ther; but no effort of philanthropic
self-abnegation can work the same miracle for a woman. When you preach
the natural equality of the sexes, you injure your cause. The facts are
too strong and too visible for you. A man can rest his claim to
superiority on brute force, if on nothing else; and force is, after all,
the ultimate basis of all government. I do not mean to underrate the
cleverness of women. The first man was overreached by Eve; and the last
woman will probably turn the head of the laggard who brings up the rear
of the human race. If a wife is only half of the scissors, as Franklin
suggests, she is often the half with the point. But feminine ability is
not of the ruling kind. You dance, for instance, better than men, if the
gymnastic capers of acrobats and tumblers can be called dancing at all;
but you cannot wield a sledge-hammer as vigorously, and your excellent
performances, numerous in literature, rarer in art, and still more rare
in science, seem to me to be mostly of the dancing rather than of the
sledge-hammer order.

But success would be your ruin. If you could establish the complete
equality you long for, your relative inferiority would become so
manifest as to be humiliating. In most of the vocations of men, women
would be as ridiculous, morally, as they are physically in men's
clothes. If a woman is nothing but a smaller man, the savage contempt
for the sex is logical. Place two races together, of which the one is
weaker, less energetic, less pugnacious than the other; and the result
will inevitably be that the strong and the fierce will make the mild and
the feeble do all their hard work. The barbarous ages would return
again. We should sit by, like the Indian, smoking the pipe of laziness,
while you were furnishing us with board, lodging, clothes, and tobacco.
The Amazons, the earliest known advocates of women's rights, saw this
point clearly; and consequently excluded men altogether from their
communities, except at their yearly camp-meetings. Men worship women for
their gentleness, affection, imagination, refinement,--for the fond,
cosey, nestling way they have with them,--for their femininity (in one
awkward word), the contrast and complement to the masculine character.
There is a sex in soul quite as much as in body. In the mythology, no
god falls in love with Minerva. A mannish woman only attracts a feminine
man. A woman's power lies in her petticoats, as Samson's strength lay in
his hair.