Heredity does not spare _your_ daughter, and yet men who plant the seeds of sex perversion in their own families have the infinite impudence to cast from their doors the blossom of their own tillage!
They go into heroics about being "disgraced." "You are no longer child of mine!" that rings in a thousand pages of literature, in one hundred cases out of one hundred and one should be met by the reply: This act of mine proves as no other could that _I am_, indeed, _your_ daughter! Blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh! Nature has told your secret through me. Let us cry quits. You put the cursed taint in my blood when I could not protect myself. _I_ am the one to complain, not you. Do not cry out for quarter like a very coward. Face your record made in flesh and blood. This polluted life of mine is Nature's reply to _your_ life of license and uncleanness! _I_ am Nature's reply to your uncontrolled passions--_inside of marriage and out_; I, the moral or mental idiot; I, the disease polluted wreck; I, the epileptic; I, the lunatic; I, the drunkard; I, the wrecker of the lives of others--I am your lineal descendant! You sacrificed others recklessly, by act and by law, to your desires and your arbitrary sex power; you cultivated a taint in your blood.
It is true that you took the precaution to transmit it through purity and ignorance to me. That very purity and ignorance of my mother served to save your peace of mind and enable you to take advantage of her for infinite opportunity for mischief. It, alas, could not save me, for I am your child also. Her ignorance was your partner in a crime against me, her helpless infant! Do not complain. Dislike my face as you will; presented to you in whatsoever form or phase of distortion it may be, I am your direct, lineal descendant! Build better! Or go down with the structure you planned for other men's daughters and in which you locked me before I was born!
If, because of their sex, men demand privileges, rights, emoluments, honors, opportunities and freedom, which they claim as good for and necessary to them and their welfare, while they insist that all these are not to be allowed to women--would be her damnation--are not these, also, sex maniacs? Has not humanity been long enough cursed by so degrading and degraded, so ignorant and so fatally wrong a mental, moral, social and legal outlook? I am attacking no individual. I am using an individual utterance on this subject simply to the better present the side of the case which is sustained by all of our present laws, conditions and male sentiment. I am wishing to present the reverse side of this awful picture. From man's point of view it is often presented--and in many ways. But once or twice have I ever seen the other side in print where it was looked at from a rational or scientific point of view.