But as women educated like gentlewomen, are never
designed for the humiliating situation which necessity sometimes
forces them to fill; these situations are considered in the light
of a degradation; and they know little of the human heart, who need
to be told, that nothing so painfully sharpens the sensibility as
such a fall in life.
Some of these women might be restrained from marrying by a proper
spirit or delicacy, and others may not have had it in their power
to escape in this pitiful way from servitude; is not that
government then very defective, and very unmindful of the happiness
of one half of its members, that does not provide for honest,
independent women, by encouraging them to fill respectable
stations? But in order to render their private virtue a public
benefit, they must have a civil existence in the state, married or
single; else we shall continually see some worthy woman, whose
sensibility has been rendered painfully acute by undeserved
contempt, droop like "the lily broken down by a plough share."
It is a melancholy truth; yet such is the blessed effects of
civilization! the most respectable women are the most oppressed;
and, unless they have understandings far superiour to the common
run of understandings, taking in both sexes, they must, from being
treated like contemptible beings, become contemptible. How many
women thus waste life away, the prey of discontent, who might have
practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and
stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging
their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes
the beauty to which it at first gave lustre; nay, I doubt whether
pity and love are so near a-kin as poets feign, for I have seldom
seen much compassion excited by the helplessness of females, unless
they were fair; then, perhaps, pity was the soft handmaid of love,
or the harbinger of lust.
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