Even, however, in the case of adults the active part played by women in real life in matters of love by no means corresponds to the conventional ideas on these subjects.  No doubt nearly every woman receives her sexual initiation from an older and more experienced man.  But, on the other hand, nearly every man receives his first initiation through the active and designed steps taken by an older and more experienced woman.  It is too often forgotten by those who write on these subjects that the man who seduces a woman has usually himself in the first place been “seduced” by a woman.

A well-known physician in Chicago tells me that on making inquiry of 25 middle-class married men in succession be found that 16 had been first seduced by a woman.  An officer in the Indian Medical Service writes to me as follows:  “Once at a club in Burma we were some 25 at table and the subject of first intercourse came up.  All had been led astray by servants save 2, whom their sisters’ governesses had initiated.  We were all men in the ‘service,’ so the facts may be taken to be typical of what occurs in our stratum of society.  All had had sexual relations with respectable unmarried girls, and most with the wives of men known to their fathers, in some instances these being old enough to be their lovers’ mothers.  Apparently up to the age of 17 none had dared to make the first advances, yet from the age of 13 onward all had had ample opportunity for gratifying their sexual instincts with women.  Though all had been to public schools where homosexuality was known to occur, yet (as I can assert from intimate knowledge) none had given signs of inversion or perversion in Burma.”

In Russia, Tchlenoff, investigating the sexual life of over 2000 Moscow students of upper and middle class (Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, Oct.-Nov., 1908), found that in half of them the first coitus took place between 14 and 17 years of age; in 41 per cent, with prostitutes, in 39 per cent, with servants, and in 10 per cent, with married women.  In 41 per cent, the young man declared that he had taken the initiative, in 25 per cent, the women took it, and in 23 per cent, the incitement came from a comrade.

The histories I have recorded in Appendix B (as well as in the two following volumes of these Studies) very well illustrate the tendency of young girls to manifest sexual impulses when freed from the constraint which they feel in the presence of adult men and from the fear of consequences.  These histories show especially how very frequently nurse-maids and servant-girls effect the sexual initiation of the young boys intrusted to them.  How common this impulse is among adolescent girls of low social class is indicated by the fact that certainly the majority of middle-class men can recall instances from