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Page 9
My second cardinal point is, that the first step we have to take, the
step which must precede all others, if anything is to be of the least
avail, must be to restore the moral law and get rid of the double
standard. I know well how much has been said and written on this point;
it has been insisted on possibly _ad nauseam_. But even now I do not
think we fully realize how completely we have been in the grasp of a
"tradition of the elders," which has emphatically "made the law of God
of none effect." Side by side with the ethics of Christianity have
grown up the bastard ethics of society, widely divergent from the true
moral order. Man has accepted the obligation of purity so far as it
subserves his own selfish interests and enables him to be sure of his
own paternity and safeguard the laws of inheritance. The precepts which
were primarily addressed to the man, as the very form of the Greek words
demonstrate, were tacitly transferred to the woman. When, in a standard
dictionary of the English language, I look out the word "virtue," which
etymologically means "manliness"--the manliness which would scorn to
gratify its own selfish passions at the cost of the young, the poor, and
the weak, at the cost of a _woman_--I find one of its meanings defined,
not as male but as "female chastity." Long ago I suggested that as
manliness thus goes by default, the word had better be changed from
virtue to "muliertue."
In a passage in one of our standard school-books, Green's _Short History
of the English People_, the historian, alluding to the coarseness of the
early Elizabethan drama, remarks that "there were no female actors, and
the grossness which startles us in words which fall from a woman's lips
took a different color when every woman's part was acted by a boy."[3]
Why, in the name of all moral sense, should it be less dreadful that
gross and obscene passages should be uttered at a public spectacle by
young and unformed boys than by adult women, who at least would have
the safeguard of mature knowledge and instincts to teach them their full
loathsomeness? Do we really think that boys are born less pure than
girls? Does the mother, when her little son is born, keep the old
iron-moulded flannels, the faded basinette, the dirty feeding-bottle for
him with the passing comment, "Oh, it is only a boy!" Is anything too
white and fine and pure for his infant limbs, and yet are we to hold
that anything is good enough for his childish soul--even, according to
Mr. Green, the grossness of the early Elizabethan stage--because he is a
boy? But I ask how many readers of that delightful history would so much
as notice this passage, and not, on the contrary, quietly accept it
without inward note or comment, possessed as we are, often without
knowing it, by our monstrous double standard?
If we want to see what is the final outcome of this moral code, of this
one-sided and distorted ethic, we have only to turn our eyes to France.
On the one hand we have "la jeune fille" in her white Communion robe,
kept so pure and ignorant of all evil, that "une soci�t�
eccl�siastique," I am told, exists for the emendation of history for her
benefit--Divine Providence, as conducting the affairs of men, being far
too coarse for her pure gaze; and at the other end of the stick we find
Zola, and a literature intended only for the eyes of men, of whose
chastity, according to Renan, "Nature takes no account whatever,"--a
literature which fouls with its vile sewage the very wellsprings of our
nature, and which, whatever its artistic merit, I make bold to say is a
curse to the civilized world.
Now, I earnestly protest that while we have this social code, which is
in direct violation of the moral law, we may set on foot any number of
Rescue Societies, Preventive Agencies, Acts for the Legal Protection of
the Young, etc., but all our efforts will be in vain. We are like a man
who should endeavor to construct a perfect system of dynamics on the
violation of Newton's first law of motion. The tacitly accepted
necessity for something short of the moral law for men will--again I say
it--work out with the certainty of a mathematical law a degraded and
outcast class, with its disease, its insanity, its foul contamination of
the young, its debasement of manhood, its disintegration of the State,
its curse to the community. You cannot dodge the moral law; as Professor
Clifford said, "There are no back-stairs to the universe" by which we
can elude the consequences of our wrong, whether of thought or action.
If you let in one evil premise by the back-door, be sure Sin and Death
will come out at the front.
Here, then, you must take a firm and watchful stand. As the mothers of
the future generation of men, you must look upon it as your
divinely-appointed task to bring back the moral law in its entirety,
the one standard equally binding on men and women alike. Whatever your
creed, you have got to hold fast to this great truth, which life itself
forces upon you, and which is a truth of Christian ethics because first
of all it is a truth of life. It is simply a moral Q.E.D., that if
chastity is a law for women--and no man would deny that--it is a law for
every woman without exception; and if it is a law for every woman, it
follows necessarily that it must be for every man, unless we are going
to indulge in the moral turpitude of accepting a pariah class of women
made up of other women's daughters and other women's sisters--not our
own, God forbid that they should be our own!--set apart for the vices of
men.
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