e rather than
remote effects, and prefer to be "short-lived queens than to labor to
attain the sober pleasures that arise from equality." Then, again, the
desire to be loved or respected for something, which is instinctive in
all human beings, is gratified in women by the homage paid to charms born
of indolence. They thus, like the rich, lose the stimulus to exertion
which this desire gives to men of the middle class, and which is one of
the chief factors in the development of rational creatures. A man with a
profession struggles to succeed in it. A woman struggles to marry
advantageously. With the former, pleasure is a relaxation; with the
latter, it is the main purpose of life. Therefore, while the man is
forced to forget himself in his work, the woman's attention is more and
more concentrated upon her own person. The great evil of this
self-culture is that the emotions are developed instead of the intellect.
Women become a prey to what is delicately called sensibility. They feel
and do not reason, and, depending upon men for protection and advice, the
only effort they make is to give their weakness a graceful covering. They
require, in the end, support even in the most trifling circumstances.
Their fears are perhaps pretty and attractive to men, but they reduce
them to such a degree of imbecility that they will start "from the frown
of an old cow or the jump of a mouse," and a rat becomes a serious
danger. These fair, fragile creatures are the objects of Mary
Wollstonecraft's deepest contempt, and she gives a good wholesome
prescription for their cure, which, despite modern co-education and Women
Conventions, female doctors and lawyers, might still be more generally
adopted to great advantage. It is in such passages as the following that
she proves the practical tendency of her arguments:--

"I am fully persuaded that we should hear of none of these
infantine airs if girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise
and not confined in close rooms till their muscles are relaxed and
their powers of digestion destroyed. To carry the remark still
further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps
created, was treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we
should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true
they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet
flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more
respectable membe