Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other
cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is
convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness,
but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with
whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong
unhappiness, and worse.
Society, from the highest to the lowest of its strata, is afflicted with
certain forms of understood and eminently preventable disease, about
which not a word has been spoken in Parliament for twenty years, and any
public mention of which by mouth or pen involves serious risk of various
kinds. Here it is perhaps not necessary for us to consider the case of
the outcast, and of the diseases with which, poor creature, she is first
infected, and which she then distributes into our homes. Our present
concern is simply to point out that prudery, again, is largely
responsible for the continuance of these evils at a time when we have so
much precise knowledge regarding their nature and the possibility of
their prevention. Medical science cannot make distinctions between one
disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does.
Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the
form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the
guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that
therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be
maintained.
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