The American man is a paradox. He is renown throughout the world as the most gallant and chivalrous type in existence, yet he can suffer himself to see the despoiler of womanhood enter the drawing room unchallenged, while the victim of his cowardice hovers in darkness, a social outcast, or chooses the so-called easiest way out with gas, poison or drowning.
We have conceded the woman her political equality and rights of citizenship; but we have long deprived her, in popular opinion at least, her right to demand a single standard of morality. We have blindly followed the idea expressed by Goldsmith, without seeking to ascertain for ourselves if the words of the poet are not the expression of a truth that may have existed in less enlightened days, but which now should be relegated to the intellectual junk heap. Goldsmith, when he penned the lines: “When lovely woman stoops to folly,” we are sure in our own mind, intended it as a subtle question rather than a heartless statement of fact, but we, in our mad struggle for fame, fortune and favor, have lost track of the poet’s meaning, and accept his words as a doctrine, which is as unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.
The other day the papers of a certain large city carried, in an obscure corner, a little item telling of the suicide of a young woman in an apartment house. On the social page of the same paper appeared a lengthy account of a certain wedding, in which a girl of wealth, position and refinement became the bride of a well known clubman.
But what the paper did not print until a week later, when certain keen nosed investigators set to work, was the fact that the bridegroom was the betrayer of the girl, who died ingloriously by gas.
That is but one case in a thousand. The keen-nosed investigators do not ferret out the truth in but a paltry few of these cases. In the too vat majority, we accept the man into the heart of society and leave the broken flower that served his fancy to wilt and die in ignominy and disgrace. And yet we can stand on the speaker’s platform and boast of our superior attitude toward women.
Are we better than the Turk, who massacres defenseless women with babes in their arms? Are we superior to the hordes whose atrocities in France horrified the world?
Listen, American father. Take that little chubby baby girl in your arms and consider the snares, pitfalls and traps that await her path through life. Ponder on the temptations that will beset her. Contemplate the innumerable misfortunes that may befall her. And then commune with your own soul and ask yourself this question: If she is led into temptation will you sit calmly by and see her betrayer turn from her with a blasé smile to resume his place in the social whirl, from which he has never been barred?
From the editorial page of The Wilmington Morning Star, Oct. 29, 1922
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