The day book. [volume], January 19, 1914, LAST EDITION, Image 9

About The day book. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1911-1917

Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL

SEE WHAT'S HERE A SLIT-SKIRT CENSOR y
-SLIT SKIRT
INSPECTION
DEPT.
CITY POI
7 m
on the streets the "slit-skirt censors"
a detachment of patrolmen armed
with two-fo.ot rules instead of clubs.
But the rule is, in fact, unneces
sary, for each censor has so delicate
a sense of decency that he can tell,
at once, and infallibly, by the tingle of
shame which passes over him when
he sees it, that a certain slit skirt is
revealing a sixteenth of an inch more
of limb than the first fifteen inchfes
which alone can be gazed upon with
perfect propriety. i -
How high may a slit skirt be slit?
"Fifteen inches!"
Such is the decree of those intelli
gent guardians of propriety, the po
lice. Any longer breach in the skirt
is considered a breach of the peace
.at least in. the puritanical minds of
the good people of Middleboro, Mass.
Chief of Police Swift of more-than-moral
Middleboro has shown that fif
teen inches is the very ultimate
maximum of leg that can be decently
shown. And so he has turned loose
, ' IT'S UP TO THE MOTHERS
In behalf of the pretty Jersey stenographer who was lured by her mar
ried employer into a disastrous elopement which ended in their arrest
charged with violating the Mann white slave act, a relative says:
"She believed what was told her. She had an implicit faih-in every-
one's honesty; a sort of girlish innocence which is expressed in the old ray
ing: To the pure all things are, pure."'
In other words, she had not been rightly educated; she had" not been
fortified tojtnake her way amid the perils of an unsheltered life.
It is too big a risk, mothers r you have no right to force your daughters
to take it You know what life is. You know ts hazards. How dare you
let the Render blossoms of your own affection go forth from the home cir
cle into he-stress of wage-earning without the knowledge of good-and evil?'
One does not like to speak unkindly to a mother who is suffering, but
upon the basis of fact as;set forth above, surely -this' mother, not'her unin
formed daughter, is mqst. to blame.
The idea which many parents have that it is difficult to teach children
the great truths of life and sex 7difficu.lt and somehow shameful is not
true. The ;shame is in not putting them in their right light ; the difficulty is
in allowing kriowledge-to be .learned at the cost of tears and iamiliatioh.