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Show -...a. -.... . , . -- . .. . . - im in A generation of speakers and teachors have drummed into Mother-Is head that the child is an "individual" and must not be suppressed. The individual nature must be permitted to expand along its individual lines. "Society" in the form of the school, the club, the institutional church, not Mother, has played the more important part in molding your daughter's character, and now in this late day Mother is awakened to the fact that the hand which rocked her child's cradle should have led that chlid out into the world. Truly the modern child does not cling to Mother's hand nor heed Mother's old-fashioned warnings. The modern girl has been taught5 that she is capable of judging her own conduct. She has neither reverence nor respect for experience arid age. If, after you have read this chat, you talk to your daughter, she will tell you that you are years behind the times. Girls have been taught to think and act for themsevles. And yet you and I and every other man knows that not one girl out of ten thousand should be trusted with a latch-key, a slit skirt, a peek-a-boo waist and the right to choose her own reading matter and amusements. I'm not so sure whether the liberty of our daughters, now closely verging toward license, is due to girJish spirit and independence or to paternal lethargy. We hive been too busy with our personal ambitions, the task of "making good" in the business world, to argue with and really protect our girls. We have trusted much to our wives and our daughters. We have no; used our knowledge of the world in general, and our own sex in particular, to hedge our daughters round with safeguards we might have provided. It's time we fathers woke up. If you don't believe this, if you think that we are pessimists and croakers, stop reading your paper on your trolley trips and listen to what the young people around you are discussing. Linger in the back of moving picture houses, near soda fountains and postal card booths or in the shadowy corners of your village streets where young folks congregate. con-gregate. Listen to the conversation of young girls from fifteen to eighteen with young men who can not yet boast of twenty years. You will understand then why we have dared to utter this warning to fathers." , , |