WOMAN'S WORST ENEMY

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 21, 1881

WOMAN'S WORST ENEMY.

"Of the worst foes that women have ever had to encounter, wine stands at the head. The appetite for strong drink in men has spoiled the lives of more women—ruined more hopes for them, brought to them more shame, sorrow, and hardship than any other evil that exists. The country numbers tens of thousands of women who are widows to-day, and sit in hopeless weeds, because their husbands have been slain by strong drink.

"Yes, there are hundreds of thousands of homes, scattered all over the land, in which women live lives of torture, going through all the changes of suffering that lie between the extremes of fear and despair, because they love wine better than the women they had sworn to love. There are women by the thousands who dread to hear at the door the step that once thrilled them with pleasure; that step has learned to reel under the influence of the seductive poison. There are women groaning with pain, while we write these words, from brutalities inflicted by husbands mad with drink. There can be no exaggeration in any statement made in regard to this matter, because no human imagination can create anything worse than the truth. The sorrows of a wife with a drunken son, are as near the realization of hell as can be reached in this world at least. The shame, the indignation, the sorrow, the sense of disgrace for herself and children, the poverty—and not unfrequently the beggary—the fear and the fact of violence, the lingering, life-long struggle and despair of countless women with drunken husbands, are enough to make all women curse wine, and engage unitedly to oppose it everywhere as the worst enemy of their sex."

Scribner's Monthly.