“I fully understand the difficulty of teaching our pure-minded, delicately-nurtured daughters the terrible lessons of this seamy side of life. I am a mother of daughters myself, and I know the cost at which the courage has to be obtained, but in this matter each mother must help another. What a mighty force is influence! What help is conveyed by pressure of opinion! How often do I remember with gratitude the words which I once read as quoted of Mrs. John Stuart Mill, who taught her little daughter to have the courage to hear what other little girls had to bear. How gladly I acknowledge the stimulus of that example to myself, and therefore I would urge all women to SPEAK OUT. Do not be afraid. You will not lose your womanliness. You will not lose your purity. You will not have your sensibilities blunted by such rough use. No, “To the pure all things are pure.” We must reach the mass through the unit, it is the individual who helps to move the world.
“We must teach and train the mind of every woman with whom we come in contact, for we have mighty work to do. A no less deed than to reverse the judgment of the whole world on the subject of purity. I do not believe it is possible for men to accomplish any radical reform in this matter. It belongs to women—I was going to say exclusively—but I will modify my assertion; and if women do not speak out more courageously in the future than they have done in the past, I believe there is but slight chance of any further amelioration in the condition of society than those which are such an inadequate return at the present time, for all the love and money expended on them.”
And the same writer says, on a still more recent occasion: “I find no words strong enough to denounce the sin of silence amongst women on these social evils; and I have come to feel that the best proof of the subjection and degradation of my sex lies in the opinions often expressed by so-called Christian and pure women about other women. If their judgments were not perverted, if their wills were not broken, if their consciences were not asleep, and if their souls were not enslaved, they would not, they could not, hold their peace and let the havoc go on with women and children as it does.”—Mrs. Laura E. Morgan-Browne (“Woman’s Herald”, 27th Feb., 1892).
Mrs. Morgan-Browne is, perhaps, not more than needfully severe on the almost criminal reticence of women; yet man must certainly take the greater share of blame for the social “double morality” which condemns irrevocably a woman, and leaves practically unscathed a man, for the same act. It is male-made laws and rules that have resulted in the perverted judgments, broken wills, sleeping consciences, and enslaved souls, which both sexes may deplore. Charles Kingsley pointed a cogent truth when he said that “Women will never obtain moral equity until they have civil equality.” (See also Note XXXV., 6.)
XV.
2.—“... woman’s griefs with man of barbarous breed.”
“In all barbarous societies the subjection of woman is more or less severe; customs or coarse laws have regulated the savagery of the first anarchic ages; they have doubtless set up a barrier against primitive ferocity, they have interdicted certain absolutely terrible abuses of force, but they have only replaced these by a servitude which is still very heavy, is often iniquitous, and no longer permits to legally-possessed women those escapes, or capriciously accorded liberties, which were tolerated in savage life.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XIV.).
4.—“Crippled and crushed by cruelty and toil.”
Some of this crippling has been of set purpose, as well as the simple result of brutal male recklessness. Instance the distortion of the feet of high-born female children in China, the tradition concerning which is that the practice was initiated and enjoined by an emperor of old, one of whose wives had (literally) “run away” from him. A somewhat similar precaution would seem to be indicated as a very probable source of the persistent and almost universal incommodity and incumbrance of the dress of woman as compared with that of man.
Dr. Thomas Inman, in his “Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names,” Vol. I., p. 53, seems to indicate a different, yet closely allied, origin and motive for the impeding form of woman’s clothing, the subordinate status of woman being always the purpose in view.