Madison Times

PURITY OF ACTRESSES.

Women In Tights Who are Still Clothed In Modesty.

Actresses, like all other women have to obey certain laws of social life. If girls come up from the country, go into lodgings alone and live without personal guardianship or social protection of any kind, they may be Luans and Virginias to the backbone, but they will have to pass through mud heaps by the way, and their experience will be more or less abominable. Also they will be roughly handled by the censorious and loosely regarded by the vicious. The fact of being on the stage does not emancipate a modest girl from the conditions held necessary for her social preservation elsewhere. And to hold that one daughter may not go to a ball at a private house without a chaperon, and another may live alone in lodgings, go on the stage without protection and travel about in a manager's company without the flimsiest pretence of a caretaker, is a stupidity scarcely worth the trouble of discussing.

Girls have to be protected against their own ignorance, their own innocence, their very selves, until they have learned something of life and its dangers, and to know the look of bird lime and how to avoid springes and snares. It may not be possible to incumber the side scenes with mothers, and yet we know for instance where this is done and where girls never set their pretty feet inside the theatre unaccompanied and unprotected. This is the main reason why, in a family of actors and actresses, bred to the board from their birth, the women can be, and are, as blameless as a nest full of doves. Father and mother and brothers are all there to watch, to guard, to check, to protect—if need be, to avenge. They themselves, these doves in tights and spangles, know all the nets spread by outsiders, and they escape where others are caught and fall in. They can even dress in those tights and spangles, dispense with petticoats, dance break downs and perform acrobatic feats with their toes, with clear eyes and a pure conscience. They are so accustomed to the whole thing from the beginning that it is all impersonal and mere "business," no more shocking to the moral sense than is the low cut and sleeveless bodice of the present day to the ordinary lady. They have never had anything to get over; consequently they have never dropped part of their moral furniture in the scramble. They were born on the other side of the leaping bar, and there is no more difference between their modesty and that of the primmest prude's than there is between ours and the Chinese woman's, who holds it a shameful exposure to show her hands, while we have only a gold cord and a bracelet for all covering from the shoulder to the finger tips.