[What eight million women want by Rheta Childe Dorr]@TWC D-Link bookWhat eight million women want CHAPTER VII 11/49
The fussy old gentlemen with white side whiskers and silk-stocking reformers and the other well meaning amateurs, who are engaged in "stamping out" the evil, deserve to be set aside.
In their places the women propose to install social experts who shall deal scientifically with the problem. The double standard of morals, accepted in fact if not in principle, in every community, and so rigidly applied that good women are actually forbidden to have any knowledge of their fallen sisters, was for the first time repudiated by a body of organized women.
The arguments on which the double standard of morals is based was, for the first time, seriously scrutinized by women of intelligence and social importance. The desirability of the descent of property in legal paternal line seemed to these women a good enough reason for applying a rigid standard of morals to women.
But they found reasons infinitely greater why the same rigid standard should be applied to men. The International Council of Women and women's organizations in every country number among their members and delegates women physicians, and through these physicians they have been able to consider the social evil from an altogether new point of view.
Certain very ugly facts, which touch the home and which intimately concern motherhood and the welfare of children, were brought forth--facts concerning infantile blindness, almost one-third of which is caused by excesses on the part of the fathers; facts concerning certain forms of ill health in married women, and the increase of sterility due to the spread of specific diseases among men.
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