If you have a power, it is a moral power. The films of interest are
not so close around you as around the men. If you will but think, you
cannot fail to wish to save the country from this disgrace. Let not
slip the occasion, but do something to lift off the curse incurred by
Eve.
You have heard the women engaged in the Abolition movement accused of
boldness, because they lifted the voice in public, and lifted the
latch of the stranger. But were these acts, whether performed
judiciously or no, _so_ bold as to dare before God and Man to
partake the fruits of such offence as this?
You hear much of the modesty of your sex. Preserve it by filling the
mind with noble desires that shall ward off the corruptions of vanity
and idleness. A profligate woman, who left her accustomed haunts and
took service in a New York boarding-house, said "she had never heard
talk so vile at the Five Points, as from the ladies at the
boarding-house." And why? Because they were idle; because, having
nothing worthy to engage them, they dwelt, with unnatural curiosity,
on the ill they dared not go to see.
It will not so much injure your modesty to have your name, by the
unthinking, coupled with idle blame, as to have upon your soul the
weight of not trying to save a whole race of women from the scorn that
is put upon _their_ modesty.
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