‘A Mother’s Duty’

Mothers were warned of the dangers of immodest fashion and other activities that endangered their daughters’ morals one Sunday evening in 1912 at First Baptist Church.

Dr. O.C.S. Wallace shared these dangers in his message “Present Perils and Problems,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

“He said: ‘Indecent fashions in dress, which were doubtless intended by those who started them to stimulate improper desires; familiarities of physical contact between the sexes in unguarded companionship in places of amusement or in the family drawing room or elsewhere; the presentation to the mind of suggestive scenes in pictures, plays or stories — all these tend to destroy modesty; and when modesty is gone a long step has been taken toward moral ruin,’” according to the Sun.

“‘It is a mother’s duty to teach her daughter what belongs to modesty, propricity [sic] of behavior and purity of mind, and to have a great horror of whatever would dishonor or defile her. The mother who ignores this duty is either bad or blind.’”

Source: Baltimore Sun, November 25, 1912