lave.

Whenever a man rises high enough to leave his own personality out of
the question, he has gone beyond the stage of silly platitudes. His own
dignity is too secure, his title to respect too far beyond question,
for him to need such little subterfuges to guard his position, either
as husband, as household-king, or as public benefactor. His home life is
not founded upon compulsory obedience; but is filled with the perfume of
perfect trust, the fragrance of loving admiration and respect. It is the
domestic tyrant, the egotistic mediocre, and the superstitious Church
that are afraid for women to think, that fear to lose her as worshipper
and serf.

You need go only a very little way back in history to learn that the
Church decided that a woman who learned the alphabet overstepped all
bounds of propriety, and that she would be wholly lost to shame who
should so far forget her modesty as to become acquainted with the
multiplication table.

And to-day, if she offers her opinion and her logic for what they are
worth, the clergy preach doleful sermons about her losing her beautiful
home character, about her innocence being gone, about their idea of her
glorious exaltation as wife and mother being destroyed. Then they grow
florid and exclaim that "man is after all subject to her, that he is
born for the rugged path and she for the couch of flowers!"*

* "A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say
that husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to
make fair concessions to their partners without being
compelled to it, but that wives are not; that if allowed any
rights of their own, they will acknowledge no rights at all
in any one else, and never will yield in anything, unless
they can be compelled, by the man's mere authority, to yield
in everything. This would have been said by many persons
some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue,
and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being
what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who
is worth replying to. It is not the doctrine of the present
day that women are less susceptible of good feeling and
consideration for those with whom they are united by the
strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary, we are
perpetually told that women are better than men by those who
are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as
good;