"
"You keep your pity to yourself. You need it," answered Geralda, with heat.
"There's nothing wrong with me or my friends or life in good old New York."
"Nothing wrong!" cried Carley. "Listen. Nothing wrong in you or life
today--nothing for you women to make right? You are blind as bats--as dead
to living truth as if you were buried. Nothing wrong when thousands of
crippled soldiers have no homes--no money--no friends--no work--in many
cases no food or bed? . . . Splendid young men who went away in their prime
to fight for you and came back ruined, suffering! Nothing wrong when sane
women with the vote might rid politics of partisanship, greed, crookedness?
Nothing wrong when prohibition is mocked by women--when the greatest boon
ever granted this country is derided and beaten down and cheated? Nothing
wrong when there are half a million defective children in this city?
Nothing wrong when there are not enough schools and teachers to educate our
boys and girls, when those teachers are shamefully underpaid? Nothing wrong
when the mothers of this great country let their youngsters go to the dark
motion picture halls and night after night in thousands of towns over all
this broad land see pictures that the juvenile court and the educators and
keepers of reform schools say make burglars, crooks, and murderers of our
boys and vampires of our girls? Nothing wrong when these young adolescent
girls ape you and wear stockings rolled under their knees below their
skirts and use a lip stick and paint their faces and darken their eyes and
pluck their eyebrows and absolutely do not know what shame is? Nothing
wrong when you may find in any city women standing at street corners
distributing booklets on birth control? Nothing wrong when great magazines
print no page or picture without its sex appeal? Nothing wrong when the
automobile, so convenient for the innocent little run out of town, presents
the greatest evil that ever menaced American girls! Nothing wrong when
money is god--when luxury, pleasure, excitement, speed are the striven for?
Nothing wrong when some of your husbands spend more of their time with
other women than with you? Nothing wrong with jazz--where the lights go out
in the dance hall and the dancers jiggle and toddle and wiggle in a
frenzy? Nothing wrong in a country where the greatest college cannot report
birth of one child to each graduate in ten years? Nothing wrong with race
suicide and the incoming horde of foreigners? .
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