It is the wrong partner in vice from whom State regulation seeks to "protect" "our wives and daughters." It is the one who can do the intelligent wife or daughter no harm whatever!
Man, we are told, is the logical animal. Why not apply a bit of logic right here? Why not set a watch on and restrict the one who does the real and permanent harm to the race?
Men claim that it is necessary to their health, happiness and comfort to sacrifice utterly the characters, health, lives, and even liberty of locomotion of thousands of women every year. This is simply infamous and Nature teaches its infamy and unnaturalness.
From the protozoan to the highest beast or bird there is no distinction of right, or opportunity or privilege as to the occupation, life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness anywhere in nature between the sexes until we reach the one species of animal where one sex has been subordinated to the other by artificial industrial conditions—by financial dependence.
Now, it so happens that as civilization goes on, Nature is taking a most terrible revenge upon the human race for this sex perversion. Asylums multiply, weaklings abound, criminals and lunatics blossom out from heretofore honored ancestry. Nature is a terrible antagonist. Having the power, man may pollute the fountain of life if he will, but Nature revenges herself on him still.
He may cover his vice with the shimmer of gold, but the curse of the serpent is there as of old. He may bind up the eyes of justice and right; but he learns at the last 'tis a desperate fight. A cover for vice in the father may be as fatal as ignorant maternity. Combined they sow broadcast on the air the horrors of life and breed its despair. It is to the "ignorance of our wives and daughters" on these points, combined with the silence of law-protected vice for men and "regulated" infamy for women that is due the possibility of passing in some states a bill to reduce to ten years the "age of consent" at which a girl is held legally responsible for her own ruin. If there was one good woman in the legislature no such bill would have a ghost of a chance to pass, or be kept from the public knowledge and rushed through a "secret session." Yet fathers of daughters pass such bills!
Is it true, after all, that men are not so good protectors of women as is woman of her sister? Ten years of age! Why, a girl is a baby then! Think of your own little girl at ten! Do not dare to stop thinking and talking and writing on the subject until such infamous laws are an impossibility!
Do not allow any one to make you believe that it is not "modest" or becoming for a woman to know about—and fight to the bitter death—any and all such laws! You have no right not to know it! You have no right to dare to bring into this world a child who shall be subject to such a law! It seems beyond belief but it is true. And then men talk of "protecting" women! Men who hold that a girl is not old enough to give lawful consent to lawful marriage or to the sale of property until she is 18 years old, say she is, at the age of ten, to be held old enough to give consent to her own eternal disgrace, ruin, degradation!
That such atrocious acts are possible is largely due to the fact that "our wives and daughters" do not know these things. The ignorance of one sex in all the vital affairs of life coupled with its financial dependence upon the other sex has gone far to make of all men sex maniacs and of so many children the victims of a polluted ancestry and the future progenitors of an enfeebled race.
A famous physician who is an expert in these matters says in one of his articles, read before his brother practitioners: "There are few families in this country not tainted with one or another form of sex pollution. If it is not physical in its demonstrations it is mental. Often it is both, and to the trained eye, and thought, of a student of anthropology and heredity, the present outlook is pitiful, indeed."