The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1917-11-06
DOROTHY DIX TALKS
BY DOROTHY DIX
Worlds Highest Paid Woman Writer.
Making Girls Wise.

NldBAAHsS NS1TAS WIS.,
There is a great deal of more or
less footless talk, that gets no where,
about the things that a 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 VINO makes
love to her without naming definite
marriage day. Every girl should hail
from Missouri and demand to be
shown a wedding ring as a guarantee
of a mans intentions.
From time immeAnorial it has been
held that one of the chief charms of
maidenhood has been its guilelessness,
it's ignorance and innocence, and its
credulous belief in everything that it
is told This tender faith has beeR 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
world full of dangers and pitfalls for
girls, safety far outWeighS aesthetic
considerations.
Mothers must be made to realize
that in this day and generation, under
tions, every girl has got to take care
of herself, every girl must be her own
protector. This is equally true wheth-
er the girl is rich and spends her life
amusing herself 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
continually 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 roman
tic notions about men and love, and
its being sweet and womanly for a
woman to be blindly trusting, and
that there is som ething peculiarly
idealistic and beautiful about uncon-
ventional relationship between men
and women.
Instead, every girl should onslaught
that the standard brand of oil with
which the wise virgin keeps her lamp
filed is the oil of suspicion. She
should be taught that while there are
many Sir Galahads among men they
constitute the small minority of the
masculine population. and the bal
ance will bear watching.
And above all, she should be 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 outside
of the pale of matrimony. Free love
is so called because cupid is free to
pack up and leave whenever the man
gets tired of the woman.
| Nine-tenths of all the tragedies that
wreck lives of girls would be pre-
! vented if only they had it bred into
| their very bones to look with suspicion
upon every man who makes love to
them, and if they. would investigate
the sincerity of every mans profession
| of affection as carefully as they would
I the genuineneSS of a silk dress they
were buying
Take, for instance, the case of
married man who deliberately goes
to work to win the heart of a young
girl. He knows that he cannot marry
her. He knows that he will doom her
to old maidhood 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.
| Yet there are tens of thousan Is of
cases in which married men abuse
themselves with such affairs, utterly
! regardless of how they are spelling
| the girls happiness in life And there
| is not a case of this kind that could
not be prevented if the girl had been
taught that love affairs with married
men are not wistfully and sadly ro-
mantle They are just assinine, and
brand of idiocy in which nobody but
a born fool girl would indulge.
Then there is the secret ma rIia
A multitude of other girls slip into
that Shiny pit thru sheer ignorance of
what it means and of the kind Ct
man who is cad and coward enough
/ to her.
There would be no more secret mar
riages if every girl gave the man who
proposed it to her an icy stare and
/ said to him: I'm wise to you and
| your kind, and there's nothing doing
/ in the secret marriage line for me,
[ for I know that it generally also
means the silent fade away about the
time that wife needs a husband
most. Anyway, 1 am not marrying any
man who is SO ashamed to have me
I for wife that he is not willing to
come out and acknowledge her be-
fore his friends. Neither am I keen
on marrying any man who is so I'M
desirable that he isn't willing to let
my family investigate him and find
out just what sort of man he Is
What's the idea in the secrecy
stuff, anyway? If you are poor, 1 am
willing to wait until you earn more
/ or I will go to work and help to make
money. As for the old fairy story
about being disinherited by your fam
/ lily, that doesn't go in the little old
U. S. A, and, anyway, if 1 don't look
| as good to you as being remembered
in a will there's nothing doing.
Secrecy and matrimony don't ap-
I peal to me in the same connection.
! I've known of too many secret brides
/ who spent the balance of their lives
in trying to explain to an increduIous
world that their marriage certificates
were genuine"
Finally. there is the pathetic host of