y beings to contribute to the comfort and to flatter the
self-esteem of men. The belief was avowed and accepted as the
unquestioned basis of human society. Good men proclaimed it, and the
cleverest women dared not question it.

For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defended
despotism and convention in other departments of life. The most
repulsive of all definitions of the principle of sex-subjection is to be
found in Rousseau:--"The education of women should always be relative to
that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem
them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to
advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are
the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in
their infancy." When the men of the eighteenth century said this, they
meant it, and they accepted not only its plain meaning, but its remotest
logical consequences. It was a denial of the humanity and personality of
women. A slave is a human being, whom the law deprives of his right to
sell his labour. A woman had to learn that her subjection affected not
only her relations to men, but her attitude to nature and to God. The
subtle poison ran in her veins when she prayed and when she studied.
Subject in her body, she was enslaved in mind and soul as well. Milton
saw the husband as a priest intervening between a woman and her God:--

He for God only, she for God in him.

Even on her knees a woman did not escape the consciousness of sex, and a
manual of morality written by a learned divine (Dr. Fordyce) assured her
that a "fine woman" never "strikes so deeply" as when a man sees her
bent in prayer. She was encouraged to pray that she might be seen of
men--men who scrutinised her with the eyes of desire. It is a woman,
herself something of a "blue-stocking," who has left us the most
pathetic statement of the intellectual fetters which her sex accepted.
Women, says Mrs. Barbauld, "must often be content to know that a thing
is so, without understanding the proof." They "cannot investigate; they
may remember." She warns the girls whom she is addressing that if they
will steal knowledge, they must learn, like the Spartan youths, to hide
their furtive gains. "The thefts of knowledge in our sex are only
connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed punished with
disgrace."

Religion was sullied; knowledge was closed; but above all the sentimen