Read Ebook: Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity by Rout Ettie Annie Lane William Arbuthnot Sir Commentator

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FOREWORD xiii

NOTE AND ADVERTISEMENT 75

"Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers, and I linger on the shore, And the Individual withers, and the World is more and more."

TENNYSON.

FOREWORD.

I have to thank the Society for the Prevention of Venereal Disease, the National Birth-Rate Commission, and the Joint Select Committee on Criminal Law Amendment Bills for recording various statements and evidence.

It remains only to state this fact: That on January 25th, 1922, Sir Arbuthnot Lane, Sir Frederick Mott, Surgeon-Commander Hamilton Boyden, of the Royal Navy, and Mr. Harman Freese, of Freese & Moon, manufacturing chemists, of 59, Bermondsey Street, London, S.E.1, met at my home to decide upon the best medical formulae for self-disinfecting ointment for men and contraceptive-disinfecting-suppositories for women. Mr. Freese made up sanitary tubes and sanitary suppositories in accordance with these formulae, but he is prohibited by law from recommending these for the prevention of venereal disease, and forbidden to supply printed directions with them, whereas similar medicaments are being retailed with printed directions in the State of Pennsylvania, and the Health Department circularises medical practitioners thus:--

"The self-treatment packet, obtainable at drug stores, to arrest venereal infection after exposure, is approved by the State Department of Health on the same principle as is antitoxin given to diphtheria contacts. Proof is lacking that the use of this packet lowers social standards. Reduction in the incidence of venereal disease is a direct result."

"You ask

Having gone so far as to admit the desirability and necessity of the medical prevention of sexual diseases, the Roman Catholic Church will certainly find itself later unable to deny the desirability and necessity of preventing the birth of children liable to be born diseased or unfit. It is not practicable for a wife to take any suitable precautions against infection by a diseased husband, which precautions will not at the same time be effective, to a greater or lesser extent, in the prevention of conception. There is no half-way house in the matter of sexual hygiene.

ETTIE A. ROUT.

At present marriage is easily the most dangerous of all our social institutions. This is partly due to the colossal ignorance of the public in regard to sex, and partly due to the fact that marriage is mainly controlled by lawyers and priests instead of by women and doctors. The legal and religious aspects of marriage are not the primary ones. A marriage may be legal--and miserable; religious--and diseased. The law pays no heed to the suitability of the partners, and the Church takes no regard for their health. Nevertheless, the basis of marriage is obviously mating, or sexual intercourse. Without that there is no marriage, and with it come not merely health and happiness but life itself. Cut out sexual intercourse, and society becomes extinct in one generation. Every generation must, of necessity, pass through the bodies of its women; there is no other way of obtaining entry into the world. Hence, it is clearly the duty of women to understand precisely the processes involved, from beginning to end.

With the lower animals sexual intercourse is desired only seasonally, and only for the purpose of reproduction. With the higher animals--man and women--sexual intercourse is desired more or less continuously throughout adult life, and desired much more for romantic than for reproductive considerations--that is, for the sake of health and happiness rather than for the sake of procreation only. A few women, and still fewer men, have no sexual desires. To them sexual abstinence seems more natural than sexual satisfaction. But for the majority of mankind and womankind--for all normally healthy men and women--there is this continuous desire to be happily mated.

For the sake of health and happiness there is everything to be said for early marriage, but better late than never. The chief obstacles to early and happy marriage are financial, and these would largely disappear if women were able to control fecundity. The chief obstacles to healthy marriage are the venereal diseases, and these could be extirpated in two or three generations if sexual cleanliness was properly taught to all adults, and if promiscuous intercourse was properly regulated during the same period. Unfortunately most women's idea of regulating promiscuous intercourse is to have none of it. This is impossible in the present stage of moral evolution, but it will become increasingly possible as we succeed in extirpating the venereal diseases, particularly syphilis. Syphilis is the one great cause of immorality, because persons born with a syphilitic taint are apt to be mentally and morally deficient; hence, tend to indulge in anti-social and unnatural practices, such as engaging in promiscuous intercourse.

The normally healthy man is a highly selective creature, and the normally healthy woman still more fastidiously selective in romantic relationship. Neither man nor woman is naturally in the least attracted by promiscuous intercourse. On the contrary, it is repugnant to both. Both regard the elements of romance, reciprocity and permanence as essential. These elements are present in marriage and absent in prostitution. Therefore, it is beneath the dignity of any decent, intelligent woman to suppose that promiscuous relationship can ever be as happy and satisfying and attractive as marriage. This, apart altogether from the fact that marriage is fertile and prostitution infertile. No, both man and woman desire love-relationship, not loveless-relationship; and they are really quite fit to be trusted with the evolution of the race through passionate love and the worship of beauty, as soon as society makes harmonious provision for their normal sexual needs. Until society does make early marriage practicable for all healthy adult men and women, say between twenty and twenty-five years of age, extra-marital relationship, however undesirable, is inevitable, because there are many men to whom, at times, any woman is better than no woman.

But extra-marital relationship is never even safe, because of its promiscuity and impermanence, except in properly conducted and effectively supervised tolerated houses. The tolerated house is absolutely necessary at present to protect women from disease and immorality, by confining this kind of intercourse as far as possible in certain definite channels. The abolition of the tolerated house spreads both disease and immorality into classes of women who would otherwise be immune, and enormously increases the dangers of promiscuous intercourse. Separated from their toilet equipment the women cannot make and keep themselves clean; on the streets they are not taught to refuse intercourse with diseased men; thus their occupation becomes more and more dangerous as medical supervision is removed. They inevitably become diseased; sometimes contract mixed infections, which they pass on to their clients--the future husbands and fathers of the nation--and "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation." All this would be impossible if women generally would recognise the primary fact that because a man is immoral that it is no reason why he should become syphilitic. We all want to abolish sin, but failing that we must cease wanting to poison the sinner. We must actively work to save him from the penalties of his folly, for that is the only way in which we can save his victims and succeed ultimately in "Making Marriage Safe."

Similarly every effort should be made to prevent women becoming diseased, no matter how immoral they may be. The prostitute is very often a woman of peculiar mentality or overdeveloped animal instincts; and many women are driven to prostitution by drink and poverty. The prostitute class is largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents. Prostitution is the effect--not the cause--of anti-social acts and conditions. We must remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects. Under present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature of a room by smashing the thermometer. All we can do is to make and keep these women clean. If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men in sexual cleanliness.

And again, just as the medical prevention of venereal disease was not proposed, and has not been applied for the purpose of fostering or condoning promiscuous intercourse, so the conscious control of fecundity by contraception must not be applied in such a way as to lessen the proportion of well-born citizens in the nation taken as a whole. Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses, must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character, brains and physique. It is a form of reverse selection--the responsible being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded and unfit.

One duty at any rate is quite clear. No woman should run any chance of conception unless she is certain of her own health and the health of her partner--the man who is to be the father of the child she is to bring into the world. If her husband's health is unsound, and she cannot avoid intercourse, she can certainly take precautions against conception and against infection. The control of fecundity and the control of infection are parallel problems, and generally speaking, the measures a woman takes to prevent conception will also prevent infection. If these precautions are not taken, a woman may not only become seriously ill herself, but she may blast the health of her unborn babe--or infect it herself during or after birth. Clearly then it is her personal, as well as her maternal and national, duty to apply preventive measures.

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, and their self-righteous indifference and intolerance soon change into lively concern for themselves and their families."

The facts seem so plain, and yet there is still great opposition to the promotion of a knowledge of sexual cleanliness and self-disinfection. Only a short time ago , Sir Frederick Mott, the great authority on syphilis, felt obliged to oppose some opponents of self-disinfection at a public enquiry in London in this fashion:--

"The point is that large numbers of innocent women have suffered from disease. They are rendered sterile, have miscarriages and abortions, and large numbers have been ruined. I have been connected with the London County Asylums for twenty-five years, and I have seen in those asylums people from all states of society, and I have seen them die of general paralysis. Five per cent. of the people who get syphilis, in spite of treatment, develop this disease. That is only one aspect of it. I was on the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease, and Sir William Osier, who was a great authority, said that he could teach medicine on syphilis alone, because every tissue in the body is affected by it, and that the diseases of blindness, deafness, insanity and every form of disease may be due to syphilis. You have only to consider the effect that it had upon the army, and I understand that more than two army corps were invalided during the war on account of venereal disease. What have you to say to that? Does not that create some anxiety?"

It is difficult even to read this eloquent appeal--the more eloquent perhaps because it was quite unpremeditated--without being deeply moved. Yet the witnesses opposing Sir Frederick Mott were apparently unaffected. Of them, as of men of old, it might justly be said:--

"He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted."

And now large numbers of hospitals all over the Empire are issuing appeals for the means to treat venereal disease.

"It is tragic," says one London hospital, "to see the sufferers--men, women and even little children--innocent little mites, knowing not from what they suffer or why they should. It is thought by many that venereal disease is a sign of guilt, but large numbers of our patients are innocent victims."

The following pages are written with the object of imparting useful, practical knowledge to sensible and serious women. The women who accept and apply this knowledge can rest calm in the sure and certain faith that it is their offspring who will build up the coming race.

A. FOR WOMEN:

SEXUAL REPRODUCTION.

To understand the practical methods of birth-control, or the control of conception, we must first have a clear view of the processes involved when the reproductive organs are in activity, and of the nature and situation of the sexual organs themselves. The diagrams on pages 34, 35 and 36 show in general outline the reproductive organs of man and woman.

Now fertilisation does not necessarily occur whenever the male organ comes in contact with the female organ. Fertilisation occurs only when a male-cell unites with a female-cell ; in other words, when the spermatazoa in the seminal fluid of a man meet and unite with the germ or ovum in the body of a woman. That is the beginning of the child. This union of the two cells need not take place during or immediately after sexual intercourse. It may occur many hours, or even two or three weeks, after connection, because the spermatazoa have motion of their own. They are tiny threadlike bodies, which may work their way towards the ovum long after they have left the body of the man and been placed in the body of the woman, and the uterus has a searching movement, and may by its pulsations draw the spermatazoa upwards. For these reasons a woman cannot be quite sure of the exact time of fertilisation, and hence cannot predict exactly the date of the child-birth. Generally the pregnancy lasts nine months, but it may last longer--say ten months on rare occasions; and it may be extended apparently by a delay in fertilisation.

PREVENTION OF CONCEPTION.

UNATTAINABLE CONDITIONS.

Before detailing these methods, I want to ask every woman to rid her mind of certain false hopes and impossible demands. It is no use asking for something which gives no trouble at all, which costs nothing, and which is at the same time absolutely certain to prevent conception. These conditions are unattainable. But almost absolute control of her reproductive functions is most certainly attainable by every careful, intelligent woman willing to spend a good deal less time and money over her sexual toilet than she now spends over the care of her teeth, for example.

SEXUAL TOILET OUTFIT.

To begin with, it is necessary to obtain suitable sexual toilet outfit, and the requirements for this are as follows:--

Enamel bidet, soluble suppositories, suitable syringe, and properly-fitting rubber pessary. These are illustrated on pages 38 and 43.

GENERAL CONDITIONS.

SUMMARY.

Finally, the following briefly summarises the recommendations for women:--

DIGEST OF BEST PREVENTIVE PRECAUTIONS.

ANTISEPTIC LOTIONS.

Dr. K.R.D. Shaw, of 144, Harley Street, London, W.1, who has had a very wide experience of "prevention" in different parts of the world during the last twenty-five years, has named the following as suitable disinfecting lotions:--

N.B.--Where there is grave danger of venereal infection, it is an excellent additional precaution to douche first with soap and water, and douche again with antiseptic lotion. The sooner this is done the better.

B. FOR MEN:

"AVOID INFECTION.

Nevertheless, the people who would put sacerdotalism before science, and the still meaner minds who would substitute legality for morality, raised storms of objection to my work, in the midst of which came a few strong, clear calls of understanding and encouragement.

One Scotch padre wrote me in 1918:--

An old family doctor, then with a colonial ambulance, wrote:--

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