Woman | Page 7

hanging over her head, and she is in constant terror lest her sin be found out. She does not permit herself to look for a mate, but if she does get married, the specter of her antematrimonial experience is constantly before her eyes. After years and years of married life, the husband may divorce her if he finds out that she had "sinned" before she knew him. And unless the husband is a broad-minded man and loves her truly and unless she made a clean breast of everything to him before marriage, her life is continuous torture. But even if the girl escaped pregnancy, the mere finding out that she had an illicit experience deprives her of social standing, or makes her a social outcast and entirely destroys or greatly minimizes her chances of ever marrying and establishing a home of her own. She must remain a lonely wanderer to the end of her days.
The enormous difference in the results of a misstep in a boy and a girl is clearly seen, and for this reason alone, if for no other, sex instruction is of more importance to the girl than it is to the boy.
But there are other important reasons, and one of them is beautifully and truthfully expressed by Byron in his two well-known lines.
Man's love is of man's life a thing apart, 'Tis woman's whole existence.
Yes, love is a woman's whole life.
Some modern women might object to this. They might say that this was true of the woman of the past, who was excluded from all other avenues of human activity. The woman of the present day has other interests besides those of Love. But I claim that this is true of only a small percentage of women; and in even this small minority of women, social, scientific and artistic activities cannot take the place of love; no matter how busy and successful these women may be, they will tell you if you enjoy their confidence that they are unhappy, if their love life is unsatisfactory. Nothing, nothing can fill the void made by the lack of love. The various activities may help to cover up the void, to protect it from strange eyes, they cannot fill it. For essentially woman is made for love. Not exclusively, but essentially, and a woman who has had no love in her life has been a failure. The few exceptions that may be mentioned only emphasize the rule.
But not only psychically is a woman's love and sex life more important than a man's, physically she is also much more cognizant of her sex and much more hampered by the manifestation of her sex nature than man is. To take but one function, menstruation. From the age 13 or 14 to the age of forty-five or fifty it is a monthly reminder to woman that she is a woman, that she is a creature of sex; and, while to many women this periodically recurring function is only a source of some annoyance or discomfort, to a great number it is a cause of pain, headache, suffering, or complete disability. Man has no such phenomenon to annoy him practically his whole life.
But more important are the results of love-union, of sex relations. A man after a sexual relation is just as free as he was before. A woman, if the relation has resulted in a pregnancy, which is generally the case, unless special pains are taken it should not so result, has nine troublesome months before her, months of discomfort if not of actual suffering; she then has an extremely trying and painful ordeal, that of childbirth, and then there is another trying period, the period of lactation or of nursing and of bringing up the baby. The penalty seems almost too great.
And when the woman is on the point of ceasing to menstruate she does not do so smoothly and comfortably. She has to go through a period called the menopause, which may last one or two years and which may bring discomforts and dangers of its own. Man does not have to go through such a distinct period of demarcation separating his sexual from his non-sexual life. Altogether it cannot be denied that woman is much more a slave of her sex nature than man is of his. Yes, Nature has handicapped woman much more heavily than she has man.
In short, both in view of the fact that sexual ignorance with its possible missteps has much more disastrous consequences for the girl than it has for the boy, and in view of the fact that the sex instinct and its physical and psychic manifestations occupy a much more important part in woman's life than they do in the life of man, we consider the necessity of sex instruction much greater