X
THE PRICE OF PRUDERY
Just after we had succeeded in getting the Notification of Births Act
put upon the Statute Book, the present writer occupied himself in
various parts of the country in the efforts which were necessary to
persuade local authorities to adopt the provisions of that Act.
Addressing a meeting of the clergy of Islington, he endeavoured to trace
back to the beginning the main cause of infant mortality, and
endeavoured to show that that lay in the natural ignorance of the human
mother, about which more must later be said. In the discussion which
followed, an elderly clergyman insisted that the causes had not been
traced far enough back, maternal ignorance being itself permitted in
consequence of our national prudery.
Ever since that day one has come to see more and more clearly that the
criticism was just. Maternal ignorance, as we shall see later, is a
natural fact of human kind, and destroys infant life everywhere, though
prudery be or be not a local phenomenon. But where vast organizations
exist for the remedying of ignorance, prudery indeed is responsible for
the neglect of ignorance on the most important of all subjects. Let it
not be supposed for a moment that in this protest one desires, even for
the highest ends, to impart such knowledge as would involve sullying the
bloom of girlhood. It is not necessary to destroy the charm of innocence
in order to remedy certain kinds of ignorance; nor are prudery and
modesty identical.
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