The manner in which, up to the present time, we have ignored the need of the young for enlightenment and guidance in questions of such elemental importance to health and well-being is at once remarkable and difficult to understand. Under the influence of the idea of the sinfulness and radically evil nature of the sexual life, we have stood helpless, as if we were faced with a mysterious and malignant power; we have left the development even of our own children to the blind hazard of chance. Those among us who were wiser were not heeded. Celebrated pedagogues of a hundred years ago, such as Rousseau, Salzmann, Jean Paul and others, expressed themselves strongly in favour of the early sexual enlightenment of youth, and gave many valuable suggestions as to the methods of such teaching. Their wise recommendations remained for the most part without practical results. Only in recent years, in connection with the question of the protection of motherhood and the campaign against prostitution, has interest in the matter been reawakened. A heightened sense of responsibility has been quickened amongst us. An increased knowledge, gained by the patient work of investigation of the sexual impulse, is proving the immense importance of its right direction in the individual life. This would seem to be forcing us to act.
To-day it is conceded, even by many who are conservative in their attitude to sex, that the old plan of silence and leaving this matter to chance, has been a fatal mistake: we are coming to understand that every child has a sacred claim to wise training in sex knowledge.
There can be no doubt of our past guilt. The proof rests in unnumbered and needless disasters in the lives of almost all of us—sufferings unendurable and maiming; hurts to our deepest selves, that we have come to understand only when our thoughts have been liberated by knowledge.
From our fear of sex, we have become the victims of sex.
What can save us? It is women—the mothers who hold the future in their keeping. The answer rests with them. Liberation from the manifold problems of our disordered sexual life depends largely on a right transmission of knowledge to our children, so that they without harm may become wise. Such teaching must be given first by the mother. In this way only, through a trained and wiser motherhood, making possible the unhampered unfoldment of the children of the future, can humanity come into its heritage.