In the next place, or some place in the program, there should be some
sort of competent and judicious sex education. I do not know just who
would impart it, since no one as yet knows very much about it, but with
the earnest, sincere and devoted work that is being carried on all over
the world by the scientific men and women who are studying eugenics and
social hygiene, there is hope in this direction, even if it is probable
that the world will not be saved by the new race of athletes that are
scientifically to be bred, and may still have some use in its affairs
for the minds of its cripples who in all times have contributed so much
to its advancement.
The marvelous phenomenon known as the feminist movement which the
students and historians of the next two hundred years will be busy
elucidating will play its part, too, for in its vast impulse toward the
equality of the sexes it must not only bring the single standard of
morals, but it should somehow be the means of achieving for women their
economic independence. This perhaps would be the most important of all
the steps to be taken in the solution of the problem. The economic
environment of course is in the lives of many girls a determining
factor and in this connection the minimum wage indeed has its bearing.
The old Puritan laws were conceived in minds intensely preoccupied
with the duty of punishing people for their sins. Prostitutes were
prostitutes because they were “bad,” and when people were bad they must
be punished. But now we see, or begin to see, if vaguely, that, except
in metaphysics, there is no such thing in our complex human life as an
absolute good or an absolute bad; we begin to discern dimly the causes
of some of the conduct called bad, and to the problem of evil we begin
to apply the conception of economic influences, social influences,
pathological influences, and other influences most of us know little or
nothing about.
Thus we begin to see that a girl’s wages, for instance, may have
something to do with what we call her morals; not everything, but
something. The wages of a girl’s father have something to do with
them, too, and the wages of her great grandfather for the matter of
that. So the dividends on which live the delicate and charming ladies
she beholds alighting from their motor cars every morning in the
shopping district may have something to do with them, though she is as
unconscious and as innocent of the relation as they, as ignorant as all
of us are. Rents have something to do with them, and so do taxes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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