Barbour County index. [volume] (Medicine Lodge, Kan.) 1880-current, 1895-05-29
A FALLING RACE.
Let America Dread the Advent of the
New Woman.

Let America Dread the Advent of the
New Woman.
Portland Oregonian Pop): The new
woman is the social complement of the
half man. Sarah Grand is the hellish
twin of Oscar Wilde. They are the
product of the same racial decay and
omens of the same social disaster. The
Simultaneous appearance of these two
detestable types in literature and in
the society of certain wealthy capitals
is natural and inevitable. Neither sex
is exempt from the taint of corruption.
One cannot be expected to remain sound
while the other loses health and vigor
and becomes the prey of a hideous
moral fungus. The woman who eman-
clpates herself from the sacred duties
OF her sex to feed its perverted energies
and appetites upon morbid dreams of
masculine liberty of conduct, of social
relations, of employment, of self-in-
dulgence, springs from the same dis
eased social root as the man who
shirks the highest duty of virile hu-
manity, as we'll as the common duties
of social life, to lull his senses, soften
his manhood, and corrupt his moral
sense in the curious exploration of the
obscure caverns of unnatural in
dulgence. Both are the product of lux
ury and idleness, and of that indefina-
BILE generation of human fiber which
comes with assemblage of men in great
numbers and relief of a part of them
of the wholesome necessity of employ
ing their faculties in the struggle for
existence. The business OF man is to
make a place in the world for himself
erd for some woman; tc beget strong
children, and to rear them to full
capacity, to play their part in life in
turn. The greater effort this costs him,
the better citizen does he become in
the training; the more vigorous strain
does he communicate to his descend
ants. The business of a woman is to
bear healthy children, to cherish them
IN infancy, and to train them in child
hood, and every restriction the ex-
per1ence of the world has placed upon
her life is welcome to the right-minded
woman, because she knows that its
only object is to fit her the better for
the performance of this supreme func-
fitted by religious performance of these
primary duties for the completest de-
velopment of faculties and the largest
realization of capacities of which his
| nature admits; indeed, the vigor ac-
quired in this natural and healthful
| existence encourages the fullest de-
velopment of mental and physical
powers. Neglect and perversion of
these primary functions bring decay of
the individual and the degeneration of
| the race. 1t is only within the present
generation that so large a number of
English women have thought there
were better things in life than rearing
large families so as to make the vicious
heresies of the new woman" a social
| cult. And it is only within this gen.
Grafton that the unmanly vices of de-
| generated Rome and the enfeebled
Orient have made their appearance in
the English capital. These are certain
signs of rare decay, of national de-
generation. They have preceded the
downfall of every great empire from
Athens to Bourbon France They are
most plainly written, and their conse-
| quence most clearly demonstrated in
the history of Rome. Wealth and lux
ury, idleness and emancipation from
social restraints, brought hideous So
cial degradation into the last days of
the republic. No woman of antiquity
enjoyed so much freedom as the Roman.
and when this fell to license through
luxury and idleness, the Roman world
began to crumble. Laxity of marriage,
ease of divorce. access to public en-
ployment through indirect channels.
loss of moral sense and distaste for
maternity, united with male in
diligence, gluttony, and practice of out
| landish vice to unfit the imperial race
for self-perpetuation. Britain is going
the way of Rome