And rightly. Many reforms were badly needed in the legal applications of morality;
the ideal of purity had stiffened into conventions that chained the mind and stifled the heart. There was a taint of insincerity over the realities of life: the false gods of narrow-minded respectability, breeding secret sin.
Wider knowledge; the sifting of old ideas and the questioning of fixed thought, can harm none. On the whole, moreover, protest was made in earnest, with a due sense of responsibility. It was not, as to-day, wildly shouted on the housetops; without reflection, undigested; in a riot of burning words.
There were, of course, wild statements made in bitter anger; foolish experiments attempted; in some quarters, merely a new cant and upside-down convention upheld to replace the old. But, on the whole, still only among the few. In all probability, under normal conditions, the needed frank discussion and honest thought would have sifted the true from the false, before the temporary confusion had inflamed popular imagination, and uprooted, without reforming, the habits and thought of daily life.
Looking back, I think, one can fairly summarize the position then arrived at by advanced thinkers, that was beginning to be generally discussed:
That there is nothing inherently evil in the human body, to be hidden up, and if possible ignored; particularly, that the instincts of sex are natural and healthy, a vital part of pure love.
That women are moved by physical "desires" equally with men, though more habituated to restraint; wherefore the old one-sided tolerance towards men, "who cannot help themselves," is utterly false and, combined with the conventional innocence of women, creates morbid barriers between the sexes, whereby "the woman pays."
That these truths should be known and faced by both sexes before, not after, marriage; with all the consequences they involve and the dangers they should enable us to avoid: the risks of a "sheltered" youth and the real meaning of purity, true and false passion or love, marriage wrecked by ignorance, divorce, the unmarried mother, birth control, the position of the prostitute, etc.
Truth, the ventilation of morality, the honest consideration of problems which may at any moment take us unawares, should not defile the heart or suggest evil
thought. Real knowledge strengthens the will; and we must look at sin, see it clearly, if we can ever hope to conquer it.