ive part
when a sexual situation arises.

It is also beginning to be felt that, especially as regards women,
ignorant innocence is not merely too fragile a possession to be worth
preservation, but that it is positively mischievous, since it involves the
lack of necessary knowledge. "It is little short of criminal," writes Dr.
F.M. Goodchild,[21] "to send our young people into the midst of the
excitements and temptations of a great city with no more preparation than
if they were going to live in Paradise." In the case of women, ignorance
has the further disadvantage that it deprives them of the knowledge
necessary for intelligent sympathy with other women. The unsympathetic
attitude of women towards women is often largely due to sheer ignorance of
the facts of life. "Why," writes in a private letter a married lady who
keenly realizes this, "are women brought up with such a profound ignorance
of their own and especially other women's natures? They do not know half
as much about other women as a man of the most average capacity learns in
his day's march." We try to make up for our failure to educate women in
the essential matters of sex by imposing upon the police and other
guardians of public order the duty of protecting women and morals. But, as
Moll insists, the real problem of chastity lies, not in the multiplication
of laws and policemen, but largely in women's knowledge of the dangers of
sex and in the cultivation of their sense of responsibility.[22] We are
always making laws for the protection of children and setting the police
on guard. But laws and the police, whether their activities are good or
bad, are in either case alike ineffectual. They can for the most part only
be invoked when the damage is already done. We have to learn to go to the
root of the matter. We have to teach children to be a law to themselves.
We have to give them that knowledge which will enable them to guard their
own personalities.[23] There is an authentic story of a lady who had
learned to swim, much to the horror of her clergyman, who thought that
swimming was unfeminine. "But," she said, "suppose I was drowning." "In
that case," he replied, "you ought to wait until a man comes along and
saves you." There we have the two methods of salvation which have been
preached to women, the old method and the new. In no sea have women been
more often in danger of drowning than that of sex. There ought to be no
question as to which is the better