Page:Wrong and Right Methods of Dealing with Social Evil - Elizabeth Blackwell (1883).djvu/29

 CHAPTER II. THE FEMALE REGULATION SYSTEM. second method of dealing with sexual evil—revealed to some extent by this evidence—is the Female Regulation System.

This is the plan adopted wherever promiscuous intercourse between the sexes has been distinctly accepted as a necessary part of society.

Under this theory no effort is made to check licentiousness in both sexes, but only to regulate female vice by law, through ordinances framed for the vicious women who take part in such intercourse.

This is the fundamental principle which unites all varieties of the Female Regulation System—whether in its timid commencement in the English Contagious Diseases Act lately adopted, or in the long-tried and logically developed system as we observe it in Brussels. The necessary identity of results, where the same false principle is adopted, will be seen in the facts recorded in the following pages.

Under this system all women of loose or suspicious (19)