What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and
earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and
loose with the moral sense within them--- which is God's voice within
us--but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for
men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is
bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the
hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is God who has
made us--not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and
false necessities; and God has made the man to love the woman and give
himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for
which she was made the blessed "mother of all living."

Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard
that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls
"l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we
women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and
earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men
spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost
bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted
into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it
seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man
led--whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this
bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation
was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the
indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life
having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this
ignorance was passing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask
nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own
womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no
woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly