1. society
2. social institution
3. marriage

LETTERS TO
MY
DAUGHTER
BY
Leslie J. Swabacker
A RGUS B OOKS , INC .
Chicago
1927
Copyright, 1926
by
ATWOOD & KNIGHT
3rd Printing
October, 1927
To
L. J. S.
This Book is
Affectionately dedicated
by
HER FATHER
CONTENTS
Introduction
I
Religion
II
Philosophy
III
Duty
IV
Conduct
V
Monogamy
VI
Men
VII
Love
VIII
The Engagement
IX
Marriage
X
Chastity
INTRODUCTION
Dear Daughter,—
Fourteen years from now, when you are eighteen, I may be either dead and buried, or rich
and conservative, and so unable to give you the advice and precepts that I now feel are
necessary, if you are to have a happy womanhood.
I look at you now, a joyous care-free child, and in spite of my great love for you, there is
also the great sorrow that I feel for anyone with a whole life to live. But it is not in the
expectation of being able to reduce the sorrows, or add to the joys of your existence that I am
writing these letters. Rather it is with the wish that this knowledge will help you to have a
fuller life; to see clearer; to enjoy more; to drain deeper the cup of living.
You have been given a good start in life’s journey. You are of clean, sound stock,
untainted, to my knowledge, by insanity, syphilis, or consumption, and you were conceived
through love. You are given the care and guidance of your parents and not the grudging
attention of hired servants; you are being educated along carefully selected lines, both
scientific and modern, and will continue to be so cared for and educated all through your
youth, provided your mother and I are spared by motors, murderers, and moonshine!
Granted that we are, the time has arrived when we must render you an account of our
stewardship of your mind and body. You are entitled to know what we have hoped to make
of you and, knowing this, you will be able to judge us with the clear, cold uncompromising
judgment of youth.
Your oldest brother, of course, suffered from all the experimentation and ignorance that
the first child in any family inevitably undergoes. Your other brothers had easier times in their
babyhood, as we learned more of the necessities of infants, until with your coming we were
as competent dieticians and pediatricians as the average young physician or trained nurse,
and from the moment you were born you were cared for scientifically and correctly. We knew
how to feed you; how to dress you; how to dose you. If you cried it was easy for us to diagnose
it as pain, pins, or mere pettishness. If you broke out into a rash, spotted, or coughed more
than seemed judicious, we sent for a doctor, and nursed you with the knowledge that with
your strong constitution and healthy body, it would all be over in a few days, and trembled
not that “an angel song would awaken our little ‘girl’ blue.”
Your food has been selected according to the best dietetics. You have been fed
well-balanced meals. No calf could have been given more or better milk, no Scotchman more
porridge, and Nebuchadnezzar himself had no more green vegetables. We have tried to avoid
poisoning you with starch, in the American fashion, or over-feeding you, in the German, and
it will be many years before you know the taste of coffee or tea—both are still unknown to
your fifteen-year-old brother.
Living in a suburb, you have had the advantage of knowing green things and living
creatures from your first outing. You have seen the life cycle of the flowers from the seed to
the blossom, and that of the birds from the building of the nest to the flying away of the
worm-fed brood. Puppies, ponies and rabbits have been your playmates, and caring for their
bodily needs your first taste of responsibility. You have seen the cow milked and the egg taken
from the hen’s nest, and so can realize the workings of nature in a way unknown to a city
child.
On the other hand, our proximity to a great city gives you the double advantage of
country living and city rearing and is slowly shaping you into a cosmopolite, one who can be
at home in crowds, with nerves and muscles trained to meet the emergencies and dangers of
the mechanical aids and engines of this complex age. Then too, all the cultural outlets that
a great city has to offer are yours for the taking—museums, libraries, theatres, concerts and
lectures.
Our village, where it seems your girlhood is to be spent, and where you are to share the
schooling that your brothers enjoy, is, I am proud to say, one of the most advanced in the
whole country. It is a village run by the women for the children. The schools you will attend
are peerless. You will not be chained to a class, dragged on by those cleverer than you, and
pulled back by the dullards. You will be taught as rapidly as you can absorb and no faster.
Your teachers will do their best to make your work pleasure and not drudgery. You will be
taught not arithmetic, but the science of numbers; not history but the progress of the world;
not reading, but the joy that lies in books; and not physiology, but the care and uses of the
body. In addition, you will learn how to appreciate music, painting, books and plays, while
your hands will be trained, not only to sew and cook, and to mould and color, but also to
wield the printer’s stick, the carpenter’s saw, and the potter’s wheel.
We have not enough money—who has—but we have sufficient to buy you good food,
simple clothes and those pleasures that make or mar childhood.
You will live in a house where there are books everywhere; where there is a constant
influx of new books and magazines; a house where the newest thoughts and ideas of men are
read and discussed; a house where not a single volume is hidden away or forbidden you.
As soon as you show any wish or desire to read books which touch sex intimately and
frankly, I will put in your way my unexpurgated Zola so that you will have your taste
permanently vitiated for such drivel as school girls read in secret. Otherwise, I shall never try
to tell you what to read but will merely attempt to open avenues.
Our friends—for like calls to like— are people who, in their opinion and ours, are
advanced thinkers, strivers for the betterment of the world and themselves—seekers, as
Kipling’s Lama was. When they come to the house, your place is still at the table, you hear
the conversation and interchange of ideas and will unconsciously imbibe it all.
We shall not ask you to choose your friends because of wealth, race or creed. You are a
citizen of a democracy; you will attend a public school where every pupil is a social equal, so
you may select your companions on a basis of personal liking and we shall only interfere if we
feel that, through ignorance, you have picked someone whose character might leave a
permanent stain on your soul.
I am not a great success in the business world, probably because I have never felt such
success as worth the struggle to secure it; but one job that I am working on twenty-four hours
every day, is to be a good father to you and your brothers.
This is how things and conditions are today, and we must take for granted that these
coming fourteen years will see no material change in our plans or ideals and that you will
grow steadily and serenely, led by us along the way that we have chosen for our path through
life.
So let us imagine you are eighteen. You are through school and ready to face life. You
have not only an education but have specialized in some field so that you are fitted to go to
work if you so desire, and have no need to feel yourself an unskilled laborer. You have a
healthy body and a clean mind. You know a great deal about yourself and more than a little
about the great world around you. You are imbued with our ideas and ideals, and face the
future with zest and a keen interest as to what life will bring. Let me tell you then, what life
has taught me and let my experience be a beacon light that shows a safe channel for you,
while it illumines the reefs on which I, myself, was wrecked.
Meanwhile, the love that has always been yours goes on with you into your womanhood,
dear daughter, and will continue while I live, whether you stand in the sunshine or slink in
the shadows.
Your Father.
C HAPTER O NE
RELIGION
Dear Daughter,—
In my letters I find that I refer many times to Koshchei. You will remember in Cabell’s
“Jurgen” he is the one who is above God, the one who made all things as they are. Let my
references to him either have no religious significance and call him nature, the life force,
evolution or what you will, or translate him as God, Jehovah or Allah. To me he is simply the
unknown and unguessable force that lies back of the beyond and behind everything.
By the time you read this your mother and I may have bitterly regretted not bringing you
up a communicant of some Orthodox creed or we may still feel that our own private religious
beliefs were the right ones.
Lacking a church of our own and believing in religion altho not in religions, we are now
allowing you to attend the different Sunday Schools and Churches of your friends, altho as
soon as your mind begins to take color from your impressions you will be discouraged from
doing this. I would not stand in your way if you came to believe that some Church held the
true way to God, but because I know that in so believing, you would of necessity also believe
the corollary of the proposition that it was the ONLY true way, and that none of the others
were His pathways. Then you would be caught in the cruelest, most futile and bitterest of the
world’s errors and the world’s quarrels.
Yet I believe in religion as a wonderful moral force and many times wish that I had a God
to turn to, with either the knowledge that He heard me and would comfort me, or that no
matter how uncomfortable and sad this life might be, a paradise awaited to recompense me
beyond the grave. The atheist is the loneliest man in the world because he stands by himself
and fights with no reserves and no moral buckler. Still, because he lacks the comforting
backing of a God, who is both a shield and a banker and is equally without the fear of hell
flame should he transgress, his moral code must be higher than that of the God-fearing man.
He must love righteousness for its own sake, and because he loves humanity. He must do
right with no hope of reward either here or hereafter, altho he has a keen realization that
wrong and sin must often be paid for in this life, and paid with usury.
But schisms and religious animosities are not my only reasons for keeping you from
attending church, synagogue or mosque. Not only the bitternesses of the sects but their
narrownesses antagonize me.
I cannot let you give your heart to the old Jewish God that was the fear and terror of my
youth. My mature reflection finds Him a narrow, bigoted, tribal God, loving the smell of
blood and delighting in pain. A God of vengeance and a God who crowned cruelty. A God
who looked upon his worshippers much as the farmer looks on the livestock he is fattening
for the market. A God who made the innocent suffer for the guilty, who took his share of the
swag much like a modern ward leader. A God who commanded “Thou shalt not kill” and
then tacked enough “ifs” and “unlesses” onto the statement to make it a void edict for his
chosen people. No, the old Jewish God is too little, too m ean, and too cruel for you to
worship.
But, you will say, they have reformed Judaism. Ay, reformed it, until it is no longer a
religion but a husk. In my youth, I attended sedulously the Temple of one of the most famous
Rabbis, or “Lecturer” as he termed himself, but I found nothing but negations, and presently
understood that when in the “Mauve Decade” they had had a thorough house-cleaning, part
of the rubbish they had chucked away as worthless was God. So Jehovah, as he is worshipped
to-day deserves not your piety.
Nor can I give your faith to Christianity. I have attended many Christian churches and
read many, many books on the subject so that I know fairly well what it is all about. I find the
New Testament as naive and as contradictory as the old. There is nothing new in
Christianity. There have been virgin births in all religions. There have been trinities before
this and many saviors have lived and died in vain. Easter was a festival of new birth long
before the beginning of the Christian era. Many of the saints of the Catholic church are
merely the old Roman gods, taken over bodily and set up in the heart of the church after
being given a much needed coat of whitewash. Most of the others are characters whose piety
has been their sole virtue and whose lives would be a reproach to a modern tramp.
Furthermore Christianity to-day is not the religion of Jesus Christ but of Saul of Tarsus,
known better to you as St. Paul, one of the most bigoted, biased, misogynists who ever lived.
Just as successive reforms have purged Judaism of even God, so have controversies and
vendettas and theologians taken every trace of the true Christ from the tall churches where
men worship today.
The church hierarchies have always compromised with wrong and have always condoned
sin. If you will think for just a minute on the history of the Christian church you will realize
that this is true. In the very beginning, as soon as they had the strength and the power they
repaid persecution and cruelty with cruelty and persecution. They have always proselytized
with a sword in the hand that did not hold the cross.
Consider the lives of the majority of the Popes; the schemings and bribings leading to
their elections, the dissolute and profligate lives that so many of them have led, their greed,
their interference in purely secular affairs, their toadying to strong kings and their bullying
of weak ones, and their cheerful giving of unbelievers to the sword, the faggot and the axe.
Remember such men as the Medici, Richelieu, Mazarin, Ignatius with his “do evil that
good may come,” the Puritan preachers of our own America with their hundred-percent
intolerance, and the leaders of the Inquisition, slaying all whose beliefs swerved an iota from
their own creed.
Think of the wars preached from pulpit against pulpit, the millions that have been slain
on the battlefield in the name of God, the religious carnages that have wasted all the world.
Think of the prayers that have always ascended from the church in time of war, asking for
God’s blessing on murder, rape and pilage; remember that even in the last great holocaust not
one voice went up from any man dedicated to God denouncing war, any w ar, as sin and
blasphemy, and asking that Christ bring not a sword but peace,—and I believe you will agree
with all thinking people today that Christianity has failed and will have little respect for many
of those who wear the livery of its ministers and priests.
I believe that the day is ripe for a new Messiah and a new faith. A faith to which a
rational, thinking man can subscribe. A faith under the leadership of men and women whose
lives and whose thoughts are worthy of imitation. A faith based on reason and buttressed
with facts; a faith which will answer a question plainly and not brush it away as a miracle or
a mystery. A faith where form and ceremonies that have become obsolete and meaningless
are not practiced out of sheer inertia. A religion, based, perhaps, like all the others, on nature
and on sex, but a religion which is willing to admit that these forces make God and are
worthy of worship.
How gladly would I and all the group so scornfully referred to by the churchmen as the
intelligentsia, affiliate ourselves with such a church and how much lighter would be our
burden if we could find something beyond ourselves in which we could truly believe and fully
trust!
Lacking such a church I must invent my own, and with it my own creed. Here is what
I have evolved for you and for me:
The scientist can explain this world back to its origin. He can explain everything about
it but cannot tell what started it and what force lies behind its beginning. Yet we all must
believe there is something. Hardly an anthropomorphic God, but something, call it Koshchei,
God, or what you will. We will not quarrel about names. It was, It is and It probably will ever
be. Moreover, as far as we know, It concerns Itself not at all with the workings and frothings
of the millions and billions of bubbles that are men and women.
In the meantime what do we need here today? A world in which there will be more elbow
room for humanity. A world that will be a pleasanter place to pass the span of existence
which has been imposed upon us. A world in which we can have a little leisure with no need
to set an eternal guard over our possessions. A world in which charity and righteousness and
benevolence and kindness are not mere mouthings of ministers. A world in which a girl like
you may live and find more joy than sorrow.
To create such a world we need no God of Vengeance. We need no Prophets calling
nations to arms and to repentance. We need no pigeons repeating God’s messages into the
ears of sweating camel drivers. We need no deities who become mortal so that they may
partake of the doubtful pleasures of mortals. We need, even, no redeemer in whose blood we
may become purified. All we do require is this: let each and every one of us follow ONE
teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, that teaching which was probably world old even in His day,
but which he put into simple, lovely form; the teaching known to the Christian Churches
today as the Golden Rule:—“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
If my neighbor and I believe this, I will not steal from him and his goods will be safe with
me. He will not try to murder or rob me, and his life and his possessions will be sacred to me.
I will not say cruel, unkind and untrue things about him nor bar him from the social group
toward which his spirit yearns.
In Lewis Mumford’s “Story of Utopias” we read:—“W e can each live in our own Utopia.
All we have to do is to start and live according to its rules.”
I do not expect to have a Messiah in my female child nor even the mother of a God but
I know that she can find peace and contentment and can leave the world a little better for
her having lived, merely by not taking from others that which is theirs, be it goods, reputation
or love.
So if you will obey this single precept, dear daughter, you will find the need for more or
other religions superfluous.
Your Father.
C HAPTER T WO
PHILOSOPHY
Dear Daughter,—
Each of us, whether we realize it or not, has our own system of philosophy.
We may have patterned it consciously after one of the systems evolved by the great sages
of the past, or it may have been formed and shaped by our own experiences in our world
journey. But no matter how obtained, it unconsciously controls all our actions and shapes all
our decisions.
Just as any chain will snap at the weakest link under excessive strain, so the test of the
worth of one’s philosophy is how it will bear strain in a day of stress.
There will come a day in your life when you suffer some great misfortune. Perhaps it will
be the death of your mother, husband or child; the loss of all your money or the loss of a lover
or job. If, when such an ill threatens to break down your serenity and your sanity, you can
curl up inside your philosophy of life and be snug until the storm is past, it will have stood a
severe test.
But it must do more. Every day there will be minor misfortunes to face. Lies told about
you that come back, meals that are late, cars and appointments missed, slights and snubs
received. Inevitably you will be hurt again and again by many of the prickles that surround
the ugly burr of life. Your philosophy must conquer all these lesser evils.
It must even go a step further. Besides negativing evil it should make you happy in your
daily life, content with your lot, wherever you may be and whatever life may chance to deal
out to you.
The greater variety you have of life, the greater should be your true happiness.
I read a story not long ago that seemed very poignant to me. A woman who had known
life in the raw is engaged to a successful man. Altho he seems an ideal complement to her
and offers all that she seems to need, something within her whispers that all is not well. One
day she asks him to tell her the story of his life, which he does. The tale is of a continuously
and consistently successful career carved out by a man, who from boyhood has always had
a happy sheltered home.
“Why,” cries the girl, “that is what is wrong, you have never known poverty, trouble or
even death! You are not a man but almost a monster. Away, I will have none of you!”
We learn,—I am descending to platitudes to prove my point,—little from success and
much from failure. The storms of life, the mire we must wade thru, the dragons of debt,
disease and despondency that we have to fight, these are the things that make us strong and
brave, also understanding, kind and charitable. Remember Barrie’s:—“‘Poor souls’ I say of
them, ‘poor soul’ they say of me. It keeps us human.”
Of course it is easy to preach and very difficult to bear with equanim ity the death of a
dearly loved one, the loss of a business position, the sweeping away of one’s income; and yet,
the girl who can meet one or all of these monsters with a splendid serenity and who can see
the first wrinkle come unmoved, is a girl who has a sufficient philosophy and whom
misfortune cannot really touch.
How can you arrive at such a state? Simply by demanding nothing of life and taking each
and every gift the fickle jade may bestow as a great boon.
Carlyle gives us the clue, in that most marvellous of all his paragraphs:—
“But the whim we have of Happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations and
averages of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average, terrestrial lot; this we fancy
belongs to us by nature and of indefeasible right. It is the simple payment of our wages, of our
deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint: only such overplus as there may be, do we
account Happiness; any deficit again is misery. Now consider that we have the valuation of
our own deserts ourselves and what a fund of self conceit there is in each of us—do you
wonder that the balance should so often dip the wrong way and many a Blockhead cry:—‘See
there what a payment, was ever worthy gentleman so used!’ I tell thee, Blockhead, it all
comes of thy vanity; of what thou fancieth those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou
deserveth to be hanged (as is most likely) thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot; fancy
thou deserveth to be hanged in a hair halter, it will be luxury to die in hemp.”
Of course, some people will tell you that he is wrong and that if you demand little of life,
life will give you but little, and if you demand much, life will give you in abundance.
Strikes a balance, as in all things. Ask and expect little of the material things in
life,—money, fame, power and position. Ask and expect that life bring you much of the
spiritual values and demand from life to the greatest extent one thing—love!
Be interested to the very fullest in every experience that each day brings you, from the
morning’s sunrise to the starlit dark. Live subjectively, rather than objectively. By that I mean
simply to rationalize and analyze your experiences rather than merely to undergo them.
When, at tennis, you drive the ball into the net you should instantly analyze the stroke
and try to make the next one clear the barrier instead of slamming your racket across the
court; so should you analyze each day’s misfortunes, and try to see what made them
misfortunes in order to prevent their recurrence.
Above all, cultivate your sense of humor. As the White Queen learned to believe six
impossible things before breakfast, so can you, with practice, find out the joke that exists in
each event, and once you have laughed at it, its terrors vanish into the same inconsequence
as did the flames of lies which surrounded Brunhilde.
It is useless to worry, and the most futile folly to plan ahead. Live but from day to day,
refining each day’s happenings into the gold of happiness. What will happen will happen, and
if you can not make yourself Master of the Event, you can at least prevent the event from
mastering you.
I said “be content in your lot” but I did not mean to advocate inertia. My philosophy,
which I hope will be yours, has no place for Buddhist resignation. You must strive always.
Beauty is a gift of the Gods, money may perhaps come to you without work, but wisdom and
happiness have to be earned.
I think I would sum up by saying; take the pleasant things in life with a feeling of
gratitude and the unpleasant with a smile. Let each day suffice unto itself, and as for
worrying, why—no man has seen tomorrow.
Your Father.
C HAPTER T HREE
DUTY
Dear Daughter,—
You need a sense of your duty towards life as much as you need philosophy and the two
together should guide both your thoughts and your conduct.
Your first duty is toward yourself. There are certain ethics of conduct that you should
possess and which I will take up in detail in my next letter, and there are certain other and
perhaps vaguer duties to assume that should be personal obligations.
The first of these is to dress as well as you can afford, just as Polonius advised Laertes. Do
this not because you want to show off before other women, or attract men’s attention, but
merely from the sense of well-being it will give you personally. For this reason it is important
that your undergarments be even nicer than those which the world sees. More girls have
probably thrown their caps over the mill because their underwear was inadequate than
because they wanted to wear jewels.
Pretty clothes will give you self-confidence. It is the unusual woman who cannot face and
conquer any situation if she feels that she is dressed correctly and adequately.
The same applies to keeping abreast of the styles; not running into extremes, of course,
but likewise wearing nothing which is apt to make you develop an inferiority complex.
Nor would I have you eschew cosm etics. Powder, rouge and perfume all have their proper
place in female adornment, and only those little fools who paint themselves like circus clowns
and outscent the skunk are ridiculous in the eyes of men. For men note and deprecate a shiny
nose or an unkempt coiffure as quickly as does another woman.
I will not say anything about duty to your family. I do not want you to consider that you
have any such duty. I would not want you to come to my funeral or stay away from a dance
the night I am dying because you felt it was your duty to do so. Give us all the love you feel
and serve us as your love prompts, but simply through affection for us as individuals. I have
seen too many young lives fettered, crippled and ruined by being kept behind the prison bars
of the Family, to ask any child of mine to share such a fate.
Both your mother and I shall be proud if, at eighteen, you are independent of us and
ready to go your own way through life. If at any time you care to give us your company or to
sit with us and watch our arteries harden, we will be happy and honored—but happier and
much more honored if we feel that you are doing it because it is enjoyable to you and not
because you feel it a duty.
Suppose you are going to work, either because you feel that you should have a career, just
to feel self-supporting or simply because you need the money.
When you accept pay from a man for any job except those on the level of dish-washing,
scrubbing floors or clerking in a 5c & 10c Store, he is buying something besides the amount
of brain and muscle necessary to do the job. He is entitled, first of all, to loyalty. You should
feel that you are working for the best firm of its kind in your town, if not in the entire world.
You should guard your employer’s interest as zealously and as constantly against the whole
world as you guard your own chastity, for your honor and that of your firm are one.
In any office, factory or store where there are more than two employees you will find that
there are two or more cliques, each generally headed by one of the minor officials. They are
usually at sword’s points with one another and wage war over every issue that can possibly
be utilized for a cause of dissension. As a rule, the whole feud originally starts over something
so trivial that not even the leaders remember it. Join neither, but at the same time, offend
neither and above all do not carry tales and messages and challenges back and forth. Stand
aloof and let your sense of humor have full play.
Be punctual to work. You have sold a certain amount of your time and as a fair-minded
girl you do not want to cheat. On the other hand, do not grudge to give to overflowing, and
therefore do not drop some important duty unfinished just because quitting time comes.
You will feel that I have been talking like a Rotarian but there are some points where
Rotary and reality meet and if you will observe these few simple rules you will find that more
and more responsibility is given unto you, until one day to everyone’s surprise, including your
own, you will be invaluable.
Owing to woman’s inability to compromise and man’s love of procrastination and golf,
there are many places of business today where the President’s secretary, the stenographer or
the forelady is the real head and runs ninety-five percent of the business.
If you achieve a position of this kind, duty is an easy master.
In addition to these I have mentioned, you have duties that you owe to your country.
Patriotism may be, perhaps, the last resort of a scoundrel as Dr. Johnson insisted, but it is
likewise the noblesse oblige of a lady or gentleman.
You live under the best form of government that has ever been devised and if it does not
always work out as it should, it is only because too many of those who consider themselves
above the average in intelligence, wealth and social position think they are degrading
themselves when they vote, or serve on a jury or pay taxes.
But if you will remember that the honor of your country is also your personal honor and
will treat it in that light you will be doing your part to make these United States what they
should and ought to be.
Remember that in this country it is the majority of votes that rule and the practical
politicians always vote; so in order to rule the country your way, all you need do is to
influence enough people who think as you do to go to the polls. Do not be satisfied to call
yourself one of the intelligent minority, but strive to make that minority the intelligent
majority.
Rely not on others and especially not on the newspapers to do your thinking for you.
Read daily papers if you must, but read also the more intelligent of the weeklies and the
better magazines. I suppose that when you read this a great deal of information will come to
you through the air, perhaps all of it. However, remember that no knowledge is really yours
until you have thought it out for yourself and it is your duty to think and to know, so that you
may intelligently do.
But the highest duty of all, perhaps, is that you keep yourself chaste and well and fit for
love so that when love comes, you will be able to be the finest type of sweetheart, wife and
mother.
Your Father.
C HAPTER FOUR
CONDUCT
Dear Daughter,—
How shall I define for you the difference between duty and conduct? Perhaps by saying
that duty is your obligation towards society and conduct your obligation towards yourself.
However, you will be judged by mankind according to your conduct and not according
to the way in which you fulfill your duty. Your duty may lie in your heart, but you wear your
conduct on your sleeve where all who run may read.
Then how would I have you conduct yourself?
In the first place I want my girl to be simple and not affected. Be yourself, your true self
at all times, making your clothes, your conversation, your manners and your morals all
integral parts of yourself and use none of them as weapons to excite envy or admiration.
Remember the height of good form is to have no conscious form and to be the same in
manner toward a peddler and a prince.
Eschew the two extremes of forcing yourself into the leadership of your group and of
being a complete nonentity. Thrust not ahead and yet do not be the kill-joy that drags behind
the rest.
If you think that you are wiser or better than your associates, neither make them
conscious of the fact or condescend to them—each one probably outshines you in some one
regard. It is easy to change your group if it is not satisfactory, but despicable to remain one
of them in body when your whole mental attitude is a sneer.
Do not be the wet blanket when you are out with your friends and at the same time, do
not be one of those noisy, forward hussies who attracts the attention and the disdain of
everyone the moment she comes into a room. The kind of a girl, who in a restaurant fusses
first with the headwaiter about the table, next with the waiter about her seat, rags the busboy
because of the service, and thruout the meal informs the world at large how poor the food
and service are, how much inferior to that which she is used to receiving, and who finally
leaves noisily after a dispute about the check, and an inadequate tip.
It is strange how distorted a view some girls have of themselves. How their mirrors fail
to show them they are overdressed, overrouged. W hen short skirts are the rule this girl’s skirt
is always much the shortest, when they drop to the ankles, hers sweeps the ground. At an
affair where other girls appear in simple frocks, she wears a ballgown. On the street she carries
a cane or a swagger stick. Anything to be different. Anything to stand apart. It is the saddest
sight in the world to see one of these creatures swinging along with the assurance that she is
the pleasing cynosure of all eyes. She truly is the cynosure but it would deflate her vanity to
realize that the sensations she arouses are not admiration and envy, but ridicule and scorn.
It is this false idea of what is correct, this mistaking of vanity for proper personal pride that
makes the washwoman, the salesgirl and the nursemaid insist upon being addressed as
“ladies.”
I would not ask you for one single second to be a lady, but do greatly desire that you will
be a gentlewoman. The word is self-explanatory and my definition of it includes kindness,
gentleness, graciousness to one’s inferiors, knowledge of no superiors, a low voice, a quiet
laugh and constant but unobtrusive thoughtfulness of others.
Smoke cigarettes, cigars or a pipe if you really enjoy smoking, or if you find that it brings
surcease of worry and quiets your nerves.
Drink if you enjoy the reaction of the alcohol and if you can remain clear headed and
mistress of yourself in spite of it.
Dance, the 1940 version of the Charleston if you wish, wriggling your hips and torso, if
such dancing frees your pagan lust for movement and rhythm.
But never drink or smoke or wriggle just to be a good fellow or because everyone else in
the crowd does so. You are the captain of your own soul and must take the entire
responsibility and you cannot blame your shipwreck on the false signals flashed you by others.
While I don’t want you to be a prude I would suggest that you entirely abstain from what
we called “spooning” and what the youth of today terms “petting.” It is a dangerous game,
especially to you who should understand so well the calls of your libido. At the very best it
is a dingy anteroom to passion and at the worst an open gateway to hell. Reserve your kisses
and caresses until the time comes to drown in love and you will never regret not having
previously waded on the marge.
Do not lie unnecessarily. A lie is a wonderful thing for avoiding trouble but the trouble
with lies are that one generally necessitates another and then they breed faster than flies. I
think it was Swift who said a lie was too good a thing to waste!
Put yourself on, say, an allowance of ten lies a week and try to stay within this number.
Use five of these to avoid giving unnecessary pain and the other five at your own discretion.
Realize that many people, especially the men who pay you compliments, may be playing
the polite game of lying which society endorses as good form. Listen to what they have to say,
smile, thank them, feel flattered and then remember that most compliments are ninety-nine
and three-quarters pure—bunk. Believe them not, even when you have the additional
evidence of your mirror and your own judgment. Flattery is too cheap a currency to capture
your heart.
Above all be tolerant. To my mind that is the ethical quality which the world needs most
today. It is the one that I strive hardest to achieve. Be tolerant of race, color, creed, religion
and opinion.
How much difference is there in the bodies of Jew and Gentile? How do the aspirations
of black and white differ? Is there any religion whose first purpose is not to find God?
Just remember, young lady, that altho other people may not be as handsome, as clever,
as pious or as learned as you think you are, each one probably has many admirable traits
which you lack and for which, if you possessed them, you might be better. A sneer is the
ugliest cloud that can cross a girl’s face. Think— is there nothing in your makeup or place in
the world for which YOU do not need to ask tolerance from others?
Your pale skin is as much an offence perhaps to the African aboriginal as are his
saucer-extended lips to you. If you will mutually agree to forget skin and lips you may find a
great mutual liking for butterflies and an exactly similar fashion of cooking yams.
Do you remember the candidate for political office who was making a speech?
“My friends,” (he said) “if elected by your suffrages to the high position of dog catcher,
I shall endeavor to be like Caesar’s wife—all things to all men.”
It is not a bad ideal for you to follow, if you do not immediately translate it as meaning
that I want you to be every man’s mistress. Rather strive to be truly interested in the ideas
and conversation of all your friends, whether the subject be prize fighting or prize poems.
So endeavor always to increase your fund of knowledge and culture. “A gentleman” said
Paragot, “is sometimes known by his useless and fantastic accomplishments.”
To have friends you must be popular and to be popular, unless you are endowed with
unusual charm or beauty, you must conduct yourself in such fashion as to win the liking and
respect, if not the love, of those with whom you com e in contact.
Your Father.
C HAPTER FIVE
MONOGAMY
Dear Daughter,—
Koschei, in his scheme of things, probably arranged for the creation of an equal number
of males and females, but everywhere the female seems to predominate. This applies alike to
the elephant, the eel, the elder tree and the English. Everywhere on earth, except in a few
mining camps, barracks and monasteries, there seem to be more women than men.
Moreover, altho one might think he was allowing his love of paradoxes to carry him too
far, he has created the human male and the human female in such fashion, that while one
woman can easily stand the sexual embraces of many men, man is also capable of satisfying
the love desires of several women. And he usually does so.
These being the facts, the logical conclusion has always been that where women were the
rulers, each one of the more virile or wealthy women took unto herself several mates; and
when men controlled, each man owned, or used, more than one woman.
However our interest is not in the past or what might be, but what conditions really are
in the world today, the conditions you will have to face.
At present there exists in the world the single system of polygamy. Of course, in the
United States and the other, so-called Christian lands, there is a pretense that it does not,
and that monogamy is the prevailing and only cult. But our monogamy is but a thin veneer
thru which the ugly undercoat of polygamy shows clearly. True monogamy, like true
prohibition would be an interesting experiment—one which I should like to see given a real
trial.
Of course, the substitution of our so-called monogamy for outright polygamy is the result
of the combination of women’s wiles and economic pressure. No virile woman wishes to
divide her husband’s embraces with another, and no woman wishes to divide the results of
her husband’s pillaging, whether it be in a raid against the Zidonians or dividends from a
special sale of piece-goods.
At the beginning, when might made right, wife desertion was not a sin, it simply did not
exist. A man begot children with the woman nearest at hand and the progeny were the
property of either the wife or the tribe. However, as moral codes became more firmly
established and the law of progenitorship became operative, the world began to frown upon
a man who did not support his wives and their children, and as the economic pressure ever
increased, one wife and her progeny stretched to the utmost the ordinary man’s purse. So
presently, scriptural passages were found, declaring this system the one ordained from on
high. It suited the women, it did not seriously hamper the men and it exalted the priests, so
everyone was pleased and happy with the possible exception of the unmarried women.
But have we monogamy? Hardly. The man of today, be he millionaire or milkman,
marries and for a few days or weeks or months he is satisfied with his wife’s embraces. The
time comes, however, when her passion is no longer pleasing or satisfying to him. It is
generally her fault, as I will explain later, but now be satisfied with the bare facts—they are
no longer love-mates. That loveliest time in the twenty-four hours, the minutes before sleep,
are no longer reserved for love but for debate, silence or battle. Money, cares, a million
different things have dulled the rapture that one body form erly aroused in the other.
It is a man’s world so what does the man do? He either divorces the woman and gets
another—thus remaining under the holy flag of social sanction, or else he, because of
economic or family reasons, lives on with his wife and takes as many mistresses as he can
afford, or his conversation or virility can secure. In all my acquaintance there are not ten
men, who have not known women, other than their wives, since the day they took their
marriage vows.
But, you will say, men are not the only violators of the marriage vow. No, but, except for
women of the pure prostitute type who should never have tried to be faithful to one, no
husband ever loses the love life of his wife unless he is grossly incompetent in the affairs of
Eros, impotent, or has shown her the way by his own infidelity. The woman who wrongs love
is the woman whom love has wronged and I, for one, do not condemn her, but feel that she
is merely fulfilling her love life.
Conan Doyle says the spirits have told him that each man has an affinity somewhere in
the cosmic scheme. He may not find her in this life, he may wed, as he believes happily, and
yet not rightly, but he will surely come to the right woman in the end, if not on earth yet in
some heaven appointed. By the time you read this Spiritualism may be as proper and as dull
as Christian Science, and a spiritual ukase that one’s wife is not one’s affinity may be valid
grounds for divorce.
Today, however, we are not all able to get in touch with the spirits with the same ease
that we can tune into WGN or WEAF, and so marriage is not always of affinities.
As long as husband and wife can mutually satisfy the love demands of each other,
philandering will be but a minor misdemeanor. This being the case, we must do everything
to lengthen the love life and if possible to stretch it over the whole period of desire. If we
really and truly want to establish a monogamous state, the art of love must be learned and
learned before marriage. It must be taught as carefully and as concisely as arithmetic and if
the home is unable to do this it should be made a regular part of the school curriculum.
Part of this training must be to teach our boys and girls that passion is beautiful and not
degrading. We allow the boys to grow up with the idea that intercourse can only be
mentioned in whispers, that a story or tale about the greatest privilege of mankind is a
“smutty story.” We allow these boys only such training for the rights of wedlock as they can
secure from stupid, anaesthetic prostitutes or from the looser and stupider of their male and
female schoolmates. We then take a boy with such training and to him give one of our
daughters. She has been reared in much the same school. She has learned what she knows
about sex, ex cathedra, so to speak, and is full of repressions and inhibitions concerning the
rights and wrongs of love. We have a minister preach a few platitudes at the couple and pack
them off expecting that by some necromancy they will be able to transform themselves into
love mates and establish a relationship of passion that will last them all their lives. We do not
expect the marriage ceremony to make them competent physicians or engineers, and yet love,
to be at its best, requires as much study as either of these professions.
Never, until the past five years, during which I have drunk deeply of the Sacred Books
of the East (for in the East love is a sacred art) have I realized what it means to be able to give
perfect passionate embraces to a woman. With this knowledge any man could awaken, or
re-awaken as need be, the joy of passion in his wife.
Of course, I am not advocating that congressmen send out copies of the Kam a Sutra
broadcast, for the picture of this nation abandoning the farm, the factory and the furnace and
even forgetting congress itself and the Great Pale Father at Washington to practice new love
embraces is too silly, but I do believe that if they were to print and distribute ten million
copies of Dr. Long’s “Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living,” a book in which instructions in
love are given in plain open terms, and if they were to pass a law making it obligatory to hand
one out with each marriage license with instructions that it must be read as a preliminary to
the bridal ceremony, the monogamous state of most marriages would be considerably
lengthened.
But even such a step would be rather futile unless the girls too were trained. I would have
them all taught as you are being taught, almost from birth, to know your body, to care for
your body, to be proud of and to glory in your body as the casket worthy to hold your heart
and mind.
While your teachers at school develop your mind for life, we are trying to train it for love.
We will try to wipe out the thought of shame that so many repressed women feel, when
on the wedding night their husbands desire to view their bare bodies. I hope that you will go
to your lover proudly, as an army with banners, as one knowing that she bears precious gifts,
having no sense of shame or sin.
We have never taught you that it was sin to converse with us or with others about sex.
We have never taught you that intercourse between lovers was wrong, something to be done
secretly between bed covers in the dark. It is the holy act of reproduction and light is
desirable that one may see better the loved mate. The fields, the woods or the state chamber
of the house are not unworthy to provide a couch for the embrace of love. It is not wrong, it
is not dirty, it is not sin. It is the rightest and the realest thing in the world.
I am not alone in this opinion. You, like the present generation, probably regard
Benjamin Franklin as a sort of half god, drawing lightning from the sky and devoid of the
vices as well as the virtues of the ordinary mortal man.
Although the sculptors who have immortalized him in marble have cut away his
humanity with their chisels, the Franklin that really lived was a man of hot blood and a man,
moreover, far in advance of his time and surroundings in his outlook at sex. Listen while he
tells you what I have just said, in only slightly different words:
“Men I find to be a sort of beings very badly constructed as they are generally more easily
provoked than reconciled, more disposed to do mischief to each other than to make
reparation, much more easily deceived than undeceived, and having more pride and even
pleasure in killing than in begetting one another; for without a blush they assemble in great
armies at noonday to destroy and when they have killed as many as they can they exaggerate
the number to augment the fancied glory; but they creep into corners or cover themselves
with the darkness of night when they mean to beget, as being ashamed of a virtuous action.”
Platonic friendship, someone has said, is sometimes possible between an indifferent man
and an anaesthetic woman. Marriage is not a platonic state and is not a friendship state, and
you can keep your mate if you can give him his fill of passion and love.
So if you and other women believe in, and desire monogamy, the recipe is simple. Be the
most desirable mistress in the world in your husband’s eyes. For monogamy is not an
impossibility, but monogamy and repression are the two poles of the earth, and can never
meet.
Your Father.
C HAPTER SIX
MEN
Dear Daughter,—
I hope that nothing I have said has given you the idea that I am advocating promiscuity.
In fact, I feel, and I expect you to feel, that the more you know of the beauty and the love
possibilities of your body the more you will realize that all this should be sacredly cherished
for the time when true love will come into your life.
“Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” Yes, free indeed, but merely
free to choose between good and evil, between right and wrong.
A stupid girl or an ignorant girl may go soiled or tainted to the altar with the convenient
excuse of Mildred in “The Blot on the ‘Scutchon”:—“God forgot me and I fell” but you have
no such defense.
Of course, you are going to be tempted many times; splendidly tempted and shamefully
tempted. I have not been besieging boudoirs, man and boy for thirty years, without learning
many a m agnificent finesse. Nor have I been so wrapped up in books that I have neglected
to watch the feints and thrusts of my fellowmen at the difficult and delectable game.
So what I am going to tell you bears the hall mark of experience if it is not stamped with
the design of what the world calls decency.
Except for a small unfortunate minority, consisting of those male bipeds who are
restrained thru fear of hell fire, impotence or the proximity of their wives, every man is willing
to beat up a flirtation with practically every woman he meets or sees.
Of course this statement is far too broad. M an has his sterile and his anaesthetic intervals
just as a woman has. There are many conditions under which his interest in women is
distinctly subordinate to business, golf, baseball, poetry or even the securing of a new pair of
shoes. I mean, merely, that ordinarily men react to women’s presence as surely as the magnet
swings to the North and they will progress as far in sex relationship as she will permit.
But all men do not react similarly to the same woman. X will walk down the street intent
on “picking up” a woman. Nine women will pass; his repressions, inhibitions, fixations or
what you will, render all nine of them unappealing to him, while numbers ten, eleven and
fourteen may stir every amorous nerve in his being. On the other hand, his friends Y, Z and
A may be fascinated by at least five of the nine that X has rejected.
Your eyes will soon prove to you that there is enuf of the sex instinct in men to make you
able to accept my statement that most men never miss an opportunity to enjoy any woman
they can secure.
Each man develops his own style of wooing but in the last analysis I feel, my dear, that
you will find a great deal of sam eness about all of them. There are only an even, or rather an
odd, thirty-nine remarks that a man can make to a woman which are calculated to rouse her
and after several years of hearing them, a girl, as soon as the conversation starts, knows
exactly the gambit the man is using and, like a clever chess player, is ready to block all the
variations.
Whether you are working in an office with a lecherous employer whose “wife does not
understand him” or are attending a Country Club dance with some flaming sheik who stands
ready to give you the “greatest thrill you have ever had” you must always be on your guard
against man’s lust.
Don’t misunderstand me. I do not want the fear of assault to turn you into a prude or
deprive you of masculine company. I merely want you to understand what it is all about so
that you will be able to guard yourself perfectly and still have a good time. You will find many,
especially among the younger men, who are willing to take you out and give you a good time
without expecting any sexual compensation, and with them you can be the best of friends and
companions. A girl of eighteen can have a great deal of pleasure without passion playing any
part in her life.
For the game of flirtation is played with different rules by the two sexes and induces
different, very different reactions. No self-respecting woman gives herself to a man unless she
feels a great longing for his embraces. On the contrary a man can go to a prostitute with
exactly the same feeling with which he goes to a barber or a chiropodist, and his physical
desire sated, he will come away with less visible trace of what he has done than when he
leaves the barber’s, shaved, and with as little stain on his soul as the chiropodist would leave.
This is what women fail to realize and why they so eagerly fall into the pit prepared and then
cannot understand the man’s inability to share their tremendous em otional reactions.
Suppose, however, thru a desire to experiment you deliberately give yourself to some
man. Do you think the thing will stop there? Control of affairs has been taken out of your
hands and is on the knees of a particularly rakish set of mischievous gods. The man will beg
for more meetings, whether or not you have satisfied him. In fact the more so, if he was not
satisfied, as then his pride has been hurt and nothing will assuage it but further gifts from you.
Moreover, to the scandal of my sex, be it said, he will gossip of you and by a system of
telegraphy that outspeeds the wireless your sin will be known and magnified to all men, and
you will be expected to share your favors among his friends.
There is no drink in the world as bitter as the dregs of passion, there is no creature so
despised and hunted as the cast-off mistress, there is no confession so hard as telling previous
misdeeds to one’s husband-to-be.
“The proper study of mankind is man.” You probably hope some day to be married. How,
unless you know many men can you discover the qualities in a man that most appeal to you?
To find a man whom you consider above the average you must first have a scale by which to
measure him. When his forty-seven year old nurse was the only woman the young Pirate of
Penzance had seen he believed her beautiful and he loved her, but how differently she
appeared in his eyes after he had met the youthful Mabel! I am, therefore, advocating your
knowing and knowing well as many men as possible. Dance, dine, motor, fly with them but
preserve your chastity for your husband. You will be richly rewarded. Passion itself is pleasant,
but passion is never so wonderful, so absorbing as when it is mingled with true love.
Therefore, whatever the temptation, however great the desire, however tempting the
opportunity, however rich the reward proffered, wait dear daughter, wait!
Think how you would feel if when you are out with your husband some day two men
meet you. They bow and as they pass you see the one say something to the other. You cannot
hear the words but you know what they are:
“She was my mistress.”
Or, when your first child is born, would you want to think that men you knew snickered
and asked each other, “is it yours?”
Men are like that and it is a fact that women must face. It is part of the calculation they
must make when they figure upon giving themselves to a man. If you, however, remain chaste
nothing they do shall hurt you in the eyes and thoughts of the one man who really
matters—your lover husband.
Your Father.
C HAPTER SEVEN
LOVE
Dear Daughter:—
But how are you going to know when the great day has arrived?
Given an adequate amount of good looks, a body well developed and shaped by exercise,
the mind that should be yours as a result of your schooling, a well established position in
society, and older brothers to bring guests into a hospitable home, you should not fail to have
a sufficient number of suitors from which to choose.
I cannot, nor do I desire, to choose your lover for you. Merely let these suggestions be a
series of tests to prove to yourself whether or not you have come to love.
In the first place he should be only between three and seven years your senior. I have
tried my best to do nothing that would burden you with the Electra complex so I do not fear
that you will have a fixation on me which would make you desire to marry an older man, and
the great love which you and your brothers have for one another will also help to make the
desire for a youthful lover part of your subconscious.
Age variations, while they seem so unimportant to a pair of lovers are a tremendous
factor after marriage. A man of forty and a girl of eighteen oftentime enjoy the same things
and have an equal amount of endurance, but when their years are fifty-five and thirty-three,
the man is an old man, glad to sit at home and “m end old bones” in Jurgen’s phrase, while
the girl is at the height of all her powers and will seek other men to fill the role that should
be her husband’s. Given a wife a decade or so the senior, her husband before long will find
her fixed opinions and crochets sufficient excuse for philandering.
Another reason for my dislike of age discrepancies is this: every generation thinks
differently. If your husband’s ideas are of the previous generation you will think differently
on almost every subject.
Any man who does not marry until he has passed his thirty-fifth year is one of two things.
Either he is the typical bachelor, set in all his ways and habits, regretting and combating each
and every innovation and change, with his virility impaired and wasted on many battlefields
of love; or else he is the white-headed boy of a sacrificing mother and adoring sisters and will
expect you, his wife, to spoil, pamper and humor him as they have. Such a man not only
makes the hardest and most selfish of husbands, but he is usually a father jealous of his own
children and resenting the division of his wife’s affection.
Even if he is not actively jealous of them he is too far separated by years and ideas to be
the companion, pal and friend whom they should find in a father.
Be sure your man is your mental equal. Dickens, in David Copperfield put his pen exactly
on the point when he said “There is no such disparity in marriage as unsuitability of mind and
purpose.” Too, too often in our world do we see college professors marrying dancing girls, and
heiresses wedding with chauffeurs and grooms, simply thru some physical urge; but I think
statistics would show that few of these marriages endure very long and fewer still are true
matings. It is a horrible feeling to go to some gathering with the one you love and of whom
you want to be proud and there realize that he or she cannot take part in, or even understand
the conversation, while you are able to take your full share. There is no pleasure in reading
a book, seeing a play or hearing a concert together if you cannot afterwards have the greater
pleasure of talking it over with him. Think of the many evenings you will have to pass
together. How will you pass them if you cannot do this?
And remember any true marriage must be based on spiritual as well as sexual qualities.
When I first met your mother, I hardly realized that she possessed a body. I was too excited
in having discovered a keen, responsive brain and a wonderful purity of thought and purpose
in life, and I wanted to win her for these things alone.
The sexual urge will gradually die, altho personally I am like the colored woman of
eighty-odd, who when asked when it did cease, answered oddly that they would have to ask
somebody older. However after forty, or fifty or sixty there is a gradual diminuendo; then
unless there is a spiritual love to fall back upon, nothing is left of the marriage but a little
heap of dead, grey ashes, cold, and rather likely to be swept away.
But if mental equality is impossible choose your mental superior rather than your mental
inferior. Suppose you do marry a man who knows a great deal more on some one subject or
on all subjects than you do. It will be a real thrill to learn from him and knowledge never
comes easier than when love is the teacher. In almost every marriage the woman has more
leisure than the man, so you should have ample opportunity to work up to his level and to
acquire such knowledge as will enable you to converse upon the subjects in which he is
interested.
Oh be sure, be very sure, be absolutely sure that your man is not a being with the mind
of a hog or a stallion, installed perhaps in a beautiful body! Know that he has not only ideas
but ideals as well, and that they are as high or higher than your own. Know that he is honest
and not merely cautious, that he believes in the dignity and the need of labor and not in
obtaining money at any price. Know that he is a true patriot, not simply a grafter, that he has
a conscience and does right because he believes in righteousness and is not merely pious.
Ascertain that he is clean minded about women and not merely afraid of entanglements, that
he loves children more than their begetting. Know that he is a thinker, and not merely a
reader of books.
Let me stress this again and again, dear daughter. Mind and body, both or neither, the
two separate elements of understanding and passion, not kept in separate caskets but fused,
by love, into one glowing jewel.
But just as marriage without mental magnetism is wrong, so is one built solely on brain
worship. The co-ed who marries her professor because of her adm iration for his intellect is
just as foolish as the game girl marrying her butcher because of his robustness.
I want you to feel the strongest possible attraction to your loved one, whomever he may
be. If I seem to lay too much emphasis upon this point it is only because I feel that here is the
rock whereon so m any modern marriages split. During the past decade, psychoanalysis has
lifted the veil from the marriage bed and we see it the grinning horror that it so often is. We
have example after example of the unhappiness and misery caused by mis-matings and have
progressed scientifically to the point where we can classify all, and even cure some of the
cases.
But prevention is better than cure, and if you understand and choose rightly now, you
will not need to be analyzed later on, spending a fortune to be told you married the wrong
man.
We can, today, review in detail every step in the hideous plague spot that seems to blot
out so much of happiness on earth. Every crime against the peace and security of his Majesty,
King Eros is set down in the calendar and opposite each we see the ever appropriate
punishment His Majesty enforces.
So carefully consider your lover. Ask yourself these questions, and answer them honestly,
for upon the veracity of your answers rests your whole future’s happiness:
1. Are his features, his face, his physique and his general appearance perfectly satisfactory
in my eyes?
2. Do I notice any disagreeable odors, either of body or breath about him?
3. Has he any characteristics or mannerisms that cause me the slightest degree of
annoyance?
4. Do I feel the least trace of distaste at his touch, his embraces or his kisses?
5. Do I thrill at contact with him?
6. Do I look forward gladly to the day when he may know me intimately?
7. Is there any one else, whose touch, whose kisses and caresses are preferable to his?
If you cannot answer these questions satisfactorily, break off your affair, dear daughter,
before it is too late. Your subconscious is flashing a danger signal, to disobey which means
death in life, if not death in reality. Remember what seems slight now will grow mountainous
after marriage, like James Stephen’s heroine who was afraid that if she looked at her husband
any longer she would see him.
A nose that is merely long during the engagement, will stretch and stretch after marriage,
until it becomes a bridge to hell, altho on the other hand, if you like long noses it will never
grow a centimeter beyond your heart.
A short man whom you do not love dwindles to a pygmy, like the spouse of the girl in the
nursery rhym e who:—
“Had a little husband,
No bigger than my thumb.”
The same may be said of all physical characteristics. If those of your lover suit you, they
are perfect, if not, for Love’s sake get one whose do.
The second of the questions may be analyzed in much the same way. The question of
odors always arises where there is the least sexual conflict and you may be sure that if any
such state exists before marriage it will prove a fertile field for trouble and oppose your
love-life later on. The Kama Sutra tells us that there are three distinct types of love odors
possessed by women and as many in the male and that certain of the combinations should
not mate.
The third question is merely a further analysis of the previous ones and the same reasons
apply for its answer in the absolute affirmative. Any annoying characteristic is bound to
become the companion of some unpleasant association and each time seen will inevitably
recall the association and will have the effect of numbing your love responses. This is not
wild, hair-splitting nonsense but good, sound, sane psychology.
The next three questions may be considered together, as they all deal with the same
angle of the proposition. In order that your wedded life may happily endure, the embraces of
your husband must seem to you the most desirable in the world. If you are a healthy, normal
uninhibited girl, you will have a liking for passion that must be satisfied and your mate is the
proper one to give you such relief and pleasure. So, and I cannot help repeating it again and
again, you are committing the most grievous crime in the world, not only against your suitor
and yourself, but against the children you expect to bear him, if the very thought of his
embrace does not thrill every fibre of your being.
Seventhly and lastly, dear daughter, do not have a disagreement with the man whom you
really love and to revenge yourself marry another. The satisfaction of having hurt him, no
matter how deeply, is a little price to receive for a lifetime of misery.
Of course, you may be one of those unfortunates who give all your love to a man and
then for some reason, being unable to marry him take another mate; if so, I know that you
will surely become, sooner or later, a fit case for a psychiatrist.
There are some other things I would have you keep in mind, altho they seem trivialities
besides these greater problems. Try not to marry an artist, and by artist I mean a man who
does creative work in the fine arts. Their work sublimates so much passion that their
love-lives with their mates are usually most unsatisfactory. Besides, their position in the
lime-light attracts dozens of poor moth women whose own love-lives are unhappy and on
whom the music, pictures and books of the artist act as powerful aphrodisiacs. The libido of
such men is very weak, according to the psychologists, so that, if you have to share it with
others you will probably starve.
Do not pick a man who is petty. Good tests are to observe how he tips a waiter, what he
does when the taxi he signals does not stop and how he acts if the dinner is late. See if he
minds using granulated sugar for his coffee instead of loaf and if he monopolizes the whole
Sunday paper. There are so many real worries and troubles in life that it is a mistake to select
a mate who worries about the non-essentials.
By all means see that he has a sense of humor as well as a keen brain. As I told you in an
earlier letter this is the most precious possession of all and its absence leaves a vacuum that
nothing on earth can fill.
Of course, before you marry you will require a physician’s certificate that he is sane of
mind, healthy of body, that he has no incipient taint of consumption or insanity and that he
has not and has never had syphilis: also that his virility is unimpaired.
Lastly, try to pick out a man with some money. Despite all the poets, novelists and
moving pictures to the contrary, love is likely to fly out of the window when poverty enters
the door. No one can freely live her love-life when one has to worry even during a lover’s
embrace when and how the butcher is to be paid. A beautiful body looks even more beautiful
properly clad, and dainty clothes, particularly dainty, pretty underclothing will help to hold
your husband’s love and passion.
First try to find a man who possesses these minor traits. Next decide if his mind and body
seem harmonious with yours and then, and only then, pledge him your hand and give him
your love.
Your Father.
C HAPTER E IGHT
THE ENGAGEMENT
Dear Daughter,—
While it is usually the happiest period of existence, the term of the engagement is also
the most difficult and surely the most nerve racking. There is no time, not even during the
honeymoon when love is so sweet, so pure and so all absorbing, no time when it is so easy to
understand, to explain and, if necessary, to forgive the loved one. You enjoy all the happiness
of marriage without any of the worries and troubles that are sure to accompany that state. All
expenditure by the man is to buy pleasure for the girl and all her energy is spent in merely
pleasing him. There are no readjustments to be made as yet, for each takes pleasure in
yielding to the other. It is the time of sweetest joy.
But it is also the time of sweet danger. Usually it is the period when a girl’s libido is
awakened for the first time and so it is a period of continual, nervous excitement. These two
factors, combined with her wish to please the loved one in all ways, are apt to make her yield
far more readily than she would ordinarily to any sex demands the man makes.
The more ignorant and uninstructed she is, the more likely she is to run into danger.
However, even the wisest and most chaste of girls may be as compliant as her less knowing
sisters.
Of course, my dear, while I do not advocate such a course, and while I can recognize its
danger, I realize that it is the custom in this year, A. D. 1926, for a great many girls to give
themselves completely to their husbands-to-be during this period.
This condition is, of course, due to the violence with which war conditions and suffrage
liberated women. From the pent-up suppressions of Victorianism, they have swept forward
like a torrent and the weaker souls have been unable to secure a footing upon firm ground
before being swept over the falls.
I feel sure, however, that during the fourteen years which will elapse before you read this,
there will be some swing back of the pendulum. Girls will realize liberty does not mean license
and, altho they will still insist upon a single moral code, that code will be for both youth and
maiden to go chaste to the marriage bed.
However, I do not say any girl who gives herself during her engagement is damned or
even degraded. Most men are not like the scoundrel in Ophelia’s song, and are willing to
marry the maid they have seduced. The times when they are not, may be measured by the
breach-of-promise suits which are filed and you know from the papers these are not
numerous. Remember, your charms are your stock in trade for your love-life and the longer
you can prolong them in his eyes, the longer you will hold him. So give but niggardly and
progress towards love’s consummation so slowly that your bridal night will still leave you with
something in reserve.
On the other hand, I strongly believe and advocate the freest and frankest of
conversation during this period. It has always been considered a desideratum for an engaged
couple to discuss their future prospects, their future home, their future friends, hopes and
ambitions, so, when it is the most important part of all, why not discuss their future love life?
Civilization has blown such a fog cloud over all sex relations that if you and your beloved are
to find each other, you must use every means to pierce the mist, and the best way is to talk
sex with him frankly, freely, fully.
This will result in many things. You will not go to your wedding bed in shame as many
girls do. Neither will you go in fear as do so many more. You will know what to expect from
him in the way of sexual relations and he will know what to expect from you. Your marriage
will be conceived in frankness and truth, and this will enable you to carry on along these
lines. It will reveal you, one to the other, of the ever-forming desires and repressions as
nothing else can, and aid you to be free of this period. It will also reduce greatly the nervous
tension which is more than likely to affect you both.
Of course, I realize that the talking may well lead on to actions, and that both of you will
have violent physical reactions as the result of such dalliance along the outer wall of passion.
But I am ready to discount this for the greater good obtained through a complete knowledge
of each other.
I strongly advocate a short engagement, three weeks is long enough and three months
the absolute limit. Do all the hesitating and doubting before you say your yes, but once you
feel really certain that you have met your mate and have promised yourself to him, do not let
the demands of trousseau, relations, money or anything else stand in the way of consummation by wedlock.
There are several good reasons for this. The first and greatest is the strain upon both your
libidos. The half-satisfactions that petting and love-making evoke are very hard on the whole
nervous system and at times terminate in serious breakdowns, and may result in the
development of tensions and inhibitions that may wreck your whole married life.
Secondly, no two people in the world can stay keyed up to the pitch sounded in the first
few fortnights of an engagement, and before long, they will perhaps out of sheer ennui, go to
greater sexual lengths than desirable, or indulge in some of the bickerings and readjustments
that should come after marriage only. It seems only fair to be wed while the first rapture still
endures and so start that state under the happiest of auspices.
Whether you see your fiancé every evening, or only occasionally, do not permit him to
prolong his visits greatly. Always keep in mind the fact that you must have some reserves of
body, of conversation, of ideas. M ake him leave while there are yet more things to say and
do. This will make him only the more eager for the next visit and will help preserve your
nervous system.
Do not pretend during your engagement. If you habitually use taxis instead of street cars,
take them and let him understand that you are a taxi-taking girl. If you have no intention of
entering the kitchen after marriage, keep out of it and do not cook for him then. If you read
novels habitually, do not switch to philosophy to show off. In fact let him get a correct and
untouched-up picture of the exact kind of wife you expect to make him.
And again, my last word, daughter; if during this period you find that you are not
matched either mentally or physically, do not let false pride, the fact that you have pledged
your word, or the need you feel for sexual satisfaction stop you one instant from breaking the
engagement and thus saving two lives for love and happiness.
Your Father.
C HAPTER N INE
MARRIAGE
Dear Daughter,—
Strindberg said in his “Dream Play”—“It is very difficult to be m arried— it is more
difficult than anything else.”
Is it not sad that this is so? Is there no way for me to make your marriage happy? If my
words can help they will be the most precious bridal gift a girl ever received.
To the average girl, marriage means such an entire change of conditions that her nervous
system is bound to receive some severe shocks.
No matter how much sex instruction she may have had, to the chaste girl the thought
of a man, even a loved one, possessing her, is rather terrifying and the marriage bed becomes
a fearsome bogey. So she goes to it with the same feeling that we approach a precipice in the
dark. She may desire greatly, but she has been fed on so many old wives’ tales, that she fears
greatly also. Such fear is generally unnecessary and, if your husband and you have talked
freely during your engagement, there is no reason to expect him to act like a beast. If he does,
I suggest that you take a club or a suitcase or the thing that comes handiest and knock him
for a goal.
However, if you have chosen wisely and discussed and agreed upon your sex relationship,
your primary sexual adjustment should be simple and the honeymoon a time of unalloyed
pleasure.
The need first comes for surrendering part of one’s individuality, part of one’s opinions,
part of one’s joys and part of one’s wishes and in return grafting upon your personality, part
of another’s.
Marriage is above all a game of give and take, a fusion of two individuals into one.
While few couples are balanced evenly, while one will always be the stronger and the
other the weaker, one always the leader and the other the follower, one always the love
maker and the other the acceptor of love, still a couple is rarely so badly balanced that both
do not color and mold each other.
It is unfair for all the sacrifices to be made by one alone. It is unjust that one should be
entitled to all the joys of sport or culture while the other toils in loneliness. Your mother and
I have always tried to play the game on a 50-50 basis. I have helped her when possible with
all household tasks and have tried to equally care for, instruct and rear you children. I have
felt it unfair to leave her evenings for poker, lodge or a club, believing that our joys should
be shared. This is only as it should be and I have never made of her a golf widow, nor has she
left me for the bridge or mah jong table.
The first year will be the hardest. Get thru those 365 days and you will probably have
found yourself.
While your mother, brothers and I form your entire background now and give you a
feeling of stability, you must to a great extent cut all those ties once you wear his ring. The
closest, holiest relationship on earth is that of husband and wife and you should cleave to
him, and to him against the world.
Handle your in-laws tactfully but firmly. You are two free souls and entitled to live your
own lives. Blood is not thicker than water but stickier than glue. Do not grow into one of
those women, chained within the circle of the family, who believe that nothing good or worth
having can be found outside this intimate group. Seek ever new interests and new friends so
that your mind shall not stagnate and petrify.
Above all think and advance while you are young, for age and conservatism overtake us
all eventually.
About children, I feel that this being the worst of all possible worlds, a place of great
sorrow and little joy, it would be better if every man and wom an of your generation were
sterile and human beings ceased to be. But such a possibility is beyond the furthest rim of
imagination.
People desire children for many reasons; to carry on their name, to support them in their
old age, for companionship, because they feel it their duty or just because they love them.
For one of these reasons you may decide to become parents. If so, have children while
you are young. When you can be their companions as well as their parents. For if you are of
a much older generation you will not be able to understand them and life will be much harder
for both them and you.
Do not have an only child. Such children are generally neurotics and so are a curse to
themselves. They are generally badly spoiled and so are also a curse to everyone else. Two
children are better than one and three better—and costlier—than two.
But do not have children with the idea that they will support or take care of you in your
old age. Be glad every time they lose a bit of their dependence on you. Strive to make them
independent and masters of their own egos, as we have striven to make you.
Fear not pregnancy. It is only the woman bearing the unwanted child of the unloved
husband who has more than a transient annoyance during this period and the same is true
about childbirth. I was in the delivery room when you were born and instead of beholding
your mother undergo the tortures of the Spanish inquisition I saw you come into the world
between smiles.
But we must come back and end as we began with sex, for sex and spirit are the two
foundations on which marriage is erected and of these the hardest to build permanently is
sex.
Since psychology stopped being a science of measuring men’s muscular reflexes and
became a science of measuring their souls, we have learned the almost unbelievably great part
sex plays in the world and especially in marriage. We have learned thru psychoanalysis how
many men and wom en go thru life anaesthetic and how many m ore never experience the
great happiness and satisfaction that comes from complete sex response. I will assert that
ninety-eight per cent of infidelities, divorces and separations come from this source and might
be avoided could the love-lives of the unhappy ones be straightened out.
Your husband, when he takes the marriage vow, intends to the deepest depth of his soul
to be true to you. At that moment you represent to him the epitome of love and passion. If
you will meet and perhaps anticipate his sexual desires and fill his cup of passionate joy to
overflowing there is no reason why he should not only be true to you but be happy and proud
to have found in you the perfect mistress as well as the best of wives. He knows that this
combination of love and passion represent the pinnacle of pleasure.
But when women are trained to believe that it is wrong or ugly or unnecessary, when
their inhibitions keep them from enjoying and participating in the love act, perhaps even to
the point of denying themselves altogether to their husbands, then infidelity is easily born.
Oh, dear daughter, do not cheat yourself and your loved one in this fashion. Your body
like the body of every other woman was made for love and only thru love can you keep your
body from growing old and stale and wrinkled.
Never let the sex act become monotonous. The marriage bed offers a million pleasures
and the sex act can be performed in many different ways. Let your husband always find in you
the same wife but a different mistress. Study the art of love and try ever to make it yield new
enjoyments.
Forget at that time all inhibitions and repressions. Think not that you have to limit
yourselves in any form. Nothing is a perversion that is done out of love and between lovers.
The married couple who admits passion as a welcome guest to their bed attaches to that
bed an anchor which the storms of life will not shift.
Your Father.
C HAPTER 10
CHASTITY
Dear Daughter,—
When you read this letter, will you still be what the world calls a virgin? Or will you have
already surrendered your body to some call of love too imperative to be resisted? W ill you,
like many girls, ripen early and find love hidden among your school books, or will you be one
of those whose armor of knowledge and whose shield of sagacity will enable you to resist
Cupid’s advances?
If you have known passion, I hope that it was of your own desire and that you went
joyfully and willingly into your lover’s arms.
However, it matters little, to my mind, what love you have enjoyed if you have remained
chaste. This may sound like a contradiction of terms but I do not think that virginity and
chastity are synonymous. I have known m any women who were wives and mothers, and yet
were truly chaste, and I have known indubitable virgins who were depraved and vicious.
A virgin, I feel, is merely a girl whose sex life has not as yet been awakened. One who
feels not the slightest thrill at the presence or touch of the other sex and who plays
indiscriminately with boys and girls. Such a girl may have lost her “virginity” climbing a tree
or astride a horse and still she is the true virgin. On the other hand, the type of girl, perhaps
younger in years, whose thoughts are all of sex, who allows boys and even men to take every
liberty but the ultimate one, yet whose greatest pride and most persistent boast is that she has
never been deflowered—that girl is not truly chaste.
Why should the loss of virginity be considered the dividing line; the separator of the goats
from the sheep? If a girl falls and breaks her hip she will always walk with a slight limp. If she
is operated upon for goiter or mastoid she is forever scarred, but can you walk down a street
or through a ballroom and pick out, by any physical difference, the virgins from those who
are not?
Had the loss of virginity truly meant anything in Koshchei’s scheme of things, I doubt
that this would have been the case. Child bearing and child nursing leave a visible stamp on
a woman’s body, but loss of virginity leaves less visible trace than the loss of a tooth.
No, virginity is a prized and precious possession partly because in the old days when rape
was more frequent than today, and when property began to descend from father to son
instead of from mother to daughter, it indicated a sealed package, and guaranteed the
husband that he would be the father of his heir. Also partly because generations of mothers,
and wives, hating and fearing the prostitute and the paramour as scabs and price cutters,
have instilled into their sons the desire for virgin wives and into their daughters the need to
remain “pure,” that they might have wares to offer in the marriage mart of a higher quality
than their “frailer” sisters.
But this condition prevails only in certain parts of the globe. Japanese maidens, before
the introduction of the code of the Western world, cohabited freely with such youths as
desired them until formal marriage put an end to their sexual freedom. There are, even today,
tribes in Africa where a girl goes freely from lover to lover without shame and without the
least loss of prestige or marriageable value. Other nations have laid a taboo on the marriage
of any girl until she has been tried by love and has not been found wanting. In rural Europe,
for countless generations, peasants have been more apt to marry after the birth of the first or
even of the second child, than before having intercourse. In any matriarchy all women have
freely chosen and as freely cast off their lovers, yet have kept their social station and their
honor, using the word honor in its narrowest sense.
I am telling you this to try to make you realize that there is nothing sacred or inevitable
about the present moral code and that it is really nothing more than a tribal custom.
Ignorance is not chastity. What possible defence can a girl have against rape if she has
no conception of what rape is, and if she has only some inborn modesty to aid her in fighting
her seducer? In the bible legend Eve was ignorant rather than chaste before she ate the apple,
and it was after she became as God, knowing good and evil that she and her younger sisters
deliberately chose chastity—or debauchery.
Goodness is not chastity, even if the words are so often coupled, particularly in fiction.
You, today, will see nothing except the ludicrous in those heroines of Dickens, Scott or
Thackeray, who when they were not doling out tracts and soup to the poor spent their entire
time protesting their innocence. Some good women and men in history have been chaste and
some have not. Queen Elizabeth, who was one of the best and wisest rulers that England ever
had and who has come down in history as “Good Queen Bess,” had several illicit love affairs;
Louise of Prussia, whose memory the Germans revere above all their other queens, tried to
barter her charms to Napoleon. On the other hand, men and women who have stood for
righteousness and patriotism, such as Parnell, were condemned by the morality of their
period. One can be a thoroughly good person and not be chaste, and contrariwise such
characters as Jessie James, Mary of England, Frederick the Great, and Benedict Arnold, to
name the first that come to hand are known in history for having been very scrupulous as to
their sex morals, and yet for having achieved notoriety as scourgers of mankind. Nor has
there been a single case of assault registered against Judas in all his two thousand years of
wandering, even though to most people he signifies evil. So goodness is not chastity, however
desirable a quality it may be.
What then do I understand as chastity? Simply the ability to look at sex and undergo sex
experiences in a clean and decent fashion. Let me illustrate. I was at Ann Arbor a few weeks
ago and in the evening I went to a Moving Picture Theatre near the campus. The picture,
title forgotten, dealt with sex only incidentally and not at all in a suggestive manner. Yet at
every embrace and at every subtitle that had the slightest connection with sex, the theatre
absolutely resounded with obscene snickers and cat calls. Those boys and girls had been
taught that sex was something dirty something to be ashamed of, something done in darkness
and their repressed and distorted minds could see nothing beautiful or sacred in the loveliest
thing on earth. So they were, in my understanding unchaste.
That is what I want you to avoid, dear little girl, and you can only do so by understanding
how beautiful are the love functions of your body.
The love life is the holiest as it is the loveliest function of living. What do most people
consider God’s supreme achievement? The creation of this earth and particularly His sixth
day’s creation of man and woman. So if you believe in following the scriptures, you will rise
to the supreme heights of your Godhead when you in turn, create men and women in God’s
image.
Moreover Koshchei, with his usual artfulness realized when he was making all things as
they are, that eventually matters would work out so that the bearing of children by women
and their support by the fathers would become grievous burdens and be avoided by all
thinking people. Therefore, in order that the human race should not die out, he made of
intercourse the highest joy and the greatest pleasure of all, and thus set an eternal lure to
charm the millions, ignorant as well as learned, into reproduction.
But he did not invent shame. Shame of the sex act arises thru jealousy. In the old days
when all women had equally lovely bodies, or equally ugly ones, as the case was, they all
enjoyed equally the favors of men and there was no shame.
When women, however, began to be selected by men, the unchosen, out of sheer spite
began enforcing taboos and deprecating love.
Then came clothes, and women found their charms enhanced by concealment and at the
same time men became imbued with the idea that those charms must be unveiled only to the
fortunate males who owned them.
Lastly, with the going of joy from the world and the coming of the Puritan, sex became
a sin and the false standard of to-day was firmly riveted on Western mankind.
But I want your thoughts to go back to the beginning. Sex is not wrong but natural and
lovely. Your body by itself is incomplete, the half of a pair of scissors, the flint without the
stone. It will remain so until it is joined in the bonds of love with some man’s body.
Let it suffice to say that it is the exact purpose for which you and all other women were
made despite much talk of careers, fame, and the other “ologies” and “isms” after which men
and women run. A girl should know and realize that this is so and eagerly await the moment
of fulfillment. For this is my idea of the truly chaste girl:
The girl who KNOWS and does not remain pure or become defiled thru ignorance.
The girl who REALIZES that it is the greatest thing in life and nothing dirty, nothing to
be ashamed of—the girl, who when married will give herself proudly and who never will be
in Puysange’s phrase: “The prostrate, sweating, and submissive meat in a tangle of
bedclothing.”
The girl who AWAITS! Not the virgin who pours out her precious charms in experimentation; not the girl too impatient to await the coming of her true fairy prince; not the girl who
for a moment of passion barters a lifetime of regrets;—but the girl who though filled with
passion, holds it firmly bitted and awaits the time appointed, meanwhile seeing sex with a
calm, clear gaze and never thru smutted glasses.
And now, my dear, I can say no more. My views may not be the world’s views, or at least
those which the world will admit holding. But for forty years I have gone like a lesser devil
up and down the world. I have looked into the hearts of men and women and have studied
their words, spoken and written. Had I been given the knowledge I am passing on to you, I
would have been a better man, a better husband and father.
Dear little four year old girl, may the years to come bring you great happiness. But come
what may, whether sorrow or joy be your lot, you will always have the love of
Your Father
THE END