cian some years ago (J. Milner Fothergill,
_Adolescence_, 1880, pp. 20, 22) "leave them with less to
actively occupy their thoughts than is the case with boys. They
are studiously taught concealment, and a girl may be a perfect
model of outward decorum and yet have a very filthy mind. The
prudishness with which she is brought up leaves her no
alternative but to view her passions from the nasty side of human
nature. All healthy thought on the subject is vigorously
repressed. Everything is done to darken her mind and foul her
imagination by throwing her back on her own thoughts and a
literature with which she is ashamed to own acquaintance. It is
opposed to a girl's best interests to prevent her from having
fair and just conceptions about herself and her nature. Many a
fair young girl is irredeemably ruined on the very threshold of
life, herself and her family disgraced, from ignorance as much as
from vice. When the moment of temptation comes she falls without
any palpable resistance; she has no trained educated power of
resistance within herself; her whole future hangs, not upon
herself, but upon the perfection of the social safeguards by
which she is hedged and surrounded." Under the free social order
of America to-day much the same results are found. In an
instructive article ("Why Girls Go Wrong," _Ladies' Home
Journal_, Jan., 1907) B.B. Lindsey, who, as Judge of the Juvenile
Court of Denver, is able to speak with authority, brings forward
ample evidence on this head. Both girls and boys, he has found,
sometimes possess manuscript books in which they had written down
the crudest sexual things. These children were often sweet-faced,
pleasant, refined and intelligent, and they had respectable
parents; but no one had ever spoken to them of sex matters,
except the worst of their school-fellows or some coarse-minded
and reckless adult. By careful inquiry Lindsey found that only in
one in twenty cases had the parents ever spoken to the children
of sexual subjects. In nearly every case the children
acknowledged that it was not from their parents, but in the
street or from older companions, that they learnt the facts of
sex. The parents usually imagined that their children were
absolutely ignorant of these matters, and were astonished to
realize their mistake; "parents do not know