e it can be proved that
they have none.

While each individual man is much to blame in encouraging the false
position of women, inconsistently degrading those from whom they pretend
to derive their chief pleasure, still greater fault lies with writers who
have given to the world in their works opinions which, seemingly
favorable, are in reality of a derogatory character to the entire sex.
Having set themselves up as teachers, they are doubly responsible. They
add to their personal influence that of their written doctrine. They
necessarily become leaders, since the majority of men are more than
willing to be led. There were several writers of the eighteenth century
who had dogmatized about women and their education and the laws of
behavior. Rousseau was to many as an inspired prophet. No woman's library
was then considered complete which did not include Dr. Fordyce's Sermons
and Dr. Gregory's "Legacy to His Daughters." Mrs. Piozzi and Madame de
Stael were minor authorities, and Lord Chesterfield's Letters had their
admirers and upholders. These writers Mary treats separately, after she
has shown the result of the tacit teaching of men, taken collectively;
and here what may be called the second part of the book begins.

As Mary says, the comments which follow can all be referred to a few
simple principles, and "might have been deduced from what I have already
said." They are a mere elaboration of what has gone before, and it would
be therefore useless to repeat them. She exposes the folly of Rousseau's
ideal, the perfect Sophia who unites the endurance of a Griselda to the
wiles of a Vivien, and whose principal mission seems to be to make men
wonder, with the French cynic, of what use women over forty are in the
world. She objects to Dr. Fordyce's eulogium of female purity and his
Rousseau-inspired appeals to women to make themselves all that is
desirable in men's eyes, expressed in "lover-like phrases of pumped-up
passion." The sensuous piety of his Sermons, suggestive of the erotic
religious poems of the East, were particularly offensive to her. She next
regrets that Dr. Gregory, at such a solemn moment as that of giving last
words of advice to his daughters, should have added the weight of his
authority to the doctrine of dissimulation; she is indignant that Mrs.
Piozzi and Madame de Stael should have so little realized the dignity of
true womanhood as to have confirmed the fiat their tyrants had passed
against them;