body of a society belle would make in a ball-room.
To call a woman pretty and sweet is to compliment her; to call a man
pretty and sweet would be to mock or insult him. The ancient Greeks
betrayed their barbarism in amorous matters in no way more
conspicuously than by their fondness for coy, effeminate boys, and
their admiration of masculine goddesses like Diana and Minerva.
Contrast this with the modern ideal of femininity, as summed up by
Shakspere:

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?

TRUE FEMININITY AND ITS FEMALE ENEMIES

A woman's voice differs from a man's not only in pitch but in timbre;
its quality suggests the sex. There is great scope for variety, from
the lowest contralto to the highest soprano, as there is in man's from
the lowest bass to the highest tenor; a variety so great that voices
differ as much as faces and can be instantly recognized; but unless it
has the proper sexual quality a voice affects us disagreeably. A
coarse, harsh voice has marred many a girl's best marriage chances,
while, on the other hand, it may happen that "the ear loveth before
the eye." Now what is true of the male and female voice holds true of
the male and female mind in all its diverse aspects. We expect men to
be not only bigger, stronger, taller, hardier, more robust, but more
courageous and aggressive, more active, more creative, more sternly
just, than women; while coarseness, cruelty, selfishness, and
pugnacity, though not virtues in either sex, affect us much less
repulsively in men than in women, for the reason that the masculine
struggle for existence and competition in business foster selfishness,
and men have inherited pugnacious instincts from their fighting
ancestors, while women, as mothers, learned the lessons of sympathy
and self-sacrifice much sooner than men. The distinctively feminine
virtues are on the whole of a much higher order than the masculine,
which is the reason why they were not appreciated or fostered at so
early an epoch. Gentleness, modesty, domesticity, girlishness,
coyness, kindness, patience, tenderness, benevolence, sympathy,
self-sacrifice, demureness, emotionality, sensitiveness, are feminine
qualities, some of which, it is true, we expect also in gentlemen; but
their absence is not nearly so fatal to a man as it is to a woman. An