The speedy dissolution of family and state was prophesied by men when first a girl took a public examination in geometry; whenever women have been given complete control of their own property; when they have been received into the professions and industries; and now in like manner people dread the condition of things that they imagine might follow if women are given the right to vote and to hold office.  We may well believe, with Lecky, that there are “certain eternal moral landmarks which never can be removed.”  But no matter what our views may be of the destinies, characteristics, functions, or limitations of the sex, certain reforms are indispensable before woman and, through her, family life can reach their highest development.  Of these reforms I shall speak briefly and with them close my history.

I. The double standard of morality for the sexes must gradually be abolished.[423] Of all the sad commentaries on Christian nations none is so pathetic or so tragical as the fact that for nineteen centuries men have been tacitly and openly allowed, at least before marriage, unrestrained liberty to indulge in sexual vice and intemperance, while one false step on the part of the woman has condemned her to social obloquy and, frequently, to a life on the street.  This strange system, a blasphemy against the Christ who suffered death in order to purify the earth, has had its defenders not merely among the uneducated who do not think, but even among the most acute intellects.  The philosopher Hume justifies it by commenting on the vastly greater consequences attendant on vice in women than in men; divines like Jeremy Taylor have encouraged it by urging women meekly to bear the sins of their husbands.  This subject is one of the great taboos in modern society.  Let me exhort the reader to go to any physician and get from him the statistics of gonorrhea and syphilis which he has met in his practice; let him learn of the children born blind and of wives rendered invalid for life because their husbands once sowed a crop of wild oats with the sanction of society; let him read the Report of the Committee of Fifteen in New York (G.P.  Putnam’s Sons, 1902) on The Social Evil, the records of the Watch and Ward Society in Boston, or the recent report of the special jury in New York which investigated the “White Slave Traffic."[424]

The plain facts are not pleasant.  A system which has been in vogue from the beginning of history cannot be changed in a decade; but the desired state of things will be more speedily achieved and immediate good will be accomplished by three reforms which may be begun at once—­have begun, in fact.  In the first place, the “age of legal consent” should be uniformly twenty-one.  In most States to-day it is fourteen or sixteen.[425] To the ordinary mind it is a self-evident proposition that a girl of those ages, the slippery period of puberty, can but seldom realise what she is doing when she submits