_By William Trufant Foster_


It is necessary to take into account all phases of the social emergency.
The question is not merely one of physiology, or pathology, or diseases,
or wages, or industrial education, or recreation, or knowledge, or
commercial organization, or legal regulation, or lust, or social customs,
or cultivation of will power, or religion. It is all of this and more. The
danger is that we shall see only one or two sides of a many-sided problem.
A solution may appear adequate because it leaves essential factors out of
consideration.

One physiological factor in the situation is of fundamental importance,
namely, the discrepancy between the age of sexual maturity and the
prevailing age of marriage,--an artificial condition largely determined by
social customs, by modern educational systems, and by standards of living.
While society has set forward, generation after generation, the age at
which marriage seems feasible, the age of puberty has remained virtually
the same. This unnatural condition--as artificial as the clothes we
wear--is a phase of the emergency which should be considered by those who
condemn as unnatural and forced the education of adolescent boys and girls
in sexual hygiene and morals. Partly as a result of this has come the
general acceptance of the double standard of chastity which has bitterly
condemned the girl--made her an outcast of society--and excused the boy
for the same offense, on the false plea of physiological necessity.

With the sanction of this double standard, tacitly accepted by society,
thousands of prostitutes have been harbored and protected. What shall we
do with them? We may drive them out of certain districts and certain