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:
[ [3] Short History of the English People, by J.R. Green, p. 247.
[ [4] See a little White Cross paper entitled, Medical Testimony.