is so sure an antidote to morbidness as the unspoiled mind of a child. He looks at the facts with such a calm, level gaze that proportions are restored to us as we follow his look.
Many of my letters show that adult women, wives and mothers, still grope for the truth that lies plain to the eyes of any simple child—the truth that there is no such thing as clean and unclean, only use and misuse. Others, through love, and the splendid revelations that it makes, have risen so far above their former misconceptions that they fear to tell a child the facts before he has experienced the love. I can imagine that in an ideal world some such reticence might be good and right—but this is far from an ideal world. We have to train our children relatively, not absolutely, in the knowledge that we do not control all their environment. I think the solution of the difficulty is to teach the facts of sex in a perfectly calm, unemotional, matter-of-fact manner, just as one teaches the laws of digestion. When knowledge of evil is thrust upon our child let us be sorry with him that those other children have never been taught, and that they are doing their bodies such sad mischief. But don't exaggerate it; don't be too shocked; don't condemn the poor little sinners, who are also victims, too severely. Charity toward wrong-doing is the best prophylactic against imitation. We never feel the lure of a sin which grieves us in another; but often the call of a sin which we too strongly condemn. Because the very strength of the condemnation rouses our imaginations, is in itself an emotion, and, since it is certainly not a loving one, must necessarily be linked with all other unloving and therefore evil emotions. As far as possible, let us keep feeling out of this subject, until such time as the true and beautiful feeling of love between husband and wife arises and uplifts it.