ess and could bring to her all the
attractions of Washington society. That young girl said to me, "The
happiest moment of my life was when I received into my hand my first
month's salary for teaching." Not long after, I met her father in
Washington, spoke to him of his noble daughter, and he said: "Yes, you
woman's rights people have robbed me of my only child and left the home
of my old age sad and desolate. Would to God that the notion of
supporting herself had never entered her head!" Had that same lovely,
cultured, energetic young girl left the love, the luxury, the protection
of that New England home for marriage, instead of self-support; had she
gone out to be the light and joy of a husband's life, instead of her
own; had she but chosen another man, instead of her father, to decide
for her all her pleasures and occupations; had she but taken another
position of dependence, instead of one of independence, neither her
father nor the world would have felt the change one to be condemned....

Fathers should be most particular about the men who visit their
daughters, and, to further this reform, pure women not only must refuse
to meet intimately and to marry impure men, but, finding themselves
deceived in their husbands, they must refuse to continue in the
marriage relation with them. We have had quite enough of the sickly
sentimentalism which counts the woman a heroine and a saint for
remaining the wife of a drunken, immoral husband, incurring the risk of
her own health and poisoning the life-blood of the young beings that
result from this unholy alliance. Such company as ye keep, such ye are!
must be the maxim of married, as well as unmarried, women....

[Numerous instances cited of the unjust discrimination against
women where men were equally guilty.]

So long as the wife is held innocent in continuing to live with a
libertine, and every girl whom he inveigles and betrays becomes an
outcast whom no other wife will tolerate in her house, there is, there
can be, no hope of solving the problem of prostitution. As long
experience has shown, these poor, homeless girls of the world can not be
relied on, as a police force, to hold all husbands true to their
marriage vows. Here and there, they will fail and, where they do, wives
must make not the girls alone, but their husbands also suffer for their
infidelity, as husbands never fail to do when their wives weakly or
wickedly yield to the blandishments of other m