The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Science
The Social Emergency: Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
Sex instruction
The hygienic problems of girls in industry will largely disappear when it
becomes a matter of common knowledge that industrial efficiency is
dependent upon physical efficiency. The physical efficiency of the worker
cannot be maintained at its highest standard when the period allotted to
rest is too short to allow the body to rebuild its tissues and dispose of
the toxic products of fatigue. All activity must be balanced by rest. If
this equilibrium between expenditure and income is disturbed, exhaustion
ensues. If long continued, it results in permanent impairment of health.
The organism poisoned by its own toxic products is incapable of productive
effort and the output will steadily diminish as the fatigue increases. The
present long working day causes a progressive diminution in the vitality
of the worker, defeats its own end, and leaves the girl weak in the face
of temptations.
The housing of unmarried girls is a very serious question. Homes for
working-girls require skillful management and a matron of insight and
sympathy. The bedrooms may be small, but well lighted and ventilated.
There should be a sunny dining-room, a library, several small parlors,
attractively furnished, a gymnasium which could be used for dancing,
shower baths, and an assembly room for concerts, lectures, and moving
pictures. This should be in charge of a trained social leader who would
direct entertainments and stimulate wholesome interests. With an
establishment of this kind we should not find so many of our girls on the
streets or seeking diversion in cheap theaters and dance halls. When girls
are able to live,--not simply exist in the deadening monotony of
alternation between work and sleep,--their heightened mental activity,
interest, and enthusiasm will prove a valuable asset to employers.
One of the chief requisites of the mental training of girls is a
knowledge, supplied at the right time and in the right way, of the
fundamental principles of reproduction. With such knowledge the girl's
mind will not be distracted by curiosity, or become morbid, when, instead
of intelligent response, the girl meets with evasions and attempted
concealments. She should not receive this knowledge in the form of
isolated facts, but as a correlated part of a great whole to be
assimilated gradually. The girl who is trained in this way will understand
and accept human reproduction as a natural process.
Questionnaires show that a majority of girls hear the facts of
reproduction at the age of seven or eight, a few younger, and a few at
the age of ten,--almost none at a later age. The majority hear these facts
from children a year or two older, a few from their mothers, and the rest
from books. A large number experience a feeling of disgust which remains
with them until they receive better information. Their questions disclose
a depth of ignorance and misconception which is appalling.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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