The Washington herald., 1913-11-03
WOMAN And THE HOME
a Question and an A11Swer
Edited By JULIA CHANDLER ,fANz.
BY Frances Shaffer

She was quite a young girl, but some
one had been telling her--indeed. 1t was
q minister in his weekly sermon-that
women, when they really fell from
grace. were infinitely worse, more
shameless. more revengeful more fend-
ish, altogether blacker than men who
went far astray.
| And though years of experience had
not passed over her head, thought her
reading had been rather limited and
life had not yet unfoided It's lessons,
she went home with wefl-defined pros
test in her heart. and a bit Of earnest
questioning In her head.
Because, while the speaker had been
quite fuisome in eulogy OF woman at
her best and had declared that she
reached heights that her brother scarce
II guessed. he used his strongest invec-
tive to tyy TO picture the awful depths
she sounded as she crept further and
further down, depths no man ever ven-
tured to follow.
He referred to "the shameless mix
ture Of beast and fiend," constituting the
woman OF the streets, without once re-
verting to the sorry truth that she Is
HluIlcu dkdlu6l as Wcli rs binnlnK, and
he held her up to condemnation as stand
ing for the extreme OF blackness. =
He spoke of Lucrezia Borgia as every
body does who searches for some one
TO typify the worst of all; but he did
not say that recent researches have un-
covered facts that have made writers
of today far kinder and fairer, even
to her with all her horrible sins, and
have made them declare that she was
more Of a tool than anything else. And
be did not bring forward the names Of
men-Nero, for example-whose awful
atrocities have made the whole world
shudder.
As his bitter words hurried along, the
young girl, with neither historical facts
nor long observation to help her, asked
herself IL IL possibly could be true that
women were found standing at the moral
extremes. the best OF all humanity and
the most hopelessly degraded. She did
not think II was, and she went home
determined to learn II his beliefs were
shared by the many.
She turned to her father, In whom her
confidence was supreme. and. without
any word OF explanation, asked il he
counted It true that woman who was
really bad, through and through. reached
the lowest depths OF degradation. SO
much farther than IL was within the
will or the power OF man to follow.
The father-who, happily for him and
for her as well, thought and observed
for himseif-simply replied, Go slow,
little girl, go slow" Then he tried to
draw her out and to learn what she
had heard. The words and their import
bad impressed her nightly, and she
repeated all that had been said, asking
again, is IL true?''
He told her II was very unwise, very
fruitless, and rather disturbing to make
such comparisons, because in trying TO
measure the heights and depths to which
men and women rise and fall. many.
many things must be taken into .consid-
GRAFTON. Without hesitation he assured
hGr that she could set her mind at rest
upon the one fact that history and every
day life furnished ample proof that the
statement was unfair and untrue. But,
he told her, il had been repeated so often
that many folk really accepted n as one
Of the strange contradictions in life that
women, when they really fell down, ,
would stoop to anything and would be
teachers in iniquity.
He suggested that possibly the speaker
had meant to convey the impression that