The Washington herald., 1917-11-09
MAKING GIRLS WISE
by DOROTHY DIX.
The Worlds Highest Paid Woman Written

There is a great deal OF more or less
footless talk, that gets nowhere.
about the things that n mother should
teach her daughters for their own
protection.
The one thing that every mother
should impress upon the mind of a
girl child from the time she is old
enough to understand anything at all
is to distrust every man who makes
love to her without naming a definite
marriage day. Every girl should hail
from Missouri and demand to be
shown a wedding ring as a guarantee
of mans intN1tions.
From time immemorial 1t has been
held that one of the chief charms of
maidcnhood has been its guilelessness.
its ignorance and innocence, and its
credulous belief in everything that it
is told. This tender faith has been so
beautiful that mothers have hesitated
to destroy it, and to teach their
daughters to be sophisticated and
worldly wise.
They have not realized that with
girls it is safety first, and that in a
world full of dangers and pitfalls for
girls, safety far outweighs any aes-
thetic considerations.
Mothers must be made to realize
that in this day and generation, under
present social and economic condi-
tions, every girl has got to take care
of herself, every girl must be her own
protector. This is equally true wheth-
ey the girl is rich and spends her life
amusing herself or is poor and spends
her life working.
No mother can be continually at the
heels of her up-to-date daughter, who
plays golf and drives her own car.
and rides and engages in all sorts of
| athletic diversions that take her con-
tinually into the society of men. No
| mother can go with her daughter into
the Office or store where she works
with men. The modern girl is, in the
end, her own chaperon, and she meets
the situation according to the wisdom
that her mother has taught her.
This makes it all important that a
girl should not go forth in the world
with her head stuffed full of romantic
| notions about men and love, and its
being sweet and womanly for a wom-
an to be blindly trusting, and that
there is something peculiarly idealistic
and beautiful about unconventional
relationship between men and women.
instead. every girl should be taught
that the standard brand of oil with
which the wise virgin keeps her lamp
filled is the oil of suspicion. She
should be taught that while there are
many Sir Gallahads among men they
constitute the small minority of the
masculine population, and the balance
will bear watching.
And above all, she should he taught
that there is no other relationship in
the world SO sordid, so brutal, and in
which the woman is treated with such
utter lack of all tenderness and con-
sideration as that which exists out
side OF the pale of matrimony. Free
love Is so called because Cupid is free
20 pack up and leave whersver the
man gets tired of the woman.
Nfne-tenths of all the tragedies that
wreck the lives of girls would be pre-
vented II only they had 1t bred into
their very bones to look with sus-
picion upon every man who makes
love 10 them, and IL they would in
vestigate the sincerity of every mans
profession of affection as carefully as
they would the genuineness of a silk
dress they were buying
Take. for instance. the case of a
married man who deliberately goes to
work TO win the heart of a young girl.
ne KNOWS that he cannot marry her.
he knows that he will doom her to
olo maidenhood by keeping other men
away from her. He knows that her
love for him can only bring her suf-
fering and sorrow and that their as
ISOLATION is inevitably bound to stain
her good name.
let there are tens of thousands of
cases In which married men amuse
themselves with such affairs, utterly
regardkess of how they are spelling
the gffrs happiness in life. And there