Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
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Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
The writers do not say whether the code of morals referred to is a code of
law or an unwritten code of public sentiment. If they mean the former,
their statement is not true; for whatever laws affect moral delinquencies
visit their penalties equally upon men and women. If they mean public
sentiment alone, the answer is, that both men and women are responsible
for its creation. It is folly to deny that there is, in the nature of
things, more excuse for men than for women. A mother realizes that her son
has a natural temptation of which her daughter knows nothing. But this
fact, while it accounts in part for the different standard, by no means
exonerates man. One of the strangest anomalies of human experience exists
in connection with this matter. Man reposes his deepest faith in the
existence of goodness at its vital point, in the virtue of woman; and yet
when he tramples upon that virtue he screens himself behind the excuse
that her nature is as vulnerable as his own, while his temptation is
greater. The main reason, as it seems to me, why women often appear more
cruel to their fallen sisters than do men, lies in the fact that pure
women abhor this vice as they abhor no other. Besides bestowing upon woman
a loftier moral sense, her Creator has hedged about her virtue with a
feeling of physical repulsion that is distinct from the moral question
involved. The social life of the world is to a large extent in woman's
hands. When she says to men "You cannot bring your impurity into my home,"
"You must be the ones to guard our sons and daughters," the reform will be
begun in earnest. Woman's faith, and her abstract way of looking at moral
questions, prevent her from fastening her thought, as men naturally do, on
any special culprit, in her severe but vague sense of wrong in this
matter. The Suffragists have taken fewer steps in the direction of
removing the social plague-spot than in the direction of bringing about a
system of easier divorce--a thing that strikes a blow directly against,
instead of for, the virtue of their sex. Social opinion is causing a
change in some of the laws concerning social vice. Nearly every State
legislature has raised the age of consent. So far as Suffrage associations
have assisted in this, it proves their ability and their good will; but
much more is due to our educated physicians and philanthropists.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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