“License still lives among men, but it lives as a reptile; among men it is dying, yet Feminists, when they ask for license, would give this dying thing a new birth among women. They forget that what was once a bad necessity is now a hideous and dying superfluity.
The Right of Motherhood
“I HAVE heard it stated by Feminists that motherhood is the right of every woman.
“So is fatherhood the right of every man, and on that plea a man might base a very wide scheme of immorality.
“As a matter of fact, there is something else: the right of the child.
“A woman has no right to motherhood unless she can provide a home for her child. A father has no right to fatherhood who cannot do likewise. And by a home I do not mean shelter and food; I mean everything sacred that lies in that word Home. Love, affection, self-restraint, mutual respect, and family respect.
“Of course, if the Feminist says, Destroy the home, one has nothing more to say. She is logical.
“But to say, I shall increase license among women without injuring or destroying the home, at once reduces her to a person who is not logical.
“As a matter of fact, the Feminist movement, as far as its moral side goes, is confined to a certain number of men who desire the extension of license; to a certain number of women who do likewise; and to a certain number of women who feel acutely that women are put upon by men in the matter of morals. That men have set up a rule of conduct for women which they don’t obey themselves.
“This is not so. The sternest moralists are women, and the morality of these moralists is not an abstract quality; it arises from a profound and intuitive motherhood instinct that tells them that license is death to the welfare of the child, whether it develops and is shown in the mother or the child.