“And wimmin are the most to blame in this respect. I believe in givin’ the D——I won’t speak the gentleman’s name right out, because I belong to the Methodist Meetin’ house, but you know who I mean, and I believe in givin’ him his due, if you owe him anything, and I say men haint half so bad as wimmen about holdin’ up male sinners and stompin’ down female ones.
“Wimmen are meaner than pusley about some things, and this is one of ’em. Now wimmen will go out and kill the fatted calf with thier own hands to feast the male prodigal that has been livin’ on husks. But let the woman that he has been boardin’ with on the same bundle of husks, ask meekly for a little mite of this veal critter, will she get it? No! She won’t get so much as one of the huffs. She will be told to keep on eatin’ her husks, and after she has got through with ’em to die, for after a woman has once eat husks, she can’t never eat any other vittles. And if she asks meekly, why is her stomach so different from the male husk eater, he went right off from husks to fatted calves, they’ll say to her ‘what is sin in a woman haint sin in a man. Men are such noble creatures that they will be a little wild, it is expected of ’em, but after they have sowed all thier wild oats, they always settle down and make the very best of men.’
“‘Can’t I settle down too?’ cries the poor woman. ‘I am sick of wild oats too, I am sick of husks—I want to live a good life, in the sight of God and man—can’t I settle down too?’
“‘Yes you can settle down in the grave,’ they say to her—‘When a woman has sinned once, that is all the place there is for her—a woman cannot be forgiven.’ There is an old sayin’ ‘Go and sin no more.’ But that is eighteen hundred years old—awful old fashioned.”
And then after they have feasted the male husk eater, on this gospel veal, and fell on his neck and embraced him a few times, they will take him into thier houses and marry him to their purest and prettiest daughter, while at the same time they won’t have the female husker in thier kitchen to wash for ’em at 4 cents an article.
I say it is a shame and a disgrace, for the woman to bear all the burden of sufferin’ and all the burden of shame too; it is a mean, cowardly piece of business, and I should think the very stuns would go to yellin’ at each other to see such injustice.
But Josiah Allen’s children haint been brought up in any such kind of a way. They have been brought up to think that sin of any kind is jest as bad in a man as it is in a woman. And any place of amusement that was bad for a woman to go to, was bad for a man.
Now when Thomas Jefferson was a little feller, he was bewitched to go to circuses, and Josiah said,
“Better let him go, Samantha, it haint no place for wimmin or girls, but it won’t hurt a boy.”
Says I, “Josiah Allen, the Lord made Thomas Jefferson with jest as pure a heart as Tirzah Ann, and no bigger eyes and ears, and if Thomas J. goes to the circus, Tirzah Ann goes too.”