192 BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF HUMAN PROBLEMS 



instinct is more assertive in men than in women, it 

 has become an accepted social usage that the male 

 should make the proposition of marriage a usage 

 springing wholly from biological conditions. This 

 custom makes it possible for women to exact certain 

 conditions for the acceptance of their husbands, 

 and of such conditions there can be none more impor- 

 tant than a clean sexual record. This is a matter 

 in which parents could play a decisive and extremely 

 helpful part, if they possessed the necessary courage 

 and foresight to guard their daughters against the 

 pitiable consequences of marriage to men whose past 

 histories make them dangerous either as carriers of 

 disease or as incontinent and loose-lived mates. 

 That parents who are otherwise conscientious in the 

 discharge of their obligations toward their children 

 should so frequently fail in respect to a duty so far- 

 reaching and critical as this can be explained only 

 on the ground that they shrink from making an un- 

 conventional inquiry or are reprehensibly ignorant 

 of the possibilities. The discovery of a sexual flaw 

 in the history of a suitor would not necessarily 

 mean his rejection, but it would mean that the 

 risks attending marriage had been weighed, and 

 that subsequent physical miseries and other disap- 

 pointments would not befall as surprises, as is now 

 too often the case. There are not lacking indica- 

 tions that women will, in the future, avail them- 

 selves of their undoubted power to set a higher stand- 

 ard of sexual morality for men than exists at present, 



