A sermon preached by Dr. Richard Price was the immediate reason which moved Burke to write the "Reflections." The Revolutionists were in the habit of meeting every 4th of November, the anniversary of the arrival of the Prince of Orange in England, to commemorate the Revolution of 1688.
Dr. Price was, in 1789, the orator of the day. He, on this occasion, expressed his warm approbation of the actions of the French Republicans, in which sentiment he was warmly seconded by all the other members of the society. Burke seized upon these demonstrations as a pretext for expounding his own views upon the proceedings in France. The sermon and orations were really not of enough importance to evoke the long essay with which he favored them. But though he began by denouncing the English Revolutionists in particular, the subject so inflamed him that before he had finished, he had written without restraint his opinion of the social struggle of the French people, and given his definition of the word Liberty, then in everybody"s mouth. As he wrote, news came pouring into England of later political developments in France which increased instead of lessening his hatred and distrust of the Revolution. It was a year before he had finished his work, and it had then grown into a lengthy and elaborate treatise.
The "Reflections" gives a careful exposition of the errors of the French Republican party, and the shortcomings of the National a.s.sembly; and, to add to this the force of ant.i.thesis, it extols the merits and virtues of the English Const.i.tution. Furthermore, it points out the evil consequences which must follow the realization of the French attempts at reform. But the real question at issue is the nature of the rights of men. It was to gain for their countrymen the justice which they thought their due, that the revolutionary leaders curtailed the power of the king, lowered the n.o.bility, and disgraced the clergy. If it could be proved that their conception of human justice was wholly wrong, the very foundation of their political structure would be destroyed. Burke"s arguments, therefore, are all intended to achieve this end.
In her detestation of his insensibility to the natural equality of mankind, Mary was too impatient to consider the minor points of his reasoning. She announces in her Advertis.e.m.e.nt that she intends to confine her strictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he levels his ingenious arguments. Her object, therefore, as well as Burke"s, is to demonstrate what are the rights of men, but she reasons from a very different stand-point. Burke defends the claims of those who inherit rights from long generations of ancestors; Mary cries aloud in defence of men whose one inheritance is the deprivation of all rights.
Burke is moved by the misery of a Marie Antoinette, shorn of her greatness; Mary, by the wretchedness of the poor peasant woman who has never possessed even its shadow. The former knows no birthright for individuals save that which results from the prescription of centuries; the latter contends that every man has a right, as a human being, to "such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of the other individuals with whom he is united in social compact." Burke a.s.serts that the present rights of man cannot be decided by reason alone, since they are founded on laws and customs long established. But Mary asks, How far back are we to go to discover their first foundation? Is it in England to the reign of Richard II., whose incapacity rendered him a mere cipher in the hands of the Barons; or to that of Edward III., whose need for money forced him to concede certain privileges to the commons? Is social slavery to be encouraged because it was established in semi-barbarous days? Does Burke, she continues,--
"... recommend night as the fittest time to a.n.a.lyze a ray of light?
"Are we to seek for the rights of men in the ages when a few marks were the only penalty imposed for the life of a man, and death for death when the property of the rich was touched?--when--I blush to discover the depravity of our nature--a deer was killed! Are these the laws that it is natural to love, and sacrilegious to invade?
Were the rights of men understood when the law authorized or tolerated murder?--or is power and right the same?"
Burke"s contempt for the poor, which Mary thought the most conspicuous feature of his treatise, was the chief cause of her indignation. She could not endure silently his admonitions to the laboring cla.s.s to respect the property which they could not possess, and his exhortations to them to find their consolation for ill-rewarded labor in the "final proportions of eternal justice." "It is, sir, possible," she tells him with some dignity, "to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next." To her mind, the oppression which the lower cla.s.ses had endured for ages, until they had become in the end beings scarcely above the brutes, made the losses of the French n.o.bility and clergy seem by comparison very insignificant evils. The horrors of the 6th of October, the discomforts and degradation of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and the dest.i.tution to which many French refugees had been reduced, blinded Burke to the long-suffering of the mult.i.tude which now rendered the distress of the few imperative. But Mary"s feelings were all stirred in the opposite cause.
"What," she asks in righteous indignation,--"what were the outrages of the day to these continual miseries? Let those sorrows hide their diminished heads before the tremendous mountain of woe that thus defaces our globe! Man preys on man, and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a Gothic pile, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer. You mourn for the empty pageant of a name, when slavery flaps her wing, and the sick heart retires to die in lonely wilds, far from the abodes of man. Did the pangs you felt for insulted n.o.bility, the anguish which rent your heart when the gorgeous robes were torn off the idol human weakness had set up, deserve to be compared with the long-drawn sigh of melancholy reflection, when misery and vice thus seem to haunt our steps, and swim on the top of every cheering prospect? Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a h.e.l.l beyond the grave? h.e.l.l stalks abroad: the lash resounds on a slave"s naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labor, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good-night, or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes its last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants."
Occasionally Mary interrupts the main drift of her "Letter" to refute some of the incidental statements in the "Reflections." But in doing this she is more eager to show the evils of English political and social laws, which Burke praises so unreservedly, than to prove that many existed in the old French government, a fact which he obstinately refuses to recognize. This may have been because she then knew little more than Burke of the real state of affairs in France, and would not take the time to collect her proofs. This is very likely, for the chief fault of her "Letter" is undue haste in its composition. It was written on the spur of the moment, and is without the method indispensable to such a work. There is no order in the arguments advanced, and too often reasoning gives place to exhortation and meditation. Another serious error is the personal abuse with which her "Letter" abounds. She treats Burke in the very same manner with which she reproves him for treating Dr. Price.
Instead of confining herself to denunciation of his views, she attacks his character, she accuses him of vanity and susceptibility to the charms of rank, of insincerity and affectation. She calls him a slave of impulse, and tells him he is too full of himself, and even compares his love for the English Const.i.tution to the brutal affection of weakness built on blind, indolent tenderness, rather than on rational grounds.
Sometimes she grows eloquent in her sarcasm.
"... On what principle you, sir," she observes, "can justify the Reformation, which tore up by the roots an old establishment, I cannot guess,--but I beg your pardon, perhaps you do not wish to justify it, and have some mental reservation to excuse you to yourself, for not openly avowing your reverence. Or, to go further back, had you been a Jew, you must have joined in the cry, "Crucify him! Crucify him!" The promulgator of a new doctrine, and the violator of old laws and customs, that did not, like ours, melt into darkness and ignorance, but rested on Divine authority, must have been a dangerous innovator in your eyes, particularly if you had not been informed that the Carpenter"s Son was of the stock and lineage of David."
But vituperation is not argument, and abuse proves nothing. This is a fault, however, into which youth readily falls. Mary was young when she wrote the "Vindication of the Rights of Man," and feeling was still too strong to be forgotten in calm discussion. It was a mistake, too, to dwell, as she did, on the inconsistency between Burke"s earlier and present policy. This was a powerful weapon against him at the time, but posterity has recognized the consistency which, in reality, underlay his seemingly diverse political creeds. Besides, the demonstration that sentiments in the "Reflections" were at variance with others expressed some years previously, did not prove them to be unsound.
Because of these faults of youth and haste, Mary"s "Letter" is not very powerful when considered as a reply to Burke; but its intrinsic merits are many. It is a simple, uncompromising expression of honest opinions.
It is n.o.ble in its fearlessness, and it manifests a philosophical insight into the meaning and basis of morality wonderful in a woman of Mary"s age. It really deserves the praise bestowed upon it in the "a.n.a.lytical Review," where the critic says that, "notwithstanding it may be the "effusion of the moment," [it] yet evidently abounds with just sentiments and lively and animated remarks, expressed in elegant and nervous language, and which may be read with pleasure and improvement when the controversy which gave rise to them is over."
CHAPTER VI.
"VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN."
The "Vindication of the Rights of Women" is the work on which Mary Wollstonecraft"s fame as an author rests. It is more than probable that, but for it, her other writings would long since have been forgotten. In it she speaks the first word in behalf of female emanc.i.p.ation. Her book is the forerunner of a movement which, whatever may be its results, will always be ranked as one of the most important of the nineteenth century.
Many of her propositions are, to the present advocates of the cause, foregone conclusions. Hers was the voice of one crying in the wilderness to prepare the way. Her princ.i.p.al task was to demonstrate that the old ideals were false.
The then most exalted type of feminine perfection was Rousseau"s Sophia.
Though this was an advance from the conception of the s.e.x which inspired Congreve, when he made the women of his comedies mere targets for men"s gallantries, or Swift, when he wrote his "Advice to a Young Married Lady," it was still a low estimate of woman"s character and sphere of action. According to Rousseau, and the Dr. Gregorys and Fordyces who re-echoed his doctrines in England, women are so far inferior to men that their contribution to the comfort and pleasure of the latter is the sole reason for their existence. For them virtue and duty have a relative and not an absolute value. What they _are_ is of no consequence. The essential point is what they _seem_ to men. That they are human beings is lost sight of in the all-engrossing fact that they are women.
It is strange that Rousseau, who would have had men return to a state of nature that they might be freed from shams and conventionalities, did not see that the sacrifice of reality to appearances was quite as bad for women. Mary Wollstonecraft, farther-sighted than he, discovered at once the flaw in his reasoning. What was said of Schopenhauer by a Frenchman could with equal truth be said of her: "Ce n"est pas un philosophe comme les autres, c"est un philosophe qui a vu le monde." She had lived in woman"s world, and consequently, unlike the sentimentalists who were accepted authorities on the subject, she did not reason from an outside stand-point. This was probably what helped her not only to recognize the false position of her s.e.x, but to understand the real cause of the trouble. She referred it, not to individual cases of masculine tyranny or feminine incompetency, but to the fundamental misconception of the relations of the s.e.xes. Therefore, what she had to do was to awaken mankind to the knowledge that women are human beings, and then to insist that they should be given the opportunity to a.s.sert themselves as such, and that their s.e.x should become a secondary consideration. It would have been useless for her to a.n.a.lyze their rights in detail until she had established the premises upon which their claims must rest. It is true she contends for their political emanc.i.p.ation. "I really think," she writes, "that women ought to have representatives instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." And she also maintains their ability for the practice of many professions, especially of medicine. But this she says, as it were, in parenthesis. These necessary reforms cannot be even begun until the equality of the s.e.xes as human beings is proved beyond a doubt. The object of the "Vindication" is to demonstrate this equality, and to point out the preliminary measures by which it may be secured.
The book is now seldom read. Others of later date have supplanted it.
Conservative readers are prejudiced against it because of its t.i.tle. The majority of the liberal-minded have not the patience to master its contents because they can find its propositions expressed more satisfactorily elsewhere. Yet, as a work which marks an epoch, it deserves to be well known. A comprehensive a.n.a.lysis of it will therefore not be out of place.
It begins strangely, as it appears to this generation, with a dedication to Talleyrand. Mary had seen him often when he had been in London, and only knew what was best in him. She admired his principles, being ignorant of his utter indifference to them. He had lately published a pamphlet on National Education, and this was a subject upon which, in vindicating women"s rights, she had much to say. He had, in pleading the cause of equality for all men, approached so closely to the whole truth that she thought, once this was pointed out to him, he could not fail to recognize it as she did. If he believed that, in his own words, "to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all partic.i.p.ation in government was a political phenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain," he could not logically deny that prescription was unjust when applied to women. Therefore, as a new const.i.tution--the first based upon reason--was about to be established in France, she reminds him that its framers would be tyrants like their predecessors if they did not allow women to partic.i.p.ate in it. In order to command his interest, she explains briefly and concisely the truth which she proposes to prove by her arguments, and thus she gives immediately the keynote to her book.
"Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument," she tells him, "is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge; for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. And how can woman be expected to co-operate unless she know why she ought to be virtuous; unless freedom strengthen her reason till she comprehend her duty, and see in what manner it is connected with her real good? If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot; and the love of mankind, from which an orderly train of virtues spring, can only be produced by considering the moral and civil interests of mankind; but the education and situation of woman, at present, shuts her out from such investigations.
"In this work I have produced many arguments, which to me were conclusive, to prove that the prevailing notion respecting a s.e.xual character was subversive of morality; and I have contended, that to render the human body and mind more perfect, chast.i.ty must more universally prevail, and that chast.i.ty will never be respected in the male world till the person of a woman is not, as it were, idolized, when little virtue or sense embellish it with the grand traces of mental beauty or the interesting simplicity of affection."
In her Introduction Mary further states the object and scope of her work.
She advances the importance of bringing to a more healthy condition women, who, like flowers nourished in over-luxuriant soil, have become beautiful at the expense of strength. She attributes their weakness to the systems of education which have aimed at making them alluring mistresses rather than rational wives, and taught them to crave love, instead of exacting respect. But, to prevent misunderstanding, she explains that she does not wish them to seek to transform themselves into men by cultivating essentially masculine qualities. They are inferior physically, and must be content to remain so. Enthusiasm never carried her to the absurd and exaggerated extremes which have made later champions of the cause laughing-stocks. She also expresses her intention of steering clear of an error into which most writers upon the subject, with the exception perhaps of the author of "Sandford and Merton," have fallen; namely, that of addressing their instruction to women of the upper cla.s.ses. But she intends, while including all ranks of society, to give particular attention to the middle cla.s.s, who appear to her to be in a more natural state. Then, warning her s.e.x that she will treat them like rational creatures, and not as beings doomed to perpetual childhood, she tells them:--
"... I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of s.e.x, and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone."
The Introduction is important because, as she says, it is the "very essence of an introduction to give a cursory account of the contents of the work it introduces." Having learnt from it what she intends to do, it remains to be seen how she accomplishes her task.
For the convenience of readers, the treatise may be divided into three parts, though the author does not make this division, and was probably unconscious of its possibility. The first chapters give a general statement of the case. The second part is an elaboration of the first, and is more concerned with individual forms of the evil than with it as a whole. The third part suggests the remedy by which women are to be delivered from social slavery.
Mary a.s.sumes as the basis of her entire argument that "the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society." The moral value of equality she demonstrates by the wretchedness and wickedness which result whenever there is a subst.i.tution of arbitrary power for the law of reason. The regal position, for example, is gained by vile intrigues and unnatural crimes and vices, and maintained by the sacrifice of true wisdom and virtue. Military discipline, since it demands unquestioning submission to the will of others, encourages thoughtless action. Even the clergy, because of the blind acquiescence required from them to certain forms of belief, have their faculties cramped. This being the case, it follows that society, "as it becomes more enlightened, should be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must necessarily be made foolish or vicious by the very const.i.tution of their profession." Now women, that is to say, one half of the human race, have hitherto, on account of their s.e.x, been absolutely debarred from the exercise of reason in forming their conduct. As women it has been supposed that they cannot have the same ideals as men. What is vice for the latter is for them virtue. Their duty is to acquire "cunning, softness of temper, _outward_ obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety." They are to render themselves "gentle domestic brutes." In their education the training of their understanding is to be neglected for the cultivation of corporeal accomplishments. They are bidden to obey no laws save those of behavior, to which they are as complete slaves as soldiers are to the commands of their general, or the clergy to the _ex cathedra_ utterances of their church. Fondness for dress, habits of dissimulation, and the affectation of a sickly delicacy are recommended for their cultivation as essentially feminine qualities; yet if virtue have but one eternal standard, it should be the same in quality for the two s.e.xes, even if there must be a difference in the degree acquired by each. If women be moral beings, they should aim at unfolding all their faculties, and not, as Rousseau and his disciples would have them do, labor only to make themselves pleasing s.e.xually. Even if this be counted a praiseworthy end, and they succeed in it, to what or how long will it avail them? The result proves the unsoundness of such doctrines:--
"The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband"s heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is past and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties; or is it not more rational to expect, that she will try to please other men, and, in the emotions raised by the expectation of new conquests, endeavor to forget the mortification her love or pride has received? When the husband ceases to be a lover--and the time will inevitably come--her desire of pleasing will then grow languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps the most evanescent of all pa.s.sions, give place to jealousy or vanity.
"I now speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice; such women, though they would shrink from an intrigue with real abhorrence, yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage of gallantry, that they are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or days and weeks are spent in dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by congenial souls, till the health is undermined and the spirits broken by discontent. How, then, can the great art of pleasing be such a necessary study? It is only useful to a mistress; the chaste wife and serious mother should only consider her power to please as the polish of her virtues, and the affection of her husband as one of the comforts that render her task less difficult, and her life happier."
Coquettish arts triumph only for a day. Love, the most transitory of all pa.s.sions, is inevitably succeeded by friendship or indifference.
The arguments which have been advanced to support this degrading system of female education are easily proved to have no foundation in reason.
Women, it is said, are not so strong physically as men. True; but this does not imply that they have no strength whatsoever. Because they are weak relatively, it does not follow that they should be made so absolutely. The sedentary life to which they are condemned weakens them, and then their weakness is accepted as an inherent, instead of an artificial, quality. Rousseau concludes that a woman is naturally a coquette, and governed in all matters by the s.e.xual instinct, because her earliest amus.e.m.e.nts consist in playing with dolls, dressing them and herself, and in talking. These conclusions are almost too puerile to be refuted:--
"That a girl, condemned to sit for hours listening to the idle chat of weak nurses or to attend at her mother"s toilet, will endeavor to join the conversation, is indeed very natural; and that she will imitate her mother or aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is undoubtedly a most natural consequence. For men of the greatest abilities have seldom had sufficient strength to rise above the surrounding atmosphere; and if the page of genius has always been blurred by the prejudices of the age, some allowance should be made for a s.e.x, who, like kings, always see things through a false medium."
The truth is, were girls allowed the same freedom in the choice of amus.e.m.e.nts as boys, they would manifest an equal fondness for out-of-door sports, to the neglect of dolls and frivolous pastimes. But it is denied to them. Directors of their education have, as a rule, been blind adherents to the doctrine that whatever is, is right, and hence have argued that because women have always been brought up in a certain way they should continue to be so trained.
The worst of it is that the artificial delicacy of const.i.tution thus produced is the cause of a corresponding weakness of mind; and women are in actual fact _fair defects_ in creation, as they have been called. And yet, after having been unfitted for action, they are expected to be competent to take charge of a family. The woman who is well-disposed, and whose husband is a sensible man, may act with propriety so long as he is alive to direct her. But if he were to die how could she alone educate her children and manage her household with discretion? The woman who is ill-disposed is not only incapacitated for her duties, but, in her desire to please and to have pleasure, she neglects dull domestic cares.
"It does not require a lively pencil, or the discriminating outline of a caricature, to sketch the domestic miseries and petty vices which such a mistress of a family diffuses. Still, she only acts as a woman ought to act, brought up according to Rousseau"s system.
She can never be reproached for being masculine, or turning out of her sphere; nay, she may observe another of his grand rules, and, cautiously preserving her reputation free from spot, be reckoned a good kind of woman. Yet in what respect can she be termed good? She abstains, it is true, without any great struggle, from committing gross crimes; but how does she fulfil her duties? Duties--in truth, she has enough to think of to adorn her body and nurse a weak const.i.tution.
"With respect to religion, she never presumes to judge for herself; but conforms, as a dependent creature should, to the ceremonies of the church which she was brought up in, piously believing that wiser heads than her own have settled that business; and not to doubt is her point of perfection. She therefore pays her t.i.the of mint and c.u.mmin, and thanks her G.o.d that she is not as other women are. These are the blessed effects of a good education! these the virtues of man"s helpmate!"
At this point Mary, after having given the picture of woman as she is now, describes her as she ought to be. This description is worth quoting, but not because it contains any originality of thought or charm of expression. It is interesting as showing exactly what the first sower of the seeds of female enfranchis.e.m.e.nt expected to reap for her harvest.
People who are frightened by a name are apt to suppose that women who defend their rights would have the world filled with uninspired Joans of Arc, and unrefined Portias. Those who judge Mary Wollstonecraft by her conduct, without inquiring into her motives or reading her book, might conclude that what she desired was the destruction of family ties and, consequently, of moral order. Therefore, in justice to her, the purity of her ideals of feminine perfection and her respect for the sanct.i.ty of domestic life should be clearly established. This can not be better done than by giving her own words on the subject:--
"Let fancy now present a woman with a tolerable understanding,--for I do not wish to leave the line of mediocrity,--whose const.i.tution, strengthened by exercise, has allowed her body to acquire its full vigor, her mind at the same time gradually expanding itself to comprehend the moral duties of life, and in what human virtue and dignity consist. Formed thus by the relative duties of her station, she marries from affection, without losing sight of prudence; and looking beyond matrimonial felicity, she secures her husband"s respect before it is necessary to exert mean arts to please him, and feed a dying flame, which nature doomed to expire when the object became familiar, when friendship and forbearance take the place of a more ardent affection. This is the natural death of love, and domestic peace is not destroyed by struggles to prevent its extinction. I also suppose the husband to be virtuous; or she is still more in want of independent principles.
"Fate, however, breaks this tie. She is left a widow, perhaps without a sufficient provision; but she is not desolate. The pang of nature is felt; but after time has softened sorrow into melancholy resignation, her heart turns to her children with redoubled fondness, and, anxious to provide for them, affection gives a sacred, heroic cast to her maternal duties. She thinks that not only the eye sees her virtuous efforts from whom all her comfort now must flow, and whose approbation is life; but her imagination, a little abstracted and exalted by grief, dwells on the fond hope that the eyes which her trembling hand closed may still see how she subdues every wayward pa.s.sion to fulfil the double duty of being the father as well as the mother of 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 forgets her s.e.x, forgets the pleasure of an awakening pa.s.sion, which might again have been inspired and returned. She no longer thinks of pleasing, and conscious dignity prevents her from priding herself on account of the praise which her conduct demands. Her children have her love, and her highest 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. The intelligent eye meets hers, whilst health and innocence smile on their chubby cheeks, and as they grow up the cares of life are lessened by their grateful attention. She lives to see the virtues which she endeavored to plant on principles, fixed into habits, to see her children attain a strength of character sufficient to enable them to endure adversity without forgetting their mother"s example.
"The task of life thus fulfilled, she calmly waits for the sleep of death, and rising from the grave may say, Behold, thou gavest me a talent, and here are five talents."
Truly, if this be the result of the vindication of their rights, even the most devoted believer in Rousseau must admit that women thereby will gain, and not lose, in true womanliness.
From the primal source of their wrongs,--that is, the undue importance attached to the s.e.xual character,--Mary next explains that minor causes have arisen to prevent women from realizing this ideal. The narrowness of mind engendered by their vicious education hinders them from looking beyond the interests of the present. They consider immediate rather than remote effects, and prefer to be "short-lived queens than to labor to attain the sober pleasures that arise from equality." Then, again, the desire to be loved or respected for something, which is instinctive in all human beings, is gratified in women by the homage paid to charms born of indolence. They thus, like the rich, lose the stimulus to exertion which this desire gives to men of the middle cla.s.s, and which is one of the chief factors in the development of rational creatures. A man with a profession struggles to succeed in it. A woman struggles to marry advantageously. With the former, pleasure is a relaxation; with the latter, it is the main purpose of life. Therefore, while the man is forced to forget himself in his work, the woman"s attention is more and more concentrated upon her own person. The great evil of this self-culture is that the emotions are developed instead of the intellect.
Women become a prey to what is delicately called sensibility. They feel and do not reason, and, depending upon men for protection and advice, the only effort they make is to give their weakness a graceful covering. They require, in the end, support even in the most trifling circ.u.mstances.
Their fears are perhaps pretty and attractive to men, but they reduce them to such a degree of imbecility that they will start "from the frown of an old cow or the jump of a mouse," and a rat becomes a serious danger. These fair, fragile creatures are the objects of Mary Wollstonecraft"s deepest contempt, and she gives a good wholesome prescription for their cure, which, despite modern co-education and Women Conventions, female doctors and lawyers, might still be more generally adopted to great advantage. It is in such pa.s.sages as the following that she proves the practical tendency of her arguments:--