[429] “We have no right, mercifully constituted with less temptation to evil than men, to shrink with sanctimonious ultra-delicacy from the barest mention of things we must know to exist. If we do not know it, our ignorance is at once both helpless and dangerous; narrows our judgment, exposes us to a thousand painful mistakes, and greatly limits our powers of usefulness.”—A Woman’s Thoughts upon Women (New York edition), p. 255.
“No single woman who takes any thought of what is going on around her, no mistress or mother who requires constantly servants for her house and nursemaids for her children, can or dare blind herself to the fact. Better face truth at once in all its bareness than be swaddled up forever in the folds of a silken falsehood.”—Ib., p. 259.
“Many of us will not investigate this subject because they are afraid: afraid not so much of being, as being thought to be, especially by the other sex, incorrect, indelicate, unfeminine; of being supposed to know more than they ought to know, or than the present refinement of society—a good and beautiful thing when real—concludes that they do know.
“Oh! women, women! why have you not more faith in yourselves, in that strong, inner purity, which alone can make a woman brave! which, if she knows herself to be clean in heart and desire, in body and soul, loving cleanness for its own sake, and not for the credit that it brings, will give her a freedom of action, and a fearlessness of consequences, which are to her a greater safeguard than any external decorum. To be, and not to seem, is the amulet of her innocence.”—Ib., p. 261.
[430] “Reformatories, Magdalene Institutions, and the like, are admirable in their way, but there are numberless cases in which individual judgment and help alone are possible. It is this, the train of thought which shall result in act, and which I desire to suggest to individual minds, in the hope of arousing that imperceptibly small influence of the many, which forms the strongest lever of universal opinion.
“All I can do—all, I fear, that any one can do by mere speech, is to impress upon every woman, and chiefly upon those who, reared innocently in safe homes, view the wicked world without somewhat like gazers at a show or spectators at a battle, shocked, wondering, perhaps pitying a little, but not understanding at all, that repentance is possible. Also, that once having returned to a chaste life, a woman’s former life should never be ‘cast up’ against her; that she should be allowed to resume, if not her pristine position, at least one that is full of usefulness, pleasantness, and respect, a respect the amount of which must be determined by her own daily conduct. She should be judged solely by what she is now, and not by what she has been. That judgment may be, ought to be stern and fixed as justice itself with regard to her present, and even her past so far as concerns the crime committed; but it ought never to take the law into its own hands toward the criminal, who may long since have become less a criminal than a sufferer. Virtue degrades herself, and loses every vestige of her power, when her dealings with vice sink into a mere matter of individual opinion, personal dislike, or selfish fear of harm. For all offenses, punishment, retributive and inevitable, must come; but punishment is one thing, revenge is another. One only, who is Omniscient as well as Omnipotent, can declare, ‘Vengeance is Mine.’”—A Woman’s Thoughts upon Women (New York ed.), p. 275.