



Produced by David Widger






PRAY YOU, SIR, WHOSE DAUGHTER?

By Helen H. Gardener


R. F. Fenno & Company

9 and 11 East 16th Street

New York

1892


I saw a woman sleeping. In her sleep she dreampt Life stood before her,
and held in each hand a gift--in the one Love, in the other Freedom. And
she said to the woman, "Choose!"

And the woman waited long; and she said: "Freedom!" And Life said, "Thou
hast well chosen. If thou hadst said, 'Love,' I would have given thee
that thou didst ask for; and I would have gone from thee, and returned
to thee no more. Now, the day will come when I shall return. In that
day I shall bear both gifts in one hand." I heard the woman laugh in her
sleep.

Olive Schreener's Dreams.



DEDICATED

With the love and admiration of the Author,

To Her Husband

Who is ever at once her first, most severe, and most sympathetic critic,
whose encouragement and interest in her work never flags; whose abiding
belief in human rights, without sex limitations, and in equality of
opportunity leaves scant room in his great soul to harbor patience with
sex domination in a land which boasts of freedom for all, and embodies
its symbol of Liberty in the form of the only legally disqualified and
unrepresented class to be found upon its shores.




PREFACE.

In the following story the writer shows us what poverty and dependence
are in their revolting outward aspects, as well as in their crippling
effects on all the tender sentiments of the human soul. Whilst the many
suffer for want of the decencies of life, the few have no knowledge of
such conditions.

They require the poor to keep clean, where water by landlords is
considered a luxury; to keep their garments whole, where they have
naught but rags to stitch together, twice and thrice worn threadbare.
The improvidence of the poor as a valid excuse for ignorance, poverty,
and vice, is as inadequate as is the providence of the rich, for their
virtue, luxury, and power. The artificial conditions of society are
based on false theories of government, religion, and morals, and not
upon the decrees of a God.

In this little volume we have a picture, too, of what the world would
call a happy family, in which a naturally strong, honest woman is
shrivelled into a mere echo of her husband, and the popular sentiment of
the class to which she belongs. The daughter having been educated in a
college with young men, and tasted of the tree of knowledge, and,
like the Gods, knowing good and evil, can no longer square her life by
opinions she has outgrown; hence with her parents there is friction,
struggle, open revolt, though conscientious and respectful withal.

Three girls belonging to different classes in society; each illustrates
the false philosophy on which woman's character is based, and each in a
different way, in the supreme moment of her life, shows the necessity of
self-reliance and self-support.

As the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class
of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts
of science, I hail with pleasure all such attempts by the young writers
of our day. The slave has had his novelist and poet, the farmer his,
the victims of ignorance and poverty theirs, but up to this time the
refinements of cruelty suffered by intelligent, educated women, have
never been painted in glowing colors, so that the living picture could
be seen and understood. It is easy to rouse attention to the grosser
forms of suffering and injustice, but the humiliations of spirit are not
so easily described and appreciated.

A class of earnest reformers have, for the last fifty years, in the
press, the pulpit, and on the platform, with essays, speeches, and
constitutional arguments before legislative assemblies, demanded the
complete emancipation of women from the political, religious, and social
bondage she now endures; but as yet few see clearly the need of larger
freedom, and the many maintain a stolid indifference to the demand.

I have long waited and watched for some woman to arise to do for her sex
what Mrs. Stowe did for the black race in "Uncle Tom's Cabin," a book
that did more to rouse the national conscience than all the glowing
appeals and constitutional arguments that agitated our people during
half a century. If, from an objective point of view, a writer could
thus eloquently portray the sorrows of a subject race, how much more
graphically should some woman describe the degradation of sex.

In Helen Gardener's stories, I see the promise, in the near future,
of such a work of fiction, that shall paint the awful facts of woman's
position in living colors that all must see and feel. The civil and
canon law, state and church alike, make the mothers of the race a
helpless, ostracised class, pariahs of a corrupt civilization. In view
of woman's multiplied wrongs, my heart oft echoes the Russian poet who
said: "God has forgotten where he hid the key to woman's emancipation."
Those who know the sad facts of woman's life, so carefully veiled
from society at large, will not consider the pictures in this story
overdrawn.

The shallow and thoughtless may know nothing of their existence, while
the helpless victims, not being able to trace the causes of their
misery, are in no position to state their wrongs themselves.

Nevertheless all the author describes in this sad story, and worse
still, is realized in everyday life, and the dark shadows dim the
sunshine in every household.

The apathy of the public to the wrongs of woman is clearly seen at this
hour, in propositions now under consideration in the Legislature of New
York. Though two infamous bills have been laid before select committees,
one to legalize prostitution, and one to lower the age of