THESOCIAL EMERGENCY
Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals
edited by
WILLIAM TRUFANT FOSTER
president of reed college
president pacific coast federation for sex hygiene
with an introduction by
CHARLES W. ELIOT
president emeritus of harvard university
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
copyright, 1914, by william trufant foster
all rights reserved
The Riverside Press
cambridge, massachusettsu.s.a.
PREFACE
This volume is the outgrowth of an extension course conducted by ReedCollege in Portland, Oregon, in 1913. The course was offered to teachersand to workers in various other fields of social service as an outline ofthe main problems of social hygiene and morals and as a guide to furtherstudy. An edition of forty-five hundred copies of the syllabus of thecourse was soon exhausted, and there appeared to be a sufficient demandfor the publication of some of the lectures.
The chapters are the various lectures, condensed by the editor, butotherwise substantially as given, with the exception of chapters i, ii,and xii, which are here presented for the first time. In the originalcourse, Reed College fortunately had the services of Calvin S. White,M.D., and L.R. Alderman, officers of the Oregon Social Hygiene Society.Their addresses have been omitted, because they were prepared rather tomeet local conditions and the needs of the course than for the generalpublic. For the same reason the greater part of the addresses of William[4]House, M.D., and of the editor have been omitted.
The Social Emergency does not purport to be a comprehensive orsystematic treatment of the problems of sex hygiene and morals; itpresents merely the views of a number of persons on certain phases of thesubject. Although no writer is responsible for the ideas of any otherwriter, yet nearly all the writers have read and approved all thechapters. Furthermore, the editor has had the aid of other competentcritics. The proof has been read by Maurice Bigelow, Ph.D., Professor ofBiology, Teachers College, Columbia University; by Calvin S. White, M.D.,Secretary of the State Board of Health of Oregon and President of theOregon Social Hygiene Society; and by William Snow, M.D., Secretary of theAmerican Social Hygiene Association. Others, including Edward L. Keyes,Jr., M.D., and Harry Beal Torrey, Ph.D., have read the particular chaptersconcerning which they could give expert opinion. The editor is grateful toall these men, and to Florence Read, Secretary of Reed Extension Courses,who has given valuable aid. With their help he has endeavored to avoid[5]the errors, the exaggerations, the narrowness of view, and the hysteriathat characterize some of the current discussions concerning sex and thesocial evil.
If there is one dominant truth in this volume, it is that any plan formeeting the social emergency that would relax the control of moral andspiritual law over sex impulses is antagonistic, not only to physic