"[V]irtues were fixed and certain... standards against which behavior could and should be measured. When conduct fell short of those standards..."

"... it was judged in moral terms as bad, wrong or evil — not, as is more often the case today, as misguided, undesirable or (the most recent corruption of the moral vocabulary) 'inappropriate.'"

Wrote Gertrude Himmelfarb in "The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values," quoted in "Gertrude Himmelfarb, scholar of Victorian era and neoconservative thinker, dies at 97" (WaPo). Himmelfarb was the wife of Irving Kristol and mother of William Kristol.

Beginning in the early 1950s, Dr. Himmelfarb published a series of well-regarded books about 19th-century British intellectual history and political and cultural figures. She advanced the notion that the Victorians, with their rigorous standards of morality, hard work, self-reliance and public rectitude — and the British Empire’s muscular economic and military presence — should be a model for modern American life and public policy....
Over time, she and other neoconservative thinkers were largely defined by what they opposed: the “grievous moral disorder,” as she called it, wrought by campus radicals and the Great Society federal aid programs of the 1960s. In her essays, Dr. Himmelfarb grew more strident in her antipathy toward postmodern academic trends, affirmative action, feminism and liberalism in general.

“Virtues are very hard,” she told the Chicago Tribune in 1995. “Vices are easy to come by. Once young people had the leisure and money to indulge themselves, it was almost inevitable that they do it.”...

“The intellect on display here is about the caliber of the village biddy who sticks her blue nose into everyone else’s business, offering opinions nobody asked for about how everybody else should live,” wrote critic Charles Taylor, reviewing Dr. Himmelfarb’s book “One Nation, Two Cultures” for Salon.com in 2000. “What did conservatives do before they had the ’60s to blame?”

ADDED: WaPo doesn't link to Charles Taylor's 2000 article, so let me. It's "Himmelfarb vs. the '60s/There's no room for real life in Gertie's America."

Implicit in all conservative hand-wringing about the sorry state of our culture, in whatever era that hand-wringing has appeared, is a longing for some lost golden age. But when was this paradisiacal era?....

Yearning for an idealized mythical past while vilifying the "diseases" of contemporary culture inevitably results in isolation from that culture... In order to oppose an idea or an epoch, you must first give it its due, and Himmelfarb simply will not....

These are the realities of our lives that Himmelfarb's doctrinaire insistence on rigid, traditional forms of family and behavior (she is in favor of making divorce more difficult) would deny.... Her pompous insistence that we restore the outmoded stigmas attached to things like divorce is the sort of thing that causes at least as much misery as divorce itself....

Himmelfarb says that we live in an age of people reluctant to make moral judgments. Let me appease her by offering one. It is morally obscene to propose, as she does, the sacrifice of people's happiness and even their lives in order to "raise standards."...

Himmelfarb prefers principles to action. But nowhere does she own up to the consequences of those principles. We can outlaw abortion -- but if we do, young women will maim and kill themselves trying to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies. We can babble on about the perils of "value-free" sex education -- but kids will experiment sexually with or without information that might save their lives. We can make divorce more difficult -- but people will grow bitter in loveless marriages and pass on a deep suspicion of the institution to their children. We can insist that private charity must replace government assistance -- but people will lose their homes, will starve, and some will die....