scold me for asking about it. Give me an answer.—How does it happen?—You cannot really deceive yourself that I, who am fourteen years old, still believe in the stork."
Were her mother herself not a victim of false notions of morality, an affectionate and sensible explanation might have saved her daughter. But the conventional mother seeks to hide her "moral" shame and embarrassment in this evasive reply:
"In order to have a child—one must love—the man—to whom one is married. . . . One must love him, Wendla, as you at your age are still unable to love.—Now you know it!"
How much Wendla "knew" the mother realized too late. The pregnant girl imagines herself ill with dropsy. And when her mother cries in desperation, "You haven't the dropsy, you have a child, girl," the agonized Wendla exclaims in bewilderment: "But it's not possible, Mother, I am not married yet. . . . Oh, Mother, why didn't you tell me everything?"
With equal stupidity the boy Morris is driven to suicide because he fails in his school examinations. And Melchior, the youthful father of Wendla's unborn child, is sent to the House of Correction, his early sexual awakening stamping him a degenerate in the eyes of teachers and parents.
For years thoughtful men and women in Germany had advocated the compelling necessity of sex enlightenment. Mutterschutz, a publication specially devoted to frank and intelligent discussion of the sex problem, has been carrying on its agitation for a considerable time. But it remained for the dramatic genius of
