[Footnote 33:  Coventry Patmore.]

CHAPTER IX

THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE

Up to this point I have dealt only with the great shaping and moulding principles of life, with indirect influence rather than direct.  How far direct teaching on matters of sex should be given to our girls has been a far greater perplexity to me than in the case of boys.  In the present state of our schools and our streets our boys must get to know evil.  Hitherto it was possible to say that our girls might get to know evil, and between that “must” and “might” lay a great and perplexing chasm.  We do not want our garden lilies to smell of anything but pure dews and rains and sun-warmed fragrance.  But is this ideal possible any longer, except in a few secluded country homes, where, hidden like Keats’s nightingale “among the leaves,” they may remain innocent and ignorant of the world’s evil?

But with the ordinary conditions of the present day, with the greater freedom accorded to women, the wider range of education, involving a wider range of reading, with modern newspapers left about, I ask, How is it possible for a mother to keep her girls in ignorance and unconscious innocence?  A volume of short stories comes into the house from the circulating library; they are clever and apparently absolutely harmless.  Yet embedded in the heart of one such volume, which shall be nameless, I came upon a story almost as vile as anything in a French novel, and conveying the most corrupt knowledge.  How, I ask, can a busy mother read through every book of short stories before letting it fall into the hands of her girls; or how, if they are to read Latin and Greek, or even carefully to study our own old literature, is she to guard them from a knowledge of evil conveyed in classical allusions, or in the coarse plainness of speech of an earlier age?  I know as a fact, whether we recognize it or not, that behind our mature backs our girls are discussing these moral problems with quite an alarming amount of freedom, and some at least, guided by no teaching, and with no practical knowledge of the great laws of human life, are coming to quite startling conclusions, which would make their mothers’ hair stand on end.  And one most undesirable, and I may add unnatural, result noticeable among the more advanced section is a certain distaste for marriage, a tendency to look upon it as something low and animal, which strikes me as simply a fatal attitude for women to take up.

Have we not, therefore, got clearly to recognize that the old order has changed, giving place to new, and requiring, therefore, new methods.  We may or we may not like the new order, but it is there.  Under the changed conditions of modern life it is inevitable; therefore it must be in the providence of God; it cannot be wholly bad, and if we will work in with it loyally, and not thrust it aside for some