The Price of Prudery : Part 2

Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles
by C. W. Saleeby, M.D.

(Page 11 of 25)

Medical science cannot make distinctions between one disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does. Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be maintained. Physiological science, however, knowing what it knows regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of the offense. These moral distinctions between one disease and another have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often than not immoral.

It would be none too easy to show that the medical profession in any country has yet used its tremendous power in this direction. Professions, of course, do not move as a whole, and we must not expect the universal laws of institutions to find an exception here. But though they do not move, they can be moved. It is when the public has been educated in the elements of these matters, and has been taught to see what the consequences of prudery are, that the necessary forces will be brought into action. Meanwhile, what we call the social evil is almost entirely left to the efforts made in Rescue Homes and the like.

Despite the judgment of a popular novelist and playwright, it is much more than doubtful whether Rescue Homes - the only method which Mrs. Grundy will tolerate - are the best way of dealing with this matter, even if the people who worked in them had the right kind of outlook upon the matter, and even if their numbers were indefinitely multiplied. Every one who has devoted a moment's thought to the matter knows perfectly well that this is merely beginning at the end, and therefore all but futile. I mention the matter here to make the point that the one measure which prudery permits - so that indeed it may even be mentioned upon our highly moral stage, and passed by the censor, who would probably be hurried into eternity if M. Brieux's Les Avariés were submitted to him, and who found "Mrs. Warren's Profession" intolerable - is just the most useless, ill-devised, and literally preposterous with which this tremendous problem can be mocked.

This leads us to another point. It is that the means of our education, other than the schools, are also prejudiced by prudery. Upon the stage there is permitted almost any indecency of word, or innuendo, or gesture, or situation, provided only that the treatment be not serious. Almost anything is tolerable if it be frivolously dealt with, but so soon as these intensely serious matters are dealt with seriously, prudery protests. The consequence is that a great educative influence, like the theater, where a few playwrights like M. Brieux, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, and Mr. Granville Barker, and Mr. John Galsworthy, might effect the greatest things, is relegated by Mrs. Grundy to the plays produced by Mr. George Edwardes and other earnest upholders of the censorship.

Publishers also, while accepting novels which would have staggered the Restoration Dramatists, can scarcely be found, even with great labor, for the publication of books dealing with the gender question from the most responsible medical or social standpoints.

It is just because public opinion is so potent, and, like all other powers, so potent either for good or for evil, that its present disastrous workings are the more deplorable. It is not unimaginable that prudery might undergo a sort of transmutation. As I have said before, we might make a eugenicist of Mrs. Grundy, so that she might be as much affronted by a criminal marriage as she is now by the spectacle of a healthy and well-developed baby appearing unduly soon after its parents' marriage. The power is there, and it means well, though it does disastrously ill. Public opinion ought to be decided upon these matters; it ought to be powerful and effective. We should never come out into the daylight until it is; we should not be saved by laws, nor by medical knowledge, nor by the admonitions of the Churches. Our salvation lies only in a healthy public opinion, not less effective and not more well-meaning than public opinion is at present, but informed where it is now ignorant, and profoundly impressed with the importance of realities as it now is with the importance of appearances.

So much having been said, what can one suggest in the direction of remedy? First, surely it is something that we merely recognize the price of prudery. Personally, I find that it has made all the difference to my calculations to have had the thing pointed out by the clerical critic whose eye these words may possibly meet. It is something to recognize in prudery an enemy that must be attacked, and to realize the measure of its enmity. In the light of some little experience, perhaps a few suggestions may be made to those who would in any way join in the campaign for the education and transmutation of public opinion on these matters.

First, we must compose ourselves with fundamental seriousness - with that absolute gravity which imperils the publication of a book and entirely prohibits the production of a play on such matters. There is something in human nature beyond my explaining which leads towards jesting in these directions. An instinct, I know, is an instinct; of which a main character is that its exercise should be independent of any knowledge as to its purpose. We eat because we like eating, rather than because we have reckoned that so many calories are required for a body of such and such a weight, in such and such conditions of temperature and pressure. It is not natural, so to say, just because man is in a sense rather more than natural, that we should be provident and serious, self-conscious, and philosophic, in dealing with our fundamental instincts. But it is necessary, if we are to be human: and only in so far as, "looking before and after," we transcend the usual conditions of instinct, are we human at all.

The special risk run by those who would deal with these matters seriously - or rather one of the risks - is that they will be suspected, and may indeed be guilty, of a tendency to priggishness and cant. Youth is very likely not far wrong in suspecting those who would discuss these matters, for youth has too often been told that they are of the earth earthy, that these are the low parts of our nature which we must learn to despise and trample on, and youth knows in its heart that whatever else may or may not be cant, this certainly is. So any one who proposes to speak gravely on the subject is a suspect.

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Co., New York.
Copyright 1911 by Mitchell Kennerley.