husband ceases to be a lover--and the
time will inevitably come--her desire of pleasing will then grow
languid, or become a spring of bitterness; and love, perhaps the
most evanescent of all passions, give place to jealousy or vanity.

"I now speak of women who are restrained by principle or prejudice;
such women, though they would shrink from an intrigue with real
abhorrence, yet, nevertheless, wish to be convinced by the homage
of gallantry, that they are cruelly neglected by their husbands; or
days and weeks are spent in dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by
congenial souls, till the health is undermined and the spirits
broken by discontent. How, then, can the great art of pleasing be
such a necessary study? It is only useful to a mistress; the chaste
wife and serious mother should only consider her power to please as
the polish of her virtues, and the affection of her husband as one
of the comforts that render her task less difficult, and her life
happier."

Coquettish arts triumph only for a day. Love, the most transitory of all
passions, is inevitably succeeded by friendship or indifference.

The arguments which have been advanced to support this degrading system
of female education are easily proved to have no foundation in reason.
Women, it is said, are not so strong physically as men. True; but this
does not imply that they have no strength whatsoever. Because they are
weak relatively, it does not follow that they should be made so
absolutely. The sedentary life to which they are condemned weakens them,
and then their weakness is accepted as an inherent, instead of an
artificial, quality. Rousseau concludes that a woman is naturally a
coquette, and governed in all matters by the sexual instinct, because her
earliest amusements consist in playing with dolls, dressing them and
herself, and in talking. These conclusions are almost too puerile to be
refuted:--

"That a girl, condemned to sit for hours listening to the idle chat
of weak nurses or to attend at her mother's toilet, will endeavor
to join the conversation, is indeed very natural; and that she will
imitate her mother or aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her
lifeless doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is
undoubtedly a most natural consequence. For men of the greatest
abilities have seldom had sufficient strength to rise ab