Please....I hardly think a teenager who had grown up in a very dysfunctional home such as hers, with a stepfather who had sexually abused her at age 10, and a sister and brother-in-law who would take her out of that environment into the OTO world, would know much of or appreciate much such boundaries. We don't know how many other women Parsons slept with before he got to her while he was married to her sister. We only know that the resultant environment became a bizarre sex injected cult.
I get you Mary, but remember it was the 30s - 40s. It was a totally different world to ours.
Even my grandmother said they were the bad old days and life was pretty tough. Step out of line and the whole world crashed down on you. Then you were marked for life. Just the way it was. Just about everyone knew it too.
My grandmother's divorce in 1929 and brought her a whole world of pain, she even had to leave town and leave her young son behind. The other women treated her the worst.
Nearly everyone knew of a person in their neighbourhood that was whispered about and openly discriminated (or even persecuted) against. That was all OK to do back then. Now it is pretty much (or close to) criminal behaviour.
I am not
blaming Sara for her behaviour, as Sheila points out there are too many factors to consider that we don't even know about. Merely pointing out that she most likely would have known the trouble she could have brought upon herself.
I agree that children living amongst wayward adults is never a good idea either. Maybe she never had many choices, I don't know. Maybe she had nowhere else to go? Nobody got much help back then. Once you were fucked up, well, good luck to you. There was only punishment for stepping off that narrow line basically.
It's taking a long time for Queen Victoria's belief systems to die. It still lives in many first world countries and most third world ones.