Chapter 3:
The same subject continued
Bodily strength, once the distinction of heroes, has sunk into such undeserved contempt that men as well as women seem to think it unnecessary: women because it detracts from their feminine graces and from that lovely weakness that is the source of their undue power; and men because it seems to conflict with the character of a gentleman. [MW is probably here using ‘contempt’ in a now obsolete sense, meaning merely that bodily strength has come to be regarded as negligible.]
It won’t be hard to prove that the two sexes have both departed from one extreme and run into another; but before I come to that I should perhaps observe that a certain common error has come to have some acceptance, and this has given strength to a false conclusion in which an effect has been mistaken for a cause.
People of genius have very often impaired their constitutions by study, or by careless inattention to their health, and. . . .superficial observers have inferred from this that men of genius have commonly weak—or to use a more fashionable term, delicate—constitutions. But the truth is the opposite of that, I believe. Diligent inquiry has led me to the conclusion that strength of mind has in most cases been accompanied by superior strength of body—natural soundness of constitution, I mean, not the robust tone of nerves and vigour of muscles that come from bodily labour when the mind is at work only in directing the hands.
Dr. Priestley has remarked. . . .that the majority of great men have lived beyond ·the age of· 45. Now, think about
a great scientist who carelessly lavishes his strength when investigating his favourite science, wasting the lamp of life, forgetful of the midnight hour;
or think about
a poet lost in dreams that his imagination has peopled, and his soul disturbed—until it shakes his constitution—by the passions that his meditation has raised; passions whose purely imaginary objects fade before his exhausted eye.
They must have had iron constitutions! Shakespeare himself didn’t grasp the airy dagger with a nerveless hand, and Milton didn’t tremble when he led Satan far from the confines of his dreary prison. [MW is referring here to Macbeth’s having a vision of a dagger and saying ‘Is this a dagger I see before me? Come, let me clutch thee!’, and to this passage from Paradise Lost: ‘Satan was now at hand, and from his seat / The Monster moving onward came as fast, / With horrid strides, Hell trembled as he strode.’] These were not the ravings of imbecility, the sickly effusions of unwell brains; but the exuberance of an imagination that wasn’t continually reminded of its material shackles when it was wandering ‘in a fine frenzy’ [Shakespeare’s phrase].
I am aware that this argument would carry me further than you may think I want to go; but I follow truth, and still adhering to my first position I will admit that bodily strength seems to give man a natural superiority over woman; and this is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built. But I still insist that not only the virtue but also the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree; and that women, considered not only as moral but as rational creatures, should try to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by the same means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half -being, one of Rousseau’s wild inventions.
·A LONG FOOTNOTE QUOTING ROUSSEAU·
Researches into abstract and speculative truths, the principles and axioms of sciences—in short, everything that tends to generalise our ideas—is not the proper province of women. Their studies should concern points of practice; it is for them to apply the principles that men have discovered, and to make observations that direct men to the establishment of general principles. All the ideas of women that aren’t immediately relevant to points of duty should be directed to the study of men, and to the attainment of the pleasant accomplishments that have to do with taste. Works of genius are beyond the capacity of women, who don’t have enough precision or power of attention to succeed in sciences that require accuracy; and physical knowledge belongs only to those who are most active, most inquiring, and understand the greatest variety of things—in short, it belongs to those who are best able to make judgments about how sensible beings relate to the laws of nature. A woman who is naturally weak and doesn’t carry her ideas very far does know how to make judgments about (and form proper estimates of) the movements that she gets started in order to aid her weakness; these movements are the passions of men. The mechanism she employs is much more powerful than ours, for all her levers move the human heart. She must have the skill to incline us to do everything that she needs or wants and that her sex won’t enable her to do herself. So she ought to study the mind of man thoroughly, not abstractly the mind of man in general, but ·concretely· the dispositions of the men she is subject to by the laws of her country or by the force of opinion. She should learn to discover their real sentiments from their conversation, actions, looks and gestures. She should also work out how to communicate—by her own conversation, actions, looks, and gestures—the sentiments that are agreeable to those men, without seeming to intend it. Men will argue more philosophically about the human heart, but women will read the heart of man better than they do. It is women’s role to form an experimental morality, so to speak, and to reduce the study of man to a system. Women have more wit, men have more genius; women observe, men reason. The two together give us the clearest light and the most perfect knowledge that the human mind is capable of attaining unaided. In one word, from this source we acquire the most intimate acquaintance with ourselves and with others that we are capable of; and that is how art has a constant tendency to perfect the endowments that nature has bestowed. The world is the book of women. (from Rousseau’s Émile)
·END OF ROUSSEAU FOOTNOTE·
I hope my readers still remember the comparison I made between women and officers.
But if bodily strength is (with some show of reason) something men boast of having, why are women so foolish as to be proud of ·weakness, which is· a defect? Rousseau has provided them with a plausible excuse that could only have occurred to a man whose imagination had been allowed to run wild in a search for ways of making impressions of the senses seem more refined—to give him a pretext for yielding to a natural appetite without violating a romantic sort of modesty that gratifies his pride and his libertinism.
Women, deluded by these sentiments, sometimes boast of their weakness, cunningly obtaining power by playing on the weakness of men,. . . .and coming to have, like Turkish generals, more real power than their masters. But this involves sacrificing •virtue to •temporary gratifications, and sacrificing •a life worthy of respect to •the triumph of an hour.
[MW begins this next paragraph by saying, rather obscurely, that her objection is not to women’s having this power over men but to how they obtain it, namely by a method that is degraded and harmful to society in general. Then:] So I will venture to assert that until women are more rationally educated, the progress of human virtue and improvement in knowledge is bound to meet continual obstacles. If you accept that woman was not created merely to gratify the appetite of man, to be the upper servant who provides his meals and takes care of his linen, then you ought to grant also that
mothers or fathers who are serious about the education of females should have as their first concern: if not to strengthen the body, at least not to destroy the ·girl’s physical· constitution by mistaken notions of beauty and female excellence; and girls should never be allowed to absorb the pernicious notion that some chemical process of reasoning can turn a defect into an excellence!
On this matter I am happy to find that the author of one of the most instructive books our country has produced for children thinks as I do. . . .
·QUOTATION FROM THOMAS DAY’S Sandford and Merton·
A respectable old man gives the following sensible account of how he went about educating his daughter Selene. ‘I tried to give to both her mind and her body a degree of vigour that is seldom found in the female sex. As soon as she was strong enough to be capable of light work in the garden and around the farm, I employed her as my constant companion. Selene soon became dexterous in all these rustic jobs, which gave me equal amounts of pleasure and admiration. If women are in general feeble in body and mind, that arises less from nature than from education. We encourage a bad slackness and inactivity, which we falsely call “delicacy”; instead of hardening their minds by the severer principles of reason and philosophy, we train them in useless arts that lead only to vanity and sensuality. In most of the countries I had visited, they are taught nothing of a higher nature than a few modulations of the voice or useless postures of the body; their time is taken in idleness or trifles, and trifles become the only pursuits capable of interesting them. We seem to forget that our own domestic •comforts and the •education of our children must depend on the qualities of the female sex. And what •comforts or •education can we expect from a race of beings who are corrupted from their infancy and know nothing of the duties of life? The only arts cultivated by women in most of the polished nations I had seen were touching a musical instrument with useless skill, exhibiting their natural or artificial graces to the eyes of idle and debauched young men, and wasting their husbands’ wealth in riotous and unnecessary expenses. And the consequences are always just what you would expect to come from such polluted sources—private misery and public servitude.
‘Selene’s education was regulated by different views, and conducted on severer principles—if you can call “severe” something that opens the mind to a sense of moral and religious duties, and arms it most effectively against the inevitable evils of life.’
·END OF QUOTATION FROM Sandford and Merton, VOL. 3·
Suppose it were proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, how does it follow that it is natural for her to try to become even weaker than nature intended her to be? Arguments of this sort are an insult to common sense, and have a whiff of passion about them. I hope that in this enlightened age the divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, can be challenged without danger ·to the challenger·; and although conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, still when any prevailing prejudice is attacked the wise will think about it and leave thoughtless and noisy scolding to the narrow-minded.
A mother who wants to give her daughter true dignity of character must ignore the sneers of ignorance and proceed on a plan diametrically opposite to the one Rousseau has recommended with all the deluding charms of eloquence and philosophical trickery. His eloquence makes absurdities plausible, and when his dogmatic conclusions are considered by people who aren’t able to refute them, they produce puzzlement but no conviction.
Throughout the whole animal kingdom every young creature requires almost continual exercise, and the infancy of children should similarly be spent in harmless play that exercises the feet and hands without requiring very precise direction from the head or the constant attention of a governess. In fact, the care necessary for self-preservation is the first natural exercise of the understanding, as inventive little pastimes stretch the imagination. But these wise designs of nature are counteracted by mistaken fondness or blind zeal. The child is not left for a moment to its own direction, particularly a girl, and is thus made dependent—and dependence is called natural.
To preserve personal beauty—woman’s glory!—the girls’ limbs and faculties are cramped with worse-than-Chinese bands; and the sedentary life they are condemned to live, while boys play in the open air, weakens their muscles and slackens their nerves. [MW is referring to the Chinese practice of binding girls’ feet very tightly so as to keep them fashionably small, with the result that the adult woman could only hobble.] As for Rousseau’s remarks, since echoed by many writers, that
girls have naturally, i.e. from their birth and independent of education, a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking,
they are too puerile to merit a serious refutation. If a girl is condemned to sit for hours listening to the idle chat of weak governesses or to be present at her mother’s toilet, it is indeed very natural for her to •try to join the conversation, and •to imitate her mother or aunts and to amuse herself [see Glossary] by adorning her lifeless doll, as they amuse themselves in dressing her, poor innocent babe! Men of the greatest abilities have seldom been strong enough to rise above the surrounding atmosphere; and if the page of genius [see Glossary] has always been blurred by the prejudices of the times, some allowance should be made for ·the members of· a sex who—like kings!—always see things through a false medium.
Thus, we can easily explain women’s conspicuous fondness for dress without supposing it to come from a desire to please ·the members of· the sex on which they are dependent. In short, the supposition that
a girl is naturally a coquette, and her behaviour expresses a desire connected with nature’s impulse to propagate the species, even before an improper education has, by heating the imagination, created the desire prematurely
is absurd. It’s so unphilosophical that such an intelligent observer as Rousseau wouldn’t have adopted it if he hadn’t been accustomed to pushing his desire for uniqueness ahead of reason, and pushing a favourite paradox ahead of truth.
To give a sex [see Glossary] to mind in this way was not very consistent with the principles of a man who argued so warmly and so well for the immortality of the soul. But truth is a weak barrier when it stands in the way of an hypothesis! Rousseau respected virtue—he almost adored it—and yet he allowed himself to love with sensual fondness. His imagination constantly prepared combustible fuel for his combustible senses; but, in order to reconcile ·his other views with· his respect for self-denial, fortitude and those heroic virtues that a mind like his could not coolly admire, he tries to invert the law of nature, and launches a doctrine that is pregnant with harm and derogatory to the character of God.
His ridiculous stories that aim to show that girls are naturally attentive to their persons. . . .are beneath contempt. [She quotes one such story and says that it belongs ‘with the anecdotes of the learned pig’; this presumably refers to The Story of the Learned Pig, an anonymous work that had appeared not long before, questioning whether Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him. MW continues:]
I have probably had more opportunity to observe girls in their infancy than J. J. Rousseau has. I can recollect my own feelings, and I have looked steadily around me [for a while she had earned her living as a governess]; and far from sharing his view about the first dawn of the female character, I will venture to say that a girl whose spirits haven’t been damped by inactivity, and whose innocence hasn’t been tainted by false shame, will always be a romp [= ‘a lively playful girl’], and the doll will never interest her unless confinement allows her no alternative. Girls and boys would play harmlessly together if the difference between the sexes hadn’t been drilled into them long before nature makes any difference. Among the women I have known—this is a matter of plain objective fact—the ones who have acted like rational creatures, or shown some vigour of intellect, are ones who ·had this kind of freedom in their youth, or· in the language of some of the elegant experts on the fair sex, had been ‘allowed to run wild’.
The evils that flow from inattention to ·bodily· health during infancy and youth extend further than is supposed; dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind, and how can someone be a good wife or mother if most of her time is spent guarding against or enduring sickness? And it can’t be expected that a woman will resolutely try to strengthen her constitution, abstaining from indulgences that would harm her health, if her motives of action were at an early age entangled with artificial notions of beauty and false descriptions of sensibility. Most men sometimes have to put up with bodily troubles, and occasionally to go out into bad weather; but genteel women are, literally speaking, slaves to their bodies—and they glory in their subjection.
I once knew a weak woman. . . .who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility. [MW contemptuously gives details; she is clearly remembering a real case; the details don’t add to the content of the work as a whole. She follows this with a paragraph saying that although the Roman emperors were ‘depraved by lawless power’, kings in Europe have generally been at least somewhat restrained, and she contrasts this with ‘the destructive blast [an intensely hot wind] that desolates Turkey, and makes the men as well as the soil unfruitful’.]
Women are in this deplorable state everywhere, because truth is hidden from them so as to preserve their ‘innocence’ (the polite name for ignorance), and they are made to take on an artificial character before their faculties have acquired any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre [see Glossary], the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming around in its gilt cage it only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits that engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one pursuit and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their view beyond the triumph of the hour. But if their understanding were emancipated from the slavery to which the pride and sensuality of man and their short sighted desire. . . .has subjected them, we would probably read of their weaknesses with surprise.
Let me pursue the argument a little further. If there were an evil being who, in the allegorical language of scripture [1 Peter 5:8] ‘went about seeking whom he should devour’, he could not more effectively degrade the human character than by giving a man absolute power. This argument branches off in various directions. Birth, riches, and every intrinsic advantage that raise a man above his fellows, without any mental exertion, really sink him below them. In proportion to his weakness, he is manipulated by designing men, until the bloated monster loses all traces of humanity. And tribes of men like flocks of sheep quietly follow such a leader!—that is a blunder that can only be explained by narrowness of understanding and a desire for present enjoyment. Educated in slavish dependence and weakened by luxury and sloth, where can we find men who will stand up and •assert the rights of man, or •claim the privilege of moral beings, who should have only one road to excellence? Slavery to monarchs and ministers, whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished and won’t be for a long time.
[MW now argues that men who contend ‘that woman ought to be subjected because she has always been so’ are using the very argument that ‘tyrannical kings and venal ministers’ use to justify their subjection of everyone else, men included. Men who go on about the folly of women, she says, should bear in mind the folly of men.]
It is obviously true that when women obtain power by unjust means they lose the rank appropriate to their having reason, and become either abject slaves or capricious tyrants. In acquiring power they lose all simplicity, all dignity of mind, and act as we see men act when they have been exalted by the same wrong means.
·MOVING INTO A DISCUSSION OF GOD’S ATTRIBUTES·
It is time to bring about a revolution in female manners, time to restore their lost dignity to them and to make them, as a part of the human species, work to reform the world by reforming themselves. It is time to separate unchangeable •morals from local •manners. If men are demi-gods, then let us indeed serve them! And if the dignity of the female soul is as disputable as that of animals, if their [= women’s] reason doesn’t give enough light to direct their conduct but they don’t have unerring instinct either, they are surely the most miserable of all creatures; bent beneath the iron hand of destiny, they must submit to being a beautiful defect in creation. In that case, God has made half of mankind at once morally accountable ·because they have reason· and yet not accountable ·because they don’t have enough reason·. I challenge moral theologians to point out some conclusive reason for God to behave like that!
The only solid foundation for morality appears to be the character of the Supreme Being; the harmony of that character arises from a balance of attributes; and. . . .one attribute seems to imply the necessity of another: God must be just because he is wise, he must be good because he is omnipotent. To exalt one attribute at the expense of another equally noble and necessary one bears the stamp of warped human reason. . . . Man, accustomed to bow down to power in his savage state, can seldom get rid of this barbarous prejudice—·this attaching of weight to physical power·—even when civilization fixes how greatly mental strength is superior to bodily strength; and his reason is clouded by these crude opinions, even when he is thinking about God. His omnipotence is made to swallow up or preside over his other attributes, and mortals who think ·as I do· that his power must be regulated by his wisdom are accused of irreverently limiting his power.
There is a kind of ‘humility’ that investigates nature but stops short of nature’s Author. I disclaim that. ·God·, the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity, no doubt has many attributes of which we can form no conception; but •reason tells me that those attributes can’t clash with the divine attributes that fill me with loving wonder, and I am compelled to listen to •her voice.
It seems natural for man to search for excellence, and either to •find it in the object that he worships or •blindly clothe that object with perfection. But what good effect can the blindly-clothing type of worship have on the moral conduct of a rational being? He bends to power; he stands in wonder before a dark cloud, which may •open a bright prospect to him, or •burst in angry fury on his doomed head without his knowing why. And if God does act on the basis of the vague impulse of an undirected will, what is man to do? He must either follow his own will, or act according to rules derived from principles that he rejects as irreverent. This is a dilemma into which both fanatics and cooler thinkers have fallen when trying to free men from the wholesome restraints imposed by a correct conception of God’s character.
It isn’t impious to scan God’s attributes: we have to do it if we are to exercise our faculties. For someone wanting to acquire either virtue or knowledge, the only ·useful· worship consists in loving God as the fountain of wisdom, goodness, and power. A blind unsettled affection may, like human passions, occupy the mind and warm the heart, ·but that has no moral benefit because it can happen· while ‘doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God’ [Micah 6:8] are forgotten. I shall resume this subject when I consider religion in a light opposite to that recommended by Dr. Gregory, who treats it as a matter of sentiment or taste—·a question of how you feel or what you like·.
·END OF DISCUSSION OF GOD’S ATTRIBUTES·
Returning now from this apparent detour: It is desirable that women’s affection for their husbands should be based on the same principle that ·religious· devotion ought to rest on. Nowhere in the world is there any other firm base. Let women beware of the misleading light of ‘sentiment’, which is often used as a softer phrase for sensuality. So it follows, I think, that from their infancy women should either be •shut up like eastern princes or •educated in a manner that enables them to think and act for themselves.
Why do men halt between two opinions, and expect impossibilities? Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being who has been made weak—or worse—by the constitution of civil society?
Still, I know that eradicating the firmly rooted prejudices that sensualists have planted will take a long time; and it will also take time
•to convince women that they are acting contrary to their real long-term interests when they value weakness or pretend to have it, under the name of ‘delicacy’, and
•to convince the world that the poisoned source of female vices [see Glossary] and follies. . . .has been the sensual homage paid to beauty.
I’m talking about beauty of features; for a German writer has shrewdly observed that a pretty woman is an object of desire for men of all descriptions, whereas a fine woman, who inspires more sublime emotions by displaying intellectual beauty, may have no attraction for men who find their happiness in the gratification of their appetites.
I can see an obvious retort that may be made, namely:
For as long as man goes on being as imperfect as he appears to have been so far, he will be pretty much the slave of his appetites; and it is always the case that the women who get the most power are those who gratify a predominant appetite; so the sex is degraded by a physical if not by a moral necessity. [The last clause is verbatim MW. It means something like this: ‘The female sex will be degraded—this isn’t morally right, but it is inevitable.’]
This objection has some force, I admit; but ·it is based on the idea that if we can see that something is inevitable we shouldn’t waste our energy trying to change it; and that idea is open to question·. In the light of the sublime precept ‘be pure as your heavenly father is pure,’ it would seem that God. . . .hasn’t set any limits to the virtues of man, and that man may press forward without considering whether he is stepping out of his sphere [= ‘getting out of line’] by harbouring such a noble ambition ·as to be as pure as God is·. . . . •Matter yields to the great governing spirit by following the causal laws that he has established; but an immortal •soul, not restrained by mechanical laws and struggling to free itself from matter’s shackles, doesn’t disturb the order of creation—indeed it contributes to it—when it tries in co-operation with the Father of spirits to govern itself by the invariable rule. . . .by which the universe is regulated.
Besides, if women are educated for dependence, i.e. to act according to the will of another fallible being, and to submit to power, whether it is right or wrong, where are we to stop? Are they to be considered as vice-regents—·deputy monarchs·—allowed to reign over a small domain, and answerable for their conduct to a higher tribunal that is as liable to error as they are?
It won’t be hard to prove that such deputies will act like men who are held down by fear, and will make their children and servants endure their tyrannical oppression. As they submit without reason, so also ·they will govern without reason·: having no fixed rules against which to judge their conduct, they will be kind or cruel as the mood takes them; and it won’t be surprising if sometimes, chafing under their heavy yoke, they take a mean pleasure in resting it on weaker shoulders.
·THE CASE OF ONE WIDOW·
Consider this case:
A woman who has been trained up to obedience marries a sensible man, who directs her judgment without making her feel the servility of her subjection. He helps her to act by this reflected light with as much propriety as can be expected when reason is taken at second hand, but she can’t ensure the life of her protector; he dies and leaves her with a large family.
She now has a double duty: to play both the mother’s and the father’s part in educating her children, forming their principles and securing their property. But she has never thought for herself, much less acted for herself. She has only learned to please men, to depend gracefully on them; but how with her burden of children is she to obtain another protector, another husband to supply the place of reason? A rational man—we aren’t treading on romantic ground!—though he may think her a pleasing docile creature won’t choose to marry a family for love when the world contains many creatures who are prettier than she is. What then is to become of her? She either •falls an easy prey to some mean fortune hunter who defrauds her children of their paternal inheritance and makes her miserable, or •becomes the victim of discontent and blind indulgence. Unable to educate her sons or get them to respect her. . . ., she suffers under the anguish of impotent regret. The serpent’s tooth enters into her very soul, and the vices of lawless youth bring her with sorrow—and perhaps also with poverty—to the grave. [MW is echoing King Lear’s words ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.’]. . . .
It seems likely that someone who has been taught only to please must still find her happiness in pleasing; and if that is true of this woman, what an example of folly—and even vice—she will be to her innocent daughters! The mother will be lost in the coquette, and instead of making friends of her daughters she will view them with suspicion because they are her rivals, the cruellest rivals because they invite a comparison and drive her from the throne of beauty—she who has never thought of a seat on the bench of reason.
It doesn’t require a lively pencil. . . .to sketch the domestic miseries and petty vices which such a mistress of a family spreads around her. Yet she is only acting as a woman ought to act if she has been brought up according to Rousseau’s system. She can’t be reproached for being ‘masculine’ or stepping out of her sphere; indeed she may conform to his rules well enough to be reckoned a good kind of woman. Yet in what respect can she be termed good? It’s true that she abstains, without any great struggle, from committing gross crimes; but how does she fulfil her duties? Duties!—·she has no time or energy for duties, when· she has enough to think about in adorning her body and nursing a weak constitution.
With regard to religion, she never presumed to judge for herself. As a dependent creature should, she conformed to the ceremonies of the church she was brought up in, piously believing that wiser heads than her own have settled that business [MW’s phrase]; and her idea of perfection in religious matters is not to doubt. So she makes her little weekly payment to the church, and thanks her God that she is not as other women are. These are the blessed effects of a good education! these are the virtues of man’s helpmate. I must relieve myself—·give myself a break from my rage and sadness·—by drawing a different picture.
·THE CASE OF ANOTHER WIDOW·
Now let us imagine a woman with a fairly good understanding (I don’t want to deal with extremes), whose constitution, strengthened by ·physical· exercise, has allowed her body to acquire its full vigour; while her mind has gradually expanded itself to understand the moral duties of life and what human virtue and dignity consist in. Formed in this way by the duties she has because of her position in life, she marries from affection, without losing sight of prudence; and. . . .she secures her husband’s respect before there’s any need to exert low tricks to please him and feed a dying flame ·of love·. Nature dooms that to expire when the loved one becomes familiar, when friendship and forbearance take the place of a more ardent affection. This is the natural death of love; and ·in the marriage I am describing here· domestic peace is not destroyed by struggles to prevent the death from happening. I am also supposing the husband to be virtuous. . . .
Fate, however, breaks this tie. She is left a widow, without enough to live on comfortably, but she is not desolate! The pang of nature is felt; but after time has softened sorrow into sad resignation, her heart turns to her children with redoubled fondness, and in her anxiety to provide for them her affection presents her maternal duties as sacred and heroic. She thinks that her virtuous efforts are seen by the eye of God, from whom all her comfort now must flow and whose approval is life; and her imagination, a little abstracted and exalted by grief, lets her hope that. . . .her husband’s eyes still see how she subdues every wayward passion in order to fulfil the double duty of being father as well as mother to her children. Raised to heroism by misfortunes, she represses the first faint dawning of a natural inclination before it ripens into love; and in the bloom of life she forgets her sex [see Glossary]—forgets the pleasure of an awakening passion which might again have been inspired and returned. . . . Her children have her love, and her brightest hopes are beyond the grave, where her imagination often strays.
I think I see her surrounded by her children, reaping the reward of her care. . . . Health and innocence smile on their chubby cheeks; and as they grow up, the cares of ·her· life are lessened by their grateful attention. She lives to see the virtues that she tried to tried implant in her children through •principles become fixed in them as •habits, and to see her children achieve enough strength of character to be able to endure adversity without forgetting their mother’s example.
The task of life thus fulfilled, she calmly waits for the sleep of death. When she rises from the grave she can say ·to God· ‘Behold, you gave me a talent, and here are five talents’. [This is a variant on a story in Matthew 25; a talent was a coin.]
* * * * *
I want to sum up what I have said in a few words: I here throw down my gauntlet [= ‘pose a challenge to anyone who wants to oppose me’] and deny that there is any way for a woman to be virtuous that isn’t also a way for a man to be virtuous—and modesty is not an exception to that. If I understand the meaning of the word, truth must be the same for man and for woman; yet the fanciful female character that poets and novelists draw so prettily demands the sacrifice of truth and sincerity; and so virtue becomes a relative idea, based on nothing but utility, and men set themselves up as judges of utility, shaping it to their own convenience.
Women may have different duties to fulfill, but they are human duties, and I firmly maintain that the principles that should regulate the performance of them must be the ones that hold for all human beings.
To become worthy of respect, women must use their understandings; there is no other basis for independence of character. I mean explicitly to say that they must only bow to the authority of reason, instead of being the modest slaves of opinion.
In the upper ranks of life we seldom we meet with a man of superior abilities, or even one whose abilities are about average! The reason seems to me clear: the state they are born in was an unnatural one. The human character has always been formed by the employments the individual or class pursues; and if the faculties are not sharpened by necessity, they must remain obtuse [= ‘blunt’]. The same line of thought can fairly be extended to women. [MW is saying that women in general tend to be dim in the way that men who have titles or high rank or great wealth tend to be dim.] That is because most of them have no serious occupations; they are left to the pursuit of pleasure, which gives to their character the triviality that makes the society of the great so insipid. The lack of firmness, produced by a similar cause, forces them both—·‘great’ men and all women·—to fly from themselves [MW’s phrase] to noisy pleasures and artificial passions, until vanity takes place of every social affection, and the characteristics of humanity almost disappear from sight. The blessings of civil governments as they are at present organized operate in such a way that wealth and female softness equally tend to debase mankind, and are produced by the same cause. If women are rational creatures they should be urged to acquire virtues that they can call their own, for how can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by his or her own efforts?