nl_e17

Campbell, "Why an Age of Consent?" April 1895
plead that "she did not offer violent physical resistance"? And yet the
men who comprise the legislatures, and profess to represent the
people of five of our states--Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, and
Wisconsin--have fixed the age at which little girls are the legal prey, to
the merciless, willy debauches at twelve years! And it is always the
testimony of the one who committed the crime and who is striving to
escape the penalty of law, that bears the greatest weight in our courts
of--shall I say, justice?
In pity and shame let it be said that those who have made laws
for women and children have stamped their own degradation upon our
statutes, and that the law which comes forward in its majesty to
declare that the child shall be protected in her property, that she
cannot make contracts in business matters, nor be united in marriage,
unless she obtains the consent of her guardian, also says that she
may consent to her moral, spiritual, and physical ruin; while the archfiend
who robs her of her crown of womanhood, her virtue, is protected
by these infamous laws that tend towards the moral degradation of
manhood and the destruction of womanhood. There can be no
argument, no excuse for such laws; they are not only barbarous, but
inhuman.
These cruel laws, that have wrought such injustice to girlhood,
are the heritage of a less developed, less civilized past; and they have
been even more harmful to man because they have made it too easy
for him to do wrong. While they have been cruelly severe towards
women, they have been criminally indulgent towards men. The
degradation of womanhood rises to gigantic proportions when it drags
into its vortex little girls of ten and twelve years of age, and it includes
also the degradation of manhood.
I believe that consenting to a crime is in itself a crime, and I hope
the day is not far distant when the age-of-consent laws will be swept
from our statutes. The crime that robs woman of the crown of her
womanhood, her virtue, that takes advantage of her in a moment of
unguarded weakness, at whatever age, is a crime before the awful
magnitude of which all other crimes dwindle into insignificance. Moral
death is a greater misfortune than physical death. The crime against
women is one the laws of nature do not pardon; it is the crime of
crimes, because it is the unanimous rebellion against the law of love,
the supreme law of life, that is confirmed by all-substantial, ethical
science that comprehends the true nature of mankind. We might with
greater propriety, have an age at which murder, arson, or any of the
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