Educated in slavish
dependence, and enervated by luxury and sloth, where shall we find
men who will stand forth to assert the rights of man; or claim the
privilege of moral beings, who should have but one road to
excellence? Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will
be long in freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the
progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.
Let not men then in the pride of power, use the same arguments that
tyrannic kings and venal ministers have used, and fallaciously
assert, that woman ought to be subjected because she has always
been so. But, when man, governed by reasonable laws, enjoys his
natural freedom, let him despise woman, if she do not share it with
him; and, till that glorious period arrives, in descanting on the
folly of the sex, let him not overlook his own.
Women, it is true, obtaining power by unjust means, by practising
or fostering vice, evidently lose the rank which reason would
assign them, and they become either abject slaves or capricious
tyrants. They lose all simplicity, all dignity of mind, in
acquiring power, and act as men are observed to act when they have
been exalted by the same means.
It is time to effect a revolution in female manners, time to
restore to them their lost dignity, and make them, as a part of the
human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.
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