Safe Marriage | Page 6

is no other way.

It is all very well to say that the man is responsible. That is only a
partial truth.[F] The woman is equally responsible as soon as she is
equally well informed. A woman's body is her own, and she will never
be really free until she knows how to look after it properly. If she is fit
to vote, fit to pay taxes, fit to hold her own estate under the Married
Women's Property Act, why should she not learn to exercise intelligent
and responsible control over her own self? Why do so many women
allow themselves to be impregnated and infected against their will?
Because they do not understand the construction and functions of their
own body. When they do understand this, they will guard their own
health as carefully as they guard their reputation. They will then not
only keep their own sexual organs scrupulously clean, but they will
encourage their husbands to do the same. Sexual intercourse is far more
refreshing and exhilarating in every way when both husband and wife
have cleansed their parts immediately before enjoying it. It is only
natural that both should wish to be sweet and clean before approaching
the closest of all bodily intimacies.
[Footnote F: It would be much less untrue to say that the remedy for the
venereal problem is clean women.--E.A.R.]
But more than this. Every well-informed woman knows that there is far
more venereal disease in the world to-day, among men and among
women, than there was before the war, and she should train all the
members of her household in habits of strict cleanliness. Instinctively
they will then avoid risking their health by contact with a possible
source of defilement, or if the risk has most unfortunately been taken,
they will instantly and instinctively remove and destroy the possible
infection, in the same rapid and effective way as they would cleanse
their boot from filth accidentally coming in contact with it. By all
means let the mothers continue to inculcate virtue, but they should also
teach sexual cleanliness directly and indirectly, themselves setting the
example. After all, the microbes of venereal disease grow almost
exclusively in the genital passages, and if these were kept sweet and
clean there would soon be an end to venereal disease. It is not a matter
of making vice safe: it is a matter of making marriage safe: a matter of
restoring and maintaining physical health, family and national, and

above all, of protecting innocent women and children, for if vice has its
dangers so also in these days has innocence its own peculiar perils, and
it is the cry of these victims--often so young and so fair--that must
affect us most deeply.
More than fourteen years ago, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, in the
Preface to "Getting Married," wrote the following regarding "The
Pathology of Marriage":--
"As to the evils of disease and contagion, our consciences are sound
enough: what is wrong with us is ignorance of the facts. No doubt this
is a very formidable ignorance in a country where the first cry of the
soul is, 'Don't tell me: I don't want to know,' and where frantic denials
and furious suppressions indicate everywhere the cowardice and want
of faith which conceives life as something too terrible to be faced. In
this particular case, 'I don't want to know' takes a righteous air, and
becomes 'I don't want to know anything about the diseases which are
the just punishment of wretches who should not be mentioned in my
presence or in any book that is intended for family reading.' Wicked
and foolish as the spirit of this attitude is, the practice of it is so easy
and lazy and uppish that it is very common, but its cry is drowned by a
louder and more sincere one. We who do not want to know, also do not
want to go blind, to go mad, to be disfigured, to be barren, to become
pestiferous, or to see such things happening to our children. We learn,
at last, that the majority of the victims are not the people of whom we
so glibly say, 'Serve them right,' but quite innocent children and
innocent parents, smitten by a contagion which, no matter in what vice
it may or may not have originated, contaminates the innocent and the
guilty alike, once it is launched, exactly as any other contagious disease
does; that indeed it often hits the innocent and misses the guilty,
because the guilty know the danger and take elaborate precautions
against it, whilst the innocent, who have been either carefully kept from
any knowledge of their danger, or erroneously led to believe that
contagion is possible through misconduct only, run into danger
blindfold. Once knock this fact into people's minds,