The light of
science makes havoc of all such primitive conditions.
You tell me that your father was the husband of three wives, and that
all lived under one roof in sisterly love, and that you never heard an
unkind word spoken in your home, and that all three wives loved you as a
son. You tell me your father held high ideals of womankind, and that the
existence of a fallen woman was impossible in your community.
Now I contend that any woman who accepts less than the full loyalty of
the man to whom she gives herself for life _has fallen from woman's
highest estate_. She lowers not only herself, but the whole sex.
To take a third of a man's love, and to share his physical and mental
and spiritual comradeship with two other wives, is far more immoral, to
my thinking, than to take the whole of a man without legal authority.
It drags down and belittles woman in the eyes of man. It is useless to
contend that such conditions lead to respect.
There is too much of the big male I, and the little female you, in the
arrangement. There is too much of the old idea that God made man, and
accident made woman, for man's use.
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