Agnes Repplier.
Miss Agnes Repplier, the distinguished essayist, discusses in the Atlantic Monthly (March, 1914) the plain speech on sex topics that are before the public to-day. While she holds no brief for "the conspiracy of silence," which she admits was "a menace in its day," she maintains that "the breaking of silence need not imply the opening of the flood-gates of speech." She goes on to say:
Present frankness.
"It was never meant by those who first cautiously advised a clearer understanding of sexual relations and hygienic rules that everybody should chatter freely respecting these grave issues; that teachers, lecturers, novelists, story-writers, militants, dramatists, social workers, and magazine editors should copiously impart all they know, or assume they know, to the world. The lack of restraint, the lack of balance, the lack of soberness and common sense were never more apparent than in the obsession of sex which has set us all ababbling about matters once excluded from the amenities of conversation.
"Knowledge is the cry. Crude, undigested knowledge, without limit and without reserve. Give it to boys, give it to girls, give it to children. No other force is taken account of by the visionaries who—in defiance, or in ignorance of history—believe that evil understood is evil conquered.
"We hear too much about the thirst for knowledge from people keen to quench it. Dr. Edward L. Keyes, president of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, advocates the teaching of sex-hygiene to children, because he thinks that it is the kind of information that children are eagerly seeking. 'What is this topic,' he asks, 'that all these little ones are questioning over, mulling over, fidgeting over, worrying over? Ask your own memories.'
One child's life.
"I do ask my memory in vain for the answer Dr. Keyes anticipates. A child's life is so full, and everything that enters it seems of supreme importance. I fidgeted over my hair which would not curl. I worried over my examples which never came out right. I mulled (though unacquainted with the word) over every piece of sewing put into my incapable fingers, which could not be trained to hold a needle. I imagined I was stolen by brigands, and became—by virtue and intelligence—spouse of a patriotic outlaw in a frontierless land. I asked artless questions which brought me into discredit with my teachers, as, for example, who 'massacred' St. Bartholomew. But vital facts, the great laws of propagation, were matters of but casual concern crowded out of my life and out of my companions' lives (in a convent boarding-school) by the more stirring happenings of every day. How could we fidget over obstetrics when we were learning to skate, and our very dreams were a medley of ice and bumps? How could we worry over 'natural laws' in the face of a tyrannical interdict which lessened our chances of breaking our necks by forbidding us to coast down a hill covered with trees? The children to be pitied, the children whose minds become infected with unwholesome curiosity are those who lack cheerful recreation, religious teaching, and the fine corrective of work. A playground or a swimming pool will do more to keep them mentally and morally sound than scores of lectures on sex-hygiene.
Personal teaching approved.
"The world is wide, and a great deal is happening in it. I do not plead for ignorance, but for the gradual and harmonious broadening of the field of knowledge, and for a more careful consideration of ways and means. There are subjects which may be taught in class, and subjects which commend themselves to individual teaching. There are topics which admit of plein-air handling, and topics which civilized man, as apart from his artless brother of the jungles, has veiled with reticence. There are truths which may be, and should be, privately imparted by a father, a mother, family doctor, or an experienced teacher; but which young people cannot advantageously acquire from the platform, the stage, the moving picture gallery, the novel or the ubiquitous monthly magazine."