Stories
are told in the presence of young girls, and jokes are interchanged,
of more than questionable nature according to our standards. Our
prudery of speech is the natural result of the liberty permitted to
women. When the protection of an older woman or of a male relative is
done away with, and a girl is permitted to go about quite unattended,
the best and the surest protection that she can have is the kind of
modesty that takes fright at even a bare mention, a bare allusion,
to certain ordinarily ignored facts of life.
The result of general freedom of speech and the process of safeguarding
a girl from its results is to make a Filipino girl regard her virtue
as something foreign to herself, a property to be guarded by her
relatives. If, through negligence or ignorance on the part of her
proper guardians, she is exposed to temptation, she feels herself
free from responsibility in succumbing. Such a view of life puts a
young girl at a great disadvantage with men, especially with men so
generally unscrupulous as Filipinos,
Among the lower classes there is no idea that a young girl can respect
herself or take care of herself. Girls are watched like prisoners,
and are never allowed to stray out of the sight of some old woman. It
is almost impossible for an American woman to obtain a young girl
to train as a servant, because, as they say, we do not watch them
properly.
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