“But, father, tell me why it’s so much more important for girls to be particular about what they do than for boys.”
“It’s not more important.”
“Well, people seem to think it is. The other day Johnnie Webster was going to a show and his little sister Carrie wanted to go, too, and he told her it was no place for girls, and she said, ‘Then it is no place for boys’; and he said, ‘But boys don’t have to be as good as girls.’ And his father and mother both heard it and never said a word. They only laughed.”
“It is unfortunately quite a common idea that boys and men do not have to be as good as girls and women; but it is not God’s idea. He doesn’t have two standards of morals, and I think the 16 time is coming when men will be glad to live up to the highest level of purity.”
“Don’t you think it seems worse for girls to swear or drink or gamble than for boys?”
“It does seem worse, because we have had such high ideals for women; but to God it must seem no worse, because he judges of us as souls, not as men and women, and He has laid down only one rule of conduct for all souls.”
“I’d like to know how the idea ever grew that it was not so bad for men to do wrong as for women.”
“Perhaps we cannot now see all the reasons for this state of things, but we can see at least one reason. Many, many years ago men bought their wives, or took them by force from others, so they felt that they owned their wives. Of course, each man liked to feel that his wife was above reproach, that she really did belong to him; therefore, he held any lack of fidelity as a great sin against himself. But he did not think that he belonged to her. She had neither bought nor captured him, so she had no power over him, except such as she could gain by her fascinations.
“Naturally, he didn’t care to be bound by the same rigid ideas to which he held her. He felt himself free to do what fancy dictated. The general level of morals was low, so he followed the pleasures of sense, and the wife could only submit, or try to be more fascinating to him than any one else. But if he was great and influential 17 or handsome, and was not bound by any moral restraints, there would be other women desirous of gaining his attentions and the material comforts he might be able to give, and he would quite willingly think himself free to follow his fancy without censure. In this way has grown up the double moral standard, the pure woman holding herself to the strictest morality, and men imagining themselves not so sternly held to the narrow path of absolute purity.
“Women are not now slaves, bought as wives and valued for their personal charms alone. They have intellectual power and moral force and social influence, and they can, if they will, create the single moral standard,—that is, the one high ideal for both men and women.”