nl_e17

Ballard, Danger to our Girls, [1900]
elaborate wardrobe, or richly endowed with material goods, but without
counsel upon the responsibility concerning the new life and
relationship, and without forecasting to her the duties of maternity?
Aye, the pathway of girls, as well as boys, is hedged with dangers
from the cradle to the grave; and with the inherited tendencies
entangling them it seems well nigh hopeless to think of holding them in
the pathway of moral rectitude. But woman is coming to the rescue.
She is beginning to realize her power, and is rising grandly to the new
conception of the Divine plane of human life; and when the
motherhood of the race takes a forward step, all humanity must follow,
all social life must be elevated. There is hope and courage in the fact
that woman is hanging out the signal lights, and stationing sentinels at
the pitfalls; that the thoughts of a degraded womanhood no longer
finds her indifferent, but rather with all her love and pity aroused,
seeking to turn the wayward into straighter paths, and to keep the
tender feet of the little ones away from the thorns and briars.
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A. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree,
was prominent in the moral education movement of the late nineteenth century.
Moral educationists viewed sexual morality as the key to innocence and morality,
and they used Blackwell's book, The Moral Education of the Young (1879) as their
guide. Blackwell accepted the Chair of Hygiene at the new London School of
Medicine for Women in 1875. She spent the last decades of her life in Hastings,
England, where she died in 1910.
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B. Frances Power Cobbe was born in Ireland in 1822 and died in 1904. She
published Essay on Intuitive Morals in 1855. She was involved in many reform
movements, including the British woman's movement. She argued that violence
against women was linked to women's economic dependence on men. She extolled
the virtues of remaining single, and lived with another woman, Mary Lloyd, for thirtyfour
years until Lloyd's death in 1896.
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http://womhist.binghamton.edu/aoc/doc21.htm (8 of 9) [6/5/2005 8:52:01 PM]