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Stanton, "Preface", in Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter, 1892
Document 12: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "Preface," in Helen Hamilton Gardener,
Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? (Boston: Arena, 1892), pp. v-x.
Introduction
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902; see biographical sketch in male
supporters of woman's rights project, also on this website), a woman suffragist and
writer, believed that the movement to raise the legal age of consent was a
necessary precondition to equality between the sexes. She wrote the preface to
Gardener's novel about a fourteen-year-old clerk in a department store who first
was seduced by the married manager of her store and then died a lonely death.
Historian Mary Odem argues that "Gardener's seduction narratives . . . express
female reformers' deep anger about women's sexual vulnerability in a maledominated
society."[12] Stanton's introduction makes clear the connection woman
suffragists made between the need to raise the age of consent and the
emancipation of women. For this reason, the social purity movement counted
woman suffragists among its staunchest supporters.
Preface
In the following story the writer shows us what poverty and
dependence are in their revolting outward aspects, as well as in their
crippling effects on all the tender sentiments of the human soul. Whilst
the many suffer for want of the decencies of life, the few have no
knowledge of such conditions.
They require the poor to keep clean, where water by landlords is
considered a luxury; to keep their garments whole where they have
naught but rags to stitch together, twice and thrice worn threadbare.
The improvidence of the poor as a valid excuse for ignorance, poverty,
and vice, is as inadequate as is the providence of the rich, for their
virtue, luxury, and power. The artificial conditions of society are based
on false theories of government, religion, and morals, and not upon the
decrees of a God.
In this little volume we have a picture, too of what the world would
call a happy family, in which a naturally strong, honest woman is
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