nl_e17

Gardener, "What Shall the Age of Consent Be?" Jan 1895
Document 13: Helen H. Gardener, "What Shall the Age of Consent Be?" Arena
(January 1895), pp. 196-98.
Introduction
Helen Hamilton Gardener (1853-1925) was a writer, reformer, and suffragist
who was extremely active in the age-of-consent movement, regularly reporting on
the progress of the campaign for the Arena. While initially women reformers had
organized petition drives to influence legislators to raise the legal age of consent,
some women, like Gardener, came to argue that the low age of consent was due to
the disenfranchisement of women, and that adequate moral protection of women
required that women be granted the right to vote.
II. WHAT SHALL THE AGE OF CONSENT BE?
BY HELEN H. GARDENER.
When I am asked to present an argument against lowering the
age of consent, or when I am requested to write the reasons why that
age should be raised to at least eighteen years, it impresses me very
much as if some one were to ask me gravely, if I would be so kind as
to try to think up some fairly plausible grounds upon which one might
base an objection to the practice of cutting the throats of his neighbor's
children whenever that neighbor happened not to be at home to
protect them; or to furnish a demurrer to the act of inoculating the
community with small-pox as a matter of ordinary amusement. There is
not, there never has been there never can be any fact in nature that is
not a protest in letters of flame against the infamy of legal enactments
which place the innocence and ignorance of childhood at the mercy of
licensed lechery.
To begin with, no being who is not too degraded or too utterly
mentally and morally diseased to be a safe person to be at large, could
wish that a little child, a baby girl fourteen, twelve, aye, ten years of
age should be made as is the case in many of our states, the legal and
rightful prey of grown men. There is no argument. There is no basis for
a difference of opinion. No man on earth would pass or want passed
such a law for his own child, for his own sister, for anyone for whom he
http://womhist.binghamton.edu/aoc/doc13.htm (1 of 3) [6/5/2005 8:51:55 PM]