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Page 11
Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension. That a celibate
life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does
produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.
Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but
small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed
graves of inward foulness. Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold
unchastity of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the
unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain
living and clean thinking.
It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on
the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work
the sunken rock on which I was always making shipwreck was the necessity
of the evil--often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of
women like a shadow--a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a
sense of their helpless ignorance. I have even met with Christian women
who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on
authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the
existence of an outcast class, no respectable woman would be safe and we
could not insure the purity of the home! So low had the moral
consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of
the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be
found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debasement of
accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own
virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined
bodies and souls of the children of the poor. Truly the dark places of
the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!
What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and
earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and
loose with the moral sense within them--- which is God's voice within
us--but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for
men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is
bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the
hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is God who has
made us--not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and
false necessities; and God has made the man to love the woman and give
himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for
which she was made the blessed "mother of all living."
Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard
that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls
"l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we
women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and
earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men
spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost
bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted
into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it
seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man
led--whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this
bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation
was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the
indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life
having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this
ignorance was passing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask
nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own
womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no
woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly
intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her
womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the
name will, for the sake of wealth or position,--what is called "a good
match,"--give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as
things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls--some poor
mothers' daughters--have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter,
that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in
apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry
under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George
Eliot,--that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake--then,
and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then,
and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a
better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of
their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be
able to evolve the true manhood, whose attitude is not to defile and
destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: _Short History of the English People_, by J.R. Green, p.
247.]
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