These pretty nothings, these caricatures of the real beauty of
sensibility, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate the taste,
and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns away from simple
unadorned truth; and a deluge of false sentiments and
over-stretched feelings, stifling the natural emotions of the
heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid, that ought to sweeten
the exercise of those severe duties, which educate a rational and
immortal being for a nobler field of action.
The education of women has, of late, been more attended to than
formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and
ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by satire or
instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that they spend
many of the first years of their lives in acquiring a smattering of
accomplishments: meanwhile, strength of body and mind are
sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of
establishing themselves, the only way women can rise in the
world--by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them,
when they marry, they act as such children may be expected to act:
they dress; they paint, and nickname God's creatures. Surely these
weak beings are only fit for the seraglio! Can they govern a
family, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the
world?
If then it can be fairly deduced from the present conduct of the
sex, from the prevalent fondness for pleasure, which takes place of
ambition and those nobler passions that open and enlarge the soul;
that the instruction which women have received has only tended,
with the constitution of civil society, to render them
insignificant objects of desire; mere propagators of fools! if it
can be proved, that in aiming to accomplish them, without
cultivating their understandings, they are taken out of their
sphere of duties, and made ridiculous and useless when the short
lived bloom of beauty is over*, I presume that RATIONAL men will
excuse me for endeavouring to persuade them to become more
masculine and respectable.
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