We cannot hope to do away wholly with either the summer hotel or the
fashionable watering-place by the assertion of parental authority.
Such an endeavor, indeed, would on the whole be an unjust as well as
fruitless piece of virtue. The delightful comradeship between young men
and young women, which is one of our national products, is typified
most saliently by the summer girl and her attendant swains. Naturally
she wishes to go to some place where swains are apt to congregate; and
the swain is always in search of her. Moreover, the summer hotel must
continue to be the summer home of thousands who, for one reason or
another, have no cottage or abandoned farm. My plea is still the same,
however. Why, now that the negro slave is free, and the workingman is
being legislated into peace and plenty, and the wrongs of other women
are being righted, should not the American mother try to burst her
bonds? It would be a much more simple matter than it seems, for, after
all, she has her own blood in her veins, and she has only to remember
what a dogmatic person she herself was in the days of her youth. If the
code of fathers and mothers, instead of that of girls and boys, were in
force at our summer hotels and watering-places, a very different state
of affairs would soon exist; and that, too, without undue interference
with that inherent, cherished, and unalienable right of the American
daughter, the maiden’s choice. We must not forget that though our
civilization boasts the free exercise of the maiden’s choice as one of
the brightest jewels in the crown of republican liberties, the crowded
condition of our divorce courts forbids us to be too demonstrative in
our self-satisfaction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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