In demanding absolute emancipation, industrial and personal, Feminists had no other thought but that such new liberty would have widened woman's scope for usefulness, for happiness, for self-development. Yet what has been the outcome of it all? For one who has used her new freedom for the ends designed, very many more have used it to their serious injury; only too many to their moral downfall.
Already everywhere such liberty has fast degenerated into licence. Our girls were no sooner emancipated by their mothers from the usually wholesome—if sometimes too severe—control of their fathers, than straightway they have emancipated themselves from the indispensable maternal rule. Strict supervision and guidance in a world they are ignorant of—or if sophisticated are in far worse case—are essential to the well-being, physical and moral, of the young and immature.
Young girls, on first discovering their attraction for the other sex, become intoxicated by the sense of their new dangerously-alluring power, and lose their heads. Beyond all things, they require at this phase a mother's strict and careful supervision, with sympathy and firm control; to tide them over their perilous phase, and thus to preserve them from consequences of their ignorance or folly, or from those of a pernicious bent. Nevertheless, young girls of every class are granted now disastrous latitudes of thought and action. The vigilant chaperonage indispensable to protect them from the biological impulses—which they mistake for "love"—of the careless or vicious young men to whom (equally with the chivalrous and honourable) modern mothers abandon their daughters, has become a dead-letter. The girl only just in her teens is free to play fast-and-loose with boys and men—as too with life, before she has learned the merest rudiments of living. All too soon she learns her lesson. And becoming precociously sophisticated—only too often precociously vicious—her nature and future are wrecked at the outset. Because nothing wrecks a woman's disposition so effectually as sex-precocity does. Sex is the very pivot of her nature. On this she swings up—or down. And early habit decides her bent.
That many of these cigarette-smoking, decadent young creatures are no worse than impudent, feather-brained and misguided, does not save the licence allowed them from being as harmful to physical as it is perilous to moral health; nor from the experiences resulting from such licence wholly unfitting the majority for later wholesome restraint, and for purer and fairer ideals of womanly conduct and living.
For much of this Feminism is gravely to blame. Not only because it has led to the absorption of the mothers in outside pursuits, as being of greater importance than the fulfilment of their maternal duties and responsibilities to their young daughters, but because, too, the partial sterilisation of girls, by masculine training and habits, in robbing them of womanly qualities, robs them of natural reserve and modesty, and of the other more delicate instincts and aspirations of their sex.
Significant, truly, of latter-day maternal neglect of young daughters was the disclosure by a doctor, in a recent British Medical Journal, that of a hundred men infected with venereal diseases, more than seventy had contracted disease from "amateur flappers." Yet as with a child badly burned by playing with fire, we blame the mother or guardian who exposed it to danger of thus injuring itself for life, so the mothers of these unfortunate girls were to blame for gross neglect of their duty to safeguard these young lives.
Nature avenges her betrayed girls, however. For medical authority shows that these youthful unfortunates transmit disease in its most virulent and destructive forms. It is as though all the vital potential of their developing womanhood is perverted to a malign poison, charged with the forces of their blasted youth.
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The Victorian, who brought up her daughters to marry in ignorance of biological fact, went to the other extreme. But it was a far less harmful one than that in vogue to-day.