You can’t raise the standard of women’s morals by raising their pay envelope. It lies deeper than that.

The remark reflects Billy Sunday’s characteristic moral-reform rhetoric: he rejects economic explanations for women’s “morals” and insists that virtue or vice is rooted in inner character, spiritual condition, or personal discipline rather than wages. Implicitly, it pushes back against Progressive-era arguments that low pay and harsh working conditions contributed to prostitution or “immorality,” and it aligns with Sunday’s broader evangelical emphasis on individual conversion and moral rectitude. The quote also reveals a gendered framing—treating women’s morality as a social problem to be regulated—while downplaying structural factors and focusing on personal or religious transformation as the remedy.