I am fully persuaded, that we should hear of none of these
infantine airs, if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise
and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed and
their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the remark still
further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps,
created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we
should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true,
they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet
flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more
respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties
of life by the light of their own reason. "Educate women like
men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex the less
power will they have over us." This is the very point I aim at. I
do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.
In the same strain have I heard men argue against instructing the
poor; for many are the forms that aristocracy assumes. "Teach them
to read and write," say they, "and you take them out of the station
assigned them by nature." An eloquent Frenchman, has answered
them; I will borrow his sentiments. But they know not, when they
make man a brute, that they may expect every instant to see him
transformed into a ferocious beast. Without knowledge there can be
no morality!
Ignorance is a frail base for virtue! Yet, that it is the
condition for which woman was organized, has been insisted upon by
the writers who have most vehemently argued in favour of the
superiority of man; a superiority not in degree, but essence;
though, to soften the argument, they have laboured to prove, with
chivalrous generosity, that the sexes ought not to be compared; man
was made to reason, woman to feel: and that together, flesh and
spirit, they make the most perfect whole, by blending happily
reason and sensibility into one character.
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