The First Necessity : Part 1

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

(Page 15 of 24)

At this stage in our discussion it is necessary to consider a subject which ought rightly to come foremost in the provident study of the facts that precede marriage - a subject which craven fear and ignorance combine to keep out of sight, yet which must now see the light of day. For the writer would be false to his task, and guilty of a mere amateur trifling with the subject, who should spend page after page in discussing the choice of marriage, the best age for marriage, and so forth, without declaring that as an absolutely essential preliminary it is necessary that the girl who mates should at least, whatever else be or be not possible, mate with a man who is free from gross and foul disease.

The two forms of disease to which we must refer are appalling in their consequences, both for the individual and the future. In technical language they are called contagious; meaning that the infection is conveyed not through the air as, say, in the case of measles or small-pox, but by means of contact with some infected surface - it may be a lip in the act of kissing, a cup in drinking, a towel in washing, and so forth. Of both these terrible diseases this is true. They therefore rank, like leprosy, as amongst the most eminently preventable diseases. Leprosy has in consequence been completely exterminated in England, but though venereal disease - the name of the two contagions considered together - diminishes, it is still abundant everywhere and in all classes of society. Here regarding it only from the point of view of the girl who is about to mate, I declare with all the force of which I am capable that, many and daily as are the abominations for which posterity will hold us up to execration, there is none more abominable in its immediate and remote consequences, none less capable of apology than the daily destruction of healthy and happy womanhood, whether in marriage or outside it, by means of these diseases. At all times this is horrible, and it is more especially horrible when the helpless victim is destroyed with the blessing of the Church and the State, parents and friends; everyone of whom should ever after go in sackcloth and ashes for being privy to such a deed.

The present writer, for one, being a private individual, the servant of the public, and responsible to no body smaller than the public, has long declined and will continue to decline to join the hateful conspiracy of silence, in virtue of which these daily horrors lie at the door of the most honored and respected individuals and professions in the community. More especially at the doors of the Church and the medical profession there lies the burden of shame that, as great organized bodies having vast power, they should concern themselves, as they daily do, with their own interests and honor, without realizing that where things like these are permitted by their silence, their honor is smirched beyond repair in whatever Eyes there be that regard.

I propose therefore to say in this chapter that which at the least cannot but have the effect of saving at any rate a few girls somewhere throughout the English-speaking world from one or other or both of these diseases, and their consequences. Let those only who have ever saved a single human being from either syphilis or gonorrhea dare to utter a word against the plain speaking which may save one woman now.

The task may be much lightened by referring the reader to a play by the bravest and wisest of modern dramatists, M. Brieux, more especially because the reader of "Les Avariés" will be enabled to see the sequence of causation in its entirety. When first our attention is called to these evils, we are apt to blame the individuals concerned. The parents of youths, finding their sons infected, will blame neither their guilty selves nor their sons, but those who tempted them. It is constantly forgotten that the unfortunate woman who infected the boy was herself first infected by a man. Either she was betrayed by an individual blackguard, or our appalling carelessness regarding girlhood, and the economic conditions which, for the glory of God and man, simultaneously maintain Park Lane and prostitution, forced her into the circumstances which brought infection. But she was once as harmless and innocent as the girl child of any reader of this book; and it was man who first destroyed her and made her the instrument of further destruction.

Ask how this came to be so, and the answer is that he in his turn was infected by some woman.

It is time, then, that we ceased to blame youth of either gender, and laid the onus where it lies - upon the shoulders of older people, and more especially upon those who by education and profession, or by the functions they have undertaken, such as parenthood, ought to know the facts and ought to act upon their knowledge. It is necessary to proceed, therefore: though perfectly aware that in many ways this chapter will have to be paid for by the writer: that he has yet to meet the eye of his publisher; that there will be abundance of abuse from those "whose sails were never to the tempest given": but aware also that in time to come those few who dared speak and take their chance in this matter, whether remembered or not, will have been the pioneers in reforming an abuse which daily makes daylight hideous. He who does betray the future for fear of the present should tread timidly upon his Mother Earth lest he awake her to gape and bury her treacherous son.

Something is known by the general public of the individual consequences of syphilis. It is known by many, also, that there is such a thing as hereditary syphilis - babies being born alive but rotted through for life. Further, it is not at all generally known, though the fact is established, that of the comparatively few survivors to adult life from amongst such babies, some may transmit the disease even to the third generation. There is a school of so-called moralists who regard all this as the legitimate and providential punishment for vice, even though ten innocent be destroyed for one guilty. Such moralists, more loathsome than syphilis itself, may be left in the gathering gloom to the company of their ghastly creed. Love and man and woman are going forward to the dawn, and if they inherit from the past no God that is fit to be their companion, they and the Divine within them will not lose heart.

The public knowledge of syphilis, though far short of the truth, is not merely so inadequate as that of gonorrhea.

"No worse than a bad cold" is the kind of lie with which youth is fooled. The disease may sometimes be little worse than a bad cold in men, though very often it is far more serious; it may kill, may cause lasting damage to the coverings of the heart and to the joints, and often may prevent all possibility of future fatherhood.

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