ets us in other halls than those of the Vatican.
Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of
conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of
intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by
sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action
which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of
home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is
taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan
for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after
all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.

The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the
enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the
matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its
responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and
abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself
snubbed for his pains. He is calmly assured that home is the sphere of
woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the
domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the _Princess_
that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to
wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the
nature of her spouse.

In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her
friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is
always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror
goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that,
in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid
pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the
sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a
religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance
with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes
her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.

It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power
even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the
simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists
simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is
never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the
feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine thin