t
of the day perverted morals. Here, too, everything was relative to men,
and men demanded a sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage,
honour, truth, sincerity, independence--these were items in a male
ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the
marriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a
sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing
view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating _Letter to
a very young lady on her marriage_, "which is generally allowed you, I
mean that of cowardice," and he goes on to express what was in his day
the wholly unorthodox view that "the same virtues equally become both
sexes." There he was singular. The business of a woman was to cultivate
those virtues most conducive to her prosperity in the one avocation open
to her. That avocation was marriage, and the virtues were those which
her prospective employer, the average over-sexed male, anxious at all
points to feel his superiority, would desire in a subject wife.
Submission was the first of them, and submission became the foundation
of female virtue. Lord Kames, a forgotten but once popular Scottish
philosopher, put the point quite fairly (the quotation, together with
that from Mrs. Barbauld, is to be found in Mr. Lyon Blease's valuable
book on _The Emancipation of Englishwomen_): "Women, destined by nature
to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without
murmuring.... This is essential to the female sex, for ever subjected to
the authority of a single person."

The rest of morality was summed up in the precepts of the art of
pleasing. Chastity had, of course, its incidental place; it enhances the
pride of possession. The art of pleasing was in practice a kind of
furtive conquest by stratagems and wiles, by tears and blushes, in which
the woman, by an assumed passivity, learned to excite the passions of
the male. Rousseau owed much of his popularity to his artistic statement
of this position:--"If woman be formed to please and to be subjected to
man, it is her place, doubtless, to render herself agreeable to him....
The violence of his desires depends on her charms; it is by means of
these that she should urge him to the exertion of those powers which
nature hath given him. The most successful method of exciting them is to
render such exertion necessary by resistance; as in that case self-love
is added to desire, and the one