It is the young woman as much as the youth who needs this enlightenment.  There are still some persons so ill-informed as to believe that though it may be necessary to instruct the youth it is best to leave his sister unsullied, as they consider it, by a knowledge of the facts of life.  This is the very reverse of the truth.  It is desirable indeed that all should be acquainted with facts so vital to humanity, even although not themselves personally concerned.  But the girl is even more concerned than the youth.  A man has the matter more within his own grasp, and if he so chooses he may avoid all the grosser risks of contact with venereal disease.  But it is not so with the woman.  Whatever her own purity, she cannot be sure that she may not have to guard against the possibility of disease in her future husband as well as in those to whom she may entrust her child.  It is a possibility which the educated woman, so far from being dispensed from, is more liable to encounter than is the working-class woman, for venereal disease is less prevalent among the poor than the rich.[253] The careful physician, even when his patient is a minister of religion, considers it his duty to inquire if he has had syphilis, and the clergyman of most severely correct life recognizes the need of such inquiry and may perhaps smile, but seldom feels himself insulted.  The relationship between husband and wife is even much more intimate and important than that between doctor and patient, and a woman is not dispensed from the necessity of such inquiry concerning her future husband by the conviction that the reply must surely be satisfactory.  Moreover, it may well be in some cases that, if she is adequately enlightened, she may be the means of saving him, before it is too late, from the guilt of premature marriage and its fateful consequences, so deserving to earn his everlasting gratitude.  Even if she fails in winning that, she still has her duty to herself and to the future race which her children will help to form.

In most countries there is a growing feeling in favor of the enlightenment of young women equally with young men as regards venereal diseases.  Thus in Germany Max Flesch, in his Prostitution und Frauenkrankheiten, considers that at the end of their school days all girls should receive instruction concerning the grave physical and social dangers to which women are exposed in life.  In France Duclaux (in his L’Hygiene Sociale) is emphatic that women must be taught.  “Already,” he states, “doctors who by custom have been made, in spite of themselves, the husband’s accomplices, will tell you of the ironical gaze they sometimes encounter when they seek to lead a wife astray concerning the causes of her ills.  The day is approaching of a revolt against the social lie which has made so many victims, and you will be obliged to teach women what they need to know in order to guard themselves against you.”  It is the same in America.