ut the trifling objects our eyes
are daily entertained with. This custom so long established and
industriously upheld makes it even ridiculous to go out of the common
road, and forces one to find as many excuses as if it was a thing
altogether criminal not to play the fool in concert with other women
of quality, whose birth and leisure only serve to render them the most
useless and most worthless part of the creation. There is hardly a
creature in the world more despicable or more liable to universal
ridicule than a learned woman! These words imply, according to
the received sense, a tattling, impertinent, vain, and conceited
creature.... The Abbe Bellegarde gives a reason for women's talking
over much: they know nothing, and every outward object strikes their
imagination and produces a multitude of thoughts, which, if they knew
more, they would know not worth thinking of. I am not now arguing
for an equality of the two sexes. I do not doubt God and nature have
thrown us into an inferior rank; we are a lower part of the creation,
we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any woman who
suffers her folly and vanity to deny this rebels against the laws of
the Creator, and indisputable order of nature; but there is a worse
effect than this, which follows the careless education given to women
of quality--it's being so easy for any man of sense, that finds it
either his interest or his pleasure to corrupt them. The common
method is to begin by attacking their religion: they bring a thousand
fallacious arguments their excessive ignorance hinders them from
refuting; and, I speak now from my own knowledge and conversation
among them, there are more atheists among the fine ladies than among
the lowest sort of rakes." This bitter plaint of a lady of quality,
with its humiliating acknowledgment of the inferiority of her sex
and the hopelessness of that inferiority, sounds very pathetic in
the light of the present-day estimate of woman and her acknowledged
equality with man in all matters, saving only in the exercise of the
public functions for which the advocates of the full programme of
woman's rights contend.

It is not surprising that women of intellectual gifts grew morbid
under a sense of social inferiority; it is not strange that they hid
their light under a bushel, and were afraid of acknowledging their
talents or their aspirations, when men regarded learning for their
daughters "as great a profanation as the