Page:Fielding - Sex and the Love Life.pdf/111
guilt; but it is no crime or moral offense to know something about one's own person. In fact, it is something of a crime for a parent to withhold the safe-guarding knowledge of self from a young person.
So the application of the term "innocent" to a condition which is really one of vacuity, or emptiness, is merely juggling with words and befogging an important issue. No enlightened modern young woman should want to be considered "innocent" of questions relating to her own person and the functions of her physical organism, any more than she should want to be considered innocent of a working knowledge of the grammar of her mother tongue.
One, however, may make a choice between modesty and prudery, over the essence of which our forebears became so hopelessly confused. Modesty implies the restraint, unobtrusiveness and freedom from excesses which must always command respect, and when combined with an intelligent grasp of human problems, assure their possessor of esteem and admiration.
Prudery, on the other hand, is either affectation or ignorance, and sometimes an ignominious combination of both. When not a conscious affectation of excessive modesty or virtue—always so utterly transparent—it connotes a state of ignorance or narrow-mindedness, with an emphasis on intolerance. The militant prude is usually an insufferable bore, except to his own compatriots, and in the end tends to defeat his own aims by his vindictiveness which alienates the sympathy of all reasonable people.
Marriage—Past and Future. The fact is significant that marriage is so universally anticipated in the feminine mind with the highest expectations and hopes. To the student of human nature it warrants a healthy optimism in