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Book V - After age 20

BOOK V - After age 20 (marriage, family, and the education of females)

We have reached the last act of youth's drams; we are approaching
its closing scene.

It is not good that man should be alone. Emile is now a man, and
we must give him his promised helpmeet. That helpmeet is Sophy.
Where is her dwelling-place, where shall she be found? We must
know beforehand what she is, and then we can decide where to look
for her. And when she is found, our task is not ended. "Since our
young gentleman," says Locke, "is about to marry, it is time to leave
him with his mistress." And with these words he ends his book. As
I have not the honour of educating "A young gentleman," I shall
take care not to follow his example.

SOPHY, OR WOMAN

Sophy should be as truly a woman as Emile is a man, i.e., she
must possess all those characters of her sex which are required to
enable her to play her part in the physical and moral order. Let
us inquire to begin with in what respects her sex differs from our
own.

But for her sex, a woman is a man; she has the same organs, the
same needs, the same faculties. The machine is the same in its
construction; its parts, its working, and its appearance are similar.
Regard it as you will the difference is only in degree.

Yet where sex is concerned man and woman are unlike; each is the
complement of the other; the difficulty in comparing them lies in
our inability to decide, in either case, what is a matter of sex,
and what is not. General differences present themselves to the
comparative anatomist and even to the superficial observer; they
seem not to be a matter of sex; yet they are really sex differences,
though the connection eludes our observation. How far such differences
may extend we cannot tell; all we know for certain is that where man
and woman are alike we have to do with the characteristics of the
species; where they are unlike, we have to do with the characteristics
of sex. Considered from these two standpoints, we find so many
instances of likeness and unlikeness that it is perhaps one of the
greatest of marvels how nature has contrived to make two beings so
like and yet so different.

These resemblances and differences must have an influence on the
moral nature; this inference is obvious, and it is confirmed by
experience; it shows the vanity of the disputes as to the superiority
or the equality of the sexes; as if each sex, pursuing the path
marked out for it by nature, were not more perfect in that very
divergence than if it more closely resembled the other. A perfect
man and a perfect woman should no more be alike in mind than in
face, and perfection admits of neither less nor more.

In the union of the sexes each alike contributes to the common
end, but in different ways. From this diversity springs the first
difference which may be observed between man and woman in their
moral relations. The man should be strong and active; the woman
should be weak and passive; the one must have both the power and
the will; it is enough that the other should offer little resistance.

When this principle is admitted, it follows that woman is specially
made for man's delight. If man in his turn ought to be pleasing
in her eyes, the necessity is less urgent, his virtue is in his
strength, he pleases because he is strong. I grant you this is not
the law of love, but it is the law of nature, which is older than
love itself.

If woman is made to please and to be in subjection to man, she
ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not provoke him to
anger; her strength is in her charms, by their means she should
compel him to discover and use his strength. The surest way of
arousing this strength is to make it necessary by resistance. Thus
pride comes to the help of desire and each exults in the other's
victory. This is the origin of attack and defence, of the boldness
of one sex and the timidity of the other, and even of the shame
and modesty with which nature has armed the weak for the conquest
of the strong.

Who can possibly suppose that nature has prescribed the same advances
to the one sex as to the other, or that the first to feel desire
should be the first to show it? What strange depravity of judgment!
The consequences of the act being so different for the two sexes,
is it natural that they should enter upon it with equal boldness?
How can any one fail to see that when the share of each is so
unequal, if the one were not controlled by modesty as the other is
controlled by nature, the result would be the destruction of both,
and the human race would perish through the very means ordained
for its continuance?

Women so easily stir a man's senses and fan the ashes of a dying
passion, that if philosophy ever succeeded in introducing this
custom into any unlucky country, especially if it were a warm
country where more women are born than men, the men, tyrannised
over by the women, would at last become their victims, and would
be dragged to their death without the least chance of escape.

Female animals are without this sense of shame, but what of that?
Are their desires as boundless as those of women, which are curbed
by this shame? The desires of the animals are the result of necessity,
and when the need is satisfied, the desire ceases; they no longer
make a feint of repulsing the male, they do it in earnest. Their
seasons of complaisance are short and soon over. Impulse and
restraint are alike the work of nature. But what would take the
place of this negative instinct in women if you rob them of their
modesty?

The Most High has deigned to do honour to mankind; he has endowed
man with boundless passions, together with a law to guide them, so
that man may be alike free and self-controlled; though swayed by
these passions man is endowed with reason by which to control them.
Woman is also endowed with boundless passions; God has given her
modesty to restrain them. Moreover, he has given to both a present
reward for the right use of their powers, in the delight which
springs from that right use of them, i.e., the taste for right
conduct established as the law of our behaviour. To my mind this
is far higher than the instinct of the beasts.

Whether the woman shares the man's passion or not, whether she is
willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and
defends herself, though not always with the same vigour, and therefore
not always with the same success. If the siege is to be successful,
the besieged must permit or direct the attack. How skilfully can
she stimulate the efforts of the aggressor. The freest and most
delightful of activities does not permit of any real violence;
reason and nature are alike against it; nature, in that she has
given the weaker party strength enough to resist if she chooses;
reason, in that actual violence is not only most brutal in itself,
but it defeats its own ends, not only because the man thus declares
war against his companion and thus gives her a right to defend her
person and her liberty even at the cost of the enemy's life, but
also because the woman alone is the judge of her condition, and a
child would have no father if any man might usurp a father's rights.

Thus the different constitution of the two sexes leads us to a third
conclusion, that the stronger party seems to be master, but is as
a matter of fact dependent on the weaker, and that, not by any foolish
custom of gallantry, nor yet by the magnanimity of the protector,
but by an inexorable law of nature. For nature has endowed woman
with a power of stimulating man's passions in excess of man's power
of satisfying those passions, and has thus made him dependent on
her goodwill, and compelled him in his turn to endeavour to please
her, so that she may be willing to yield to his superior strength.
Is it weakness which yields to force, or is it voluntary self-surrender?
This uncertainty constitutes the chief charm of the man's victory,
and the woman is usually cunning enough to leave him in doubt. In
this respect the woman's mind exactly resembles her body; far from
being ashamed of her weakness, she is proud of it; her soft muscles
offer no resistance, she professes that she cannot lift the lightest
weight; she would be ashamed to be strong. And why? Not only to
gain an appearance of refinement; she is too clever for that; she
is providing herself beforehand with excuses, with the right to be
weak if she chooses.

The experience we have gained through our vices has considerably
modified the views held in older times; we rarely hear of violence
for which there is so little occasion that it would hardly be
credited, Yet such stories are common enough among the Jews and
ancient Greeks; for such views belong to the simplicity of nature,
and have only been uprooted by our profligacy. If fewer deeds
of violence are quoted in our days, it is not that men are more
temperate, but because they are less credulous, and a complaint
which would have been believed among a simple people would only
excite laughter among ourselves; therefore silence is the better
course. There is a law in Deuteronomy, under which the outraged
maiden was punished, along with her assailant, if the crime were
committed in a town; but if in the country or in a lonely place,
the latter alone was punished. "For," says the law, "the maiden
cried for help, and there was none to hear." From this merciful
interpretation of the law, girls learnt not to let themselves be
surprised in lonely places.

This change in public opinion has had a perceptible effect on our
morals. It has produced our modern gallantry. Men have found that
their pleasures depend, more than they expected, on the goodwill
of the fair sex, and have secured this goodwill by attentions which
have had their reward.

See how we find ourselves led unconsciously from the physical to
the moral constitution, how from the grosser union of the sexes
spring the sweet laws of love. Woman reigns, not by the will of
man, but by the decrees of nature herself; she had the power long
before she showed it. That same Hercules who proposed to violate
all the fifty daughters of Thespis was compelled to spin at the
feet of Omphale, and Samson, the strong man, was less strong than
Delilah. This power cannot be taken from woman; it is hers by right;
she would have lost it long ago, were it possible.

The consequences of sex are wholly unlike for man and woman. The
male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female,
or at least all her youth; everything reminds her of her sex; the
performance of her functions requires a special constitution. She
needs care during pregnancy and freedom from work when her child
is born; she must have a quiet, easy life while she nurses her
children; their education calls for patience and gentleness, for
a zeal and love which nothing can dismay; she forms a bond between
father and child, she alone can win the father's love for his
children and convince him that they are indeed his own. What loving
care is required to preserve a united family! And there should be
no question of virtue in all this, it must be a labour of love,
without which the human race would be doomed to extinction.

The mutual duties of the two sexes are not, and cannot be, equally
binding on both. Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of
man-made laws; this inequality is not of man's making, or at any
rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason. She
to whom nature has entrusted the care of the children must hold
herself responsible for them to their father. No doubt every breach
of faith is wrong, and every faithless husband, who robs his wife
of the sole reward of the stern duties of her sex, is cruel and
unjust; but the faithless wife is worse; she destroys the family
and breaks the bonds of nature; when she gives her husband children
who are not his own, she is false both to him and them, her crime
is not infidelity but treason. To my mind, it is the source of
dissension and of crime of every kind. Can any position be more
wretched than that of the unhappy father who, when he clasps his
child to his breast, is haunted by the suspicion that this is the
child of another, the badge of his own dishonour, a thief who is
robbing his own children of their inheritance. Under such circumstances
the family is little more than a group of secret enemies, armed
against each other by a guilty woman, who compels them to pretend
to love one another.

Thus it is not enough that a wife should be faithful; her husband,
along with his friends and neighbours, must believe in her fidelity;
she must be modest, devoted, retiring; she should have the witness
not only of a good conscience, but of a good reputation. In a word,
if a father must love his children, he must be able to respect their
mother. For these reasons it is not enough that the woman should
be chaste, she must preserve her reputation and her good name. From
these principles there arises not only a moral difference between
the sexes, but also a fresh motive for duty and propriety, which
prescribes to women in particular the most scrupulous attention
to their conduct, their manners, their behaviour. Vague assertions
as to the equality of the sexes and the similarity of their duties
are only empty words; they are no answer to my argument.

It is a poor sort of logic to quote isolated exceptions against
laws so firmly established. Women, you say, are not always bearing
children. Granted; yet that is their proper business. Because there
are a hundred or so of large towns in the world where women live
licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is
their business to have few children? And what would become of your
towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer
women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies?
There are plenty of country places where women with only four or
five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here
and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it
make? [Footnote: Without this the race would necessarily diminish;
all things considered, for its preservation each woman ought to have
about four children, for about half the children born die before
they can become parents, and two must survive to replace the father
and mother. See whether the towns will supply them?] Is it any the
less a woman's business to be a mother? And to not the general laws
of nature and morality make provision for this state of things?

Even if there were these long intervals, which you assume, between
the periods of pregnancy, can a woman suddenly change her way of life
without danger? Can she be a nursing mother to-day and a soldier
to-morrow? Will she change her tastes and her feelings as a chameleon
changes his colour? Will she pass at once from the privacy of
household duties and indoor occupations to the buffeting of the
winds, the toils, the labours, the perils of war? Will she be now
timid, [Footnote: Women's timidity is yet another instinct of nature
against the double risk she runs during pregnancy.] now brave, now
fragile, now robust? If the young men of Paris find a soldier's
life too hard for them, how would a woman put up with it, a woman
who has hardly ventured out of doors without a parasol and who has
scarcely put a foot to the ground? Will she make a good soldier at
an age when even men are retiring from this arduous business?

There are countries, I grant you, where women bear and rear
children with little or no difficulty, but in those lands the men
go half-naked in all weathers, they strike down the wild beasts,
they carry a canoe as easily as a knapsack, they pursue the chase
for 700 or 800 leagues, they sleep in the open on the bare ground,
they bear incredible fatigues and go many days without food. When
women become strong, men become still stronger; when men become
soft, women become softer; change both the terms and the ratio
remains unaltered.

I am quite aware that Plato, in the Republic, assigns the same
gymnastics to women and men. Having got rid of the family there is
no place for women in his system of government, so he is forced to
turn them into men. That great genius has worked out his plans in
detail and has provided for every contingency; he has even provided
against a difficulty which in all likelihood no one would ever have
raised; but he has not succeeded in meeting the real difficulty. I
am not speaking of the alleged community of wives which has often
been laid to his charge; this assertion only shows that his detractors
have never read his works. I refer to that political promiscuity
under which the same occupations are assigned to both sexes alike,
a scheme which could only lead to intolerable evils; I refer to that
subversion of all the tenderest of our natural feelings, which he
sacrificed to an artificial sentiment which can only exist by their
aid. Will the bonds of convention hold firm without some foundation
in nature? Can devotion to the state exist apart from the love of
those near and dear to us? Can patriotism thrive except in the soil
of that miniature fatherland, the home? Is it not the good son,
the good husband, the good father, who makes the good citizen?

When once it is proved that men and women are and ought to be
unlike in constitution and in temperament, it follows that their
education must be different. Nature teaches us that they should work
together, but that each has its own share of the work; the end is
the same, but the means are different, as are also the feelings
which direct them. We have attempted to paint a natural man, let
us try to paint a helpmeet for him.

You must follow nature's guidance if you would walk aright. The
native characters of sex should be respected as nature's handiwork.
You are always saying, "Women have such and such faults, from which
we are free." You are misled by your vanity; what would be faults
in you are virtues in them; and things would go worse, if they
were without these so-called faults. Take care that they do not
degenerate into evil, but beware of destroying them.

On the other hand, women are always exclaiming that we educate them
for nothing but vanity and coquetry, that we keep them amused with
trifles that we may be their masters; we are responsible, so they
say, for the faults we attribute to them. How silly! What have men
to do with the education of girls? What is there to hinder their
mothers educating them as they please? There are no colleges for
girls; so much the better for them! Would God there were none for
the boys, their education would be more sensible and more wholesome.
Who is it that compels a girl to waste her time on foolish trifles?
Are they forced, against their will, to spend half their time over
their toilet, following the example set them by you? Who prevents
you teaching them, or having them taught, whatever seems good
in your eyes? Is it our fault that we are charmed by their beauty
and delighted by their airs and graces, if we are attracted and
flattered by the arts they learn from you, if we love to see them
prettily dressed, if we let them display at leisure the weapons
by which we are subjugated? Well then, educate them like men. The
more women are like men, the less influence they will have over
men, and then men will be masters indeed.

All the faculties common to both sexes are not equally shared
between them, but taken as a whole they are fairly divided. Woman
is worth more as a woman and less as a man; when she makes a good
use of her own rights, she has the best of it; when she tries to
usurp our rights, she is our inferior. It is impossible to controvert
this, except by quoting exceptions after the usual fashion of the
partisans of the fair sex.

To cultivate the masculine virtues in women and to neglect their
own is evidently to do them an injury. Women are too clear-sighted
to be thus deceived; when they try to usurp our privileges they do
not abandon their own; with this result: they are unable to make use
of two incompatible things, so they fall below their own level as
women, instead of rising to the level of men. If you are a sensible
mother you will take my advice. Do not try to make your daughter a
good man in defiance of nature. Make her a good woman, and be sure
it will be better both for her and us.

Does this mean that she must be brought up in ignorance and kept
to housework only? Is she to be man's handmaid or his help-meet?
Will he dispense with her greatest charm, her companionship? To keep
her a slave will he prevent her knowing and feeling? Will he make
an automaton of her? No, indeed, that is not the teaching of nature,
who has given women such a pleasant easy wit. On the contrary,
nature means them to think, to will, to love, to cultivate their
minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their
hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to
direct the strength of men. They should learn many things, but only
such things as are suitable.

When I consider the special purpose of woman, when I observe
her inclinations or reckon up her duties, everything combines to
indicate the mode of education she requires. Men and women are made
for each other, but their mutual dependence differs in degree; man
is dependent on woman through his desires; woman is dependent on
man through her desires and also through her needs; he could do
without her better than she can do without him. She cannot fulfil
her purpose in life without his aid, without his goodwill, without
his respect; she is dependent on our feelings, on the price we
put upon her virtue, and the opinion we have of her charms and her
deserts. Nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself
and her children, should be at the mercy of man's judgment.

Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor
beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must be respected.
A woman's honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but on her
reputation, and no woman who permits herself to be considered vile
is really virtuous. A man has no one but himself to consider, and
so long as he does right he may defy public opinion; but when a
woman does right her task is only half finished, and what people
think of her matters as much as what she really is. Hence her
education must, in this respect, be different from man's education.
"What will people think" is the grave of a man's virtue and the
throne of a woman's.

The children's health depends in the first place on the mother's,
and the early education of man is also in a woman's hands; his
morals, his passions, his tastes, his pleasures, his happiness
itself, depend on her. A woman's education must therefore be planned
in relation to man. To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect
and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to
counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these
are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should
be taught while she is young. The further we depart from this
principle, the further we shall be from our goal, and all our
precepts will fail to secure her happiness or our own.

Every woman desires to be pleasing in men's eyes, and this is right;
but there is a great difference between wishing to please a man of
worth, a really lovable man, and seeking to please those foppish
manikins who are a disgrace to their own sex and to the sex which
they imitate. Neither nature nor reason can induce a woman to love
an effeminate person, nor will she win love by imitating such a
person.

If a woman discards the quiet modest bearing of her sex, and
adopts the airs of such foolish creatures, she is not following
her vocation, she is forsaking it; she is robbing herself of the
rights to which she lays claim. "If we were different," she says,
"the men would not like us." She is mistaken. Only a fool likes
folly; to wish to attract such men only shows her own foolishness. If
there were no frivolous men, women would soon make them, and women
are more responsible for men's follies than men are for theirs.
The woman who loves true manhood and seeks to find favour in its
sight will adopt means adapted to her ends. Woman is a coquette by
profession, but her coquetry varies with her aims; let these aims
be in accordance with those of nature, and a woman will receive a
fitting education.

Even the tiniest little girls love finery; they are not content to
be pretty, they must be admired; their little airs and graces show
that their heads are full of this idea, and as soon as they can
understand they are controlled by "What will people think of you?"
If you are foolish enough to try this way with little boys, it
will not have the same effect; give them their freedom and their
sports, and they care very little what people think; it is a work
of time to bring them under the control of this law.

However acquired, this early education of little girls is an
excellent thing in itself. As the birth of the body must precede
the birth of the mind, so the training of the body must precede
the cultivation of the mind. This is true of both sexes; but the
aim of physical training for boys and girls is not the same; in the
one case it is the development of strength, in the other of grace;
not that these qualities should be peculiar to either sex, but that
their relative values should be different. Women should be strong
enough to do anything gracefully; men should be skilful enough to
do anything easily.

The exaggeration of feminine delicacy leads to effeminacy in men.
Women should not be strong like men but for them, so that their
sons may be strong. Convents and boarding-schools, with their plain
food and ample opportunities for amusements, races, and games in
the open air and in the garden, are better in this respect than
the home, where the little girl is fed on delicacies, continually
encouraged or reproved, where she is kept sitting in a stuffy room,
always under her mother's eye, afraid to stand or walk or speak
or breathe, without a moment's freedom to play or jump or run or
shout, or to be her natural, lively, little self; there is either
harmful indulgence or misguided severity, and no trace of reason.
In this fashion heart and body are alike destroyed.

In Sparta the girls used to take part in military sports just like
the boys, not that they might go to war, but that they might bear
sons who could endure hardship. That is not what I desire. To provide
the state with soldiers it is not necessary that the mother should
carry a musket and master the Prussian drill. Yet, on the whole, I
think the Greeks were very wise in this matter of physical training.
Young girls frequently appeared in public, not with the boys, but
in groups apart. There was scarcely a festival, a sacrifice, or a
procession without its bands of maidens, the daughters of the chief
citizens. Crowned with flowers, chanting hymns, forming the chorus
of the dance, bearing baskets, vases, offerings, they presented a
charming spectacle to the depraved senses of the Greeks, a spectacle
well fitted to efface the evil effects of their unseemly gymnastics.
Whatever this custom may have done for the Greek men, it was well
fitted to develop in the Greek women a sound constitution by means
of pleasant, moderate, and healthy exercise; while the desire to
please would develop a keen and cultivated taste without risk to
character.

When the Greek women married, they disappeared from public life;
within the four walls of their home they devoted themselves to
the care of their household and family. This is the mode of life
prescribed for women alike by nature and reason. These women gave
birth to the healthiest, strongest, and best proportioned men who
ever lived, and except in certain islands of ill repute, no women
in the whole world, not even the Roman matrons, were ever at once
so wise and so charming, so beautiful and so virtuous, as the women
of ancient Greece.

It is admitted that their flowing garments, which did not cramp
the figure, preserved in men and women alike the fine proportions
which are seen in their statues. These are still the models of
art, although nature is so disfigured that they are no longer to
be found among us. The Gothic trammels, the innumerable bands which
confine our limbs as in a press, were quite unknown. The Greek
women were wholly unacquainted with those frames of whalebone in
which our women distort rather than display their figures. It seems
to me that this abuse, which is carried to an incredible degree of
folly in England, must sooner or later lead to the production of
a degenerate race. Moreover, I maintain that the charm which these
corsets are supposed to produce is in the worst possible taste; it
is not a pleasant thing to see a woman cut in two like a wasp--it
offends both the eye and the imagination. A slender waist has
its limits, like everything else, in proportion and suitability,
and beyond these limits it becomes a defect. This defect would be
a glaring one in the nude; why should it be beautiful under the
costume?

I will not venture upon the reasons which induce women to incase
themselves in these coats of mail. A clumsy figure, a large waist,
are no doubt very ugly at twenty, but at thirty they cease to offend
the eye, and as we are bound to be what nature has made us at any
given age, and as there is no deceiving the eye of man, such defects
are less offensive at any age than the foolish affectations of a
young thing of forty.

Everything which cramps and confines nature is in bad taste; this
is as true of the adornments of the person as of the ornaments of
the mind. Life, health, common-sense, and comfort must come first;
there is no grace in discomfort, languor is not refinement, there
is no charm in ill-health; suffering may excite pity, but pleasure
and delight demand the freshness of health.

Boys and girls have many games in common, and this is as it should
be; do they not play together when they are grown up? They have also
special tastes of their own. Boys want movement and noise, drums,
tops, toy-carts; girls prefer things which appeal to the eye,
and can be used for dressing-up--mirrors, jewellery, finery, and
specially dolls. The doll is the girl's special plaything; this shows
her instinctive bent towards her life's work. The art of pleasing
finds its physical basis in personal adornment, and this physical
side of the art is the only one which the child can cultivate.

Here is a little girl busy all day with her doll; she is always
changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it, trying new
combinations of trimmings well or ill matched; her fingers are
clumsy, her taste is crude, but there is no mistaking her bent; in
this endless occupation time flies unheeded, the hours slip away
unnoticed, even meals are forgotten. She is more eager for adornment
than for food. "But she is dressing her doll, not herself," you
will say. Just so; she sees her doll, she cannot see herself; she
cannot do anything for herself, she has neither the training, nor
the talent, nor the strength; as yet she herself is nothing, she is
engrossed in her doll and all her coquetry is devoted to it. This
will not always be so; in due time she will be her own doll.

We have here a very early and clearly-marked bent; you have only to
follow it and train it. What the little girl most clearly desires
is to dress her doll, to make its bows, its tippets, its sashes,
and its tuckers; she is dependent on other people's kindness in all
this, and it would be much pleasanter to be able to do it herself.
Here is a motive for her earliest lessons, they are not tasks
prescribed, but favours bestowed. Little girls always dislike learning
to read and write, but they are always ready to learn to sew. They
think they are grown up, and in imagination they are using their
knowledge for their own adornment.

The way is open and it is easy to follow it; cutting out, embroidery,
lace-making follow naturally. Tapestry is not popular; furniture is
too remote from the child's interests, it has nothing to do with
the person, it depends on conventional tastes. Tapestry is a woman's
amusement; young girls never care for it.

This voluntary course is easily extended to include drawing, an
art which is closely connected with taste in dress; but I would not
have them taught landscape and still less figure painting. Leaves,
fruit, flowers, draperies, anything that will make an elegant
trimming for the accessories of the toilet, and enable the girl
to design her own embroidery if she cannot find a pattern to her
taste; that will be quite enough. Speaking generally, if it is
desirable to restrict a man's studies to what is useful, this is
even more necessary for women, whose life, though less laborious,
should be even more industrious and more uniformly employed in a
variety of duties, so that one talent should not be encouraged at
the expense of others.

Whatever may be said by the scornful, good sense belongs to both
sexes alike. Girls are usually more docile than boys, and they
should be subjected to more authority, as I shall show later on,
but that is no reason why they should be required to do things
in which they can see neither rhyme nor reason. The mother's art
consists in showing the use of everything they are set to do, and
this is all the easier as the girl's intelligence is more precocious
than the boy's. This principle banishes, both for boys and girls,
not only those pursuits which never lead to any appreciable results,
not even increasing the charms of those who have pursued them, but
also those studies whose utility is beyond the scholar's present age
and can only be appreciated in later years. If I object to little
boys being made to learn to read, still more do I object to it
for little girls until they are able to see the use of reading; we
generally think more of our own ideas than theirs in our attempts
to convince them of the utility of this art. After all, why should
a little girl know how to read and write! Has she a house to manage?
Most of them make a bad use of this fatal knowledge, and girls are
so full of curiosity that few of them will fail to learn without
compulsion. Possibly cyphering should come first; there is nothing
so obviously useful, nothing which needs so much practice or gives
so much opportunity for error as reckoning. If the little girl
does not get the cherries for her lunch without an arithmetical
exercise, she will soon learn to count.

I once knew a little girl who learnt to write before she could read,
and she began to write with her needle. To begin with, she would
write nothing but O's; she was always making O's, large and small,
of all kinds and one within another, but always drawn backwards.
Unluckily one day she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass
while she was at this useful work, and thinking that the cramped
attitude was not pretty, like another Minerva she flung away her
pen and declined to make any more O's. Her brother was no fonder
of writing, but what he disliked was the constraint, not the look
of the thing. She was induced to go on with her writing in this way.
The child was fastidious and vain; she could not bear her sisters
to wear her clothes. Her things had been marked, they declined to
mark them any more, she must learn to mark them herself; there is
no need to continue the story.

Show the sense of the tasks you set your little girls, but keep them
busy. Idleness and insubordination are two very dangerous faults,
and very hard to cure when once established. Girls should be
attentive and industrious, but this is not enough by itself; they
should early be accustomed to restraint. This misfortune, if such
it be, is inherent in their sex, and they will never escape from it,
unless to endure more cruel sufferings. All their life long, they
will have to submit to the strictest and most enduring restraints,
those of propriety. They must be trained to bear the yoke from the
first, so that they may not feel it, to master their own caprices
and to submit themselves to the will of others. If they were always
eager to be at work, they should sometimes be compelled to do
nothing. Their childish faults, unchecked and unheeded, may easily
lead to dissipation, frivolity, and inconstancy. To guard against
this, teach them above all things self-control. Under our senseless
conditions, the life of a good woman is a perpetual struggle against
self; it is only fair that woman should bear her share of the ills
she has brought upon man.

Beware lest your girls become weary of their tasks and infatuated
with their amusements; this often happens under our ordinary methods
of education, where, as Fenelon says, all the tedium is on one side
and all the pleasure on the other. If the rules already laid down
are followed, the first of these dangers will be avoided, unless the
child dislikes those about her. A little girl who is fond of her
mother or her friend will work by her side all day without getting
tired; the chatter alone will make up for any loss of liberty. But
if her companion is distasteful to her, everything done under her
direction will be distasteful too. Children who take no delight
in their mother's company are not likely to turn out well; but to
judge of their real feelings you must watch them and not trust to
their words alone, for they are flatterers and deceitful and soon
learn to conceal their thoughts. Neither should they be told that
they ought to love their mother. Affection is not the result of
duty, and in this respect constraint is out of place. Continual
intercourse, constant care, habit itself, all these will lead
a child to love her mother, if the mother does nothing to deserve
the child's ill-will. The very control she exercises over the
child, if well directed, will increase rather than diminish the
affection, for women being made for dependence, girls feel themselves
made to obey.

Just because they have, or ought to have, little freedom, they are
apt to indulge themselves too fully with regard to such freedom
as they have; they carry everything to extremes, and they devote
themselves to their games with an enthusiasm even greater than that
of boys. This is the second difficulty to which I referred. This
enthusiasm must be kept in check, for it is the source of several
vices commonly found among women, caprice and that extravagant
admiration which leads a woman to regard a thing with rapture to-day
and to be quite indifferent to it to-morrow. This fickleness of
taste is as dangerous as exaggeration; and both spring from the same
cause. Do not deprive them of mirth, laughter, noise, and romping
games, but do not let them tire of one game and go off to another;
do not leave them for a moment without restraint. Train them to
break off their games and return to their other occupations without
a murmur. Habit is all that is needed, as you have nature on your
side.

This habitual restraint produces a docility which woman requires
all her life long, for she will always be in subjection to a man,
or to man's judgment, and she will never be free to set her own
opinion above his. What is most wanted in a woman is gentleness;
formed to obey a creature so imperfect as man, a creature often
vicious and always faulty, she should early learn to submit to
injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband
without complaint; she must be gentle for her own sake, not his.
Bitterness and obstinacy only multiply the sufferings of the wife
and the misdeeds of the husband; the man feels that these are
not the weapons to be used against him. Heaven did not make women
attractive and persuasive that they might degenerate into bitterness,
or meek that they should desire the mastery; their soft voice was
not meant for hard words, nor their delicate features for the frowns
of anger. When they lose their temper they forget themselves; often
enough they have just cause of complaint; but when they scold they
always put themselves in the wrong. We should each adopt the tone
which befits our sex; a soft-hearted husband may make an overbearing
wife, but a man, unless he is a perfect monster, will sooner or
later yield to his wife's gentleness, and the victory will be hers.

Daughters must always be obedient, but mothers need not always be
harsh. To make a girl docile you need not make her miserable; to
make her modest you need not terrify her; on the contrary, I should
not be sorry to see her allowed occasionally to exercise a little
ingenuity, not to escape punishment for her disobedience, but
to evade the necessity for obedience. Her dependence need not be
made unpleasant, it is enough that she should realise that she is
dependent. Cunning is a natural gift of woman, and so convinced
am I that all our natural inclinations are right, that I would
cultivate this among others, only guarding against its abuse.

For the truth of this I appeal to every honest observer. I do not
ask you to question women themselves, our cramping institutions may
compel them to sharpen their wits; I would have you examine girls,
little girls, newly-born so to speak; compare them with boys of the
same age, and I am greatly mistaken if you do not find the little
boys heavy, silly, and foolish, in comparison. Let me give one
illustration in all its childish simplicity.

Children are commonly forbidden to ask for anything at table, for
people think they can do nothing better in the way of education
than to burden them with useless precepts; as if a little bit of
this or that were not readily given or refused without leaving a
poor child dying of greediness intensified by hope. Every one knows
how cunningly a little boy brought up in this way asked for salt
when he had been overlooked at table. I do not suppose any one will
blame him for asking directly for salt and indirectly for meat;
the neglect was so cruel that I hardly think he would have been
punished had he broken the rule and said plainly that he was hungry.
But this is what I saw done by a little girl of six; the circumstances
were much more difficult, for not only was she strictly forbidden
to ask for anything directly or indirectly, but disobedience would
have been unpardonable, for she had eaten of every dish; one only
had been overlooked, and on this she had set her heart. This is what
she did to repair the omission without laying herself open to the
charge of disobedience; she pointed to every dish in turn, saying,
"I've had some of this; I've had some of this;" however she omitted
the one dish so markedly that some one noticed it and said, "Have
not you had some of this?" "Oh, no," replied the greedy little girl
with soft voice and downcast eyes. These instances are typical of
the cunning of the little boy and girl.

What is, is good, and no general law can be bad. This special skill
with which the female sex is endowed is a fair equivalent for its
lack of strength; without it woman would be man's slave, not his
helpmeet. By her superiority in this respect she maintains her equality
with man, and rules in obedience. She has everything against her,
our faults and her own weakness and timidity; her beauty and her
wiles are all that she has. Should she not cultivate both? Yet beauty
is not universal; it may be destroyed by all sorts of accidents,
it will disappear with years, and habit will destroy its influence.
A woman's real resource is her wit; not that foolish wit which is
so greatly admired in society, a wit which does nothing to make
life happier; but that wit which is adapted to her condition, the
art of taking advantage of our position and controlling us through
our own strength. Words cannot tell how beneficial this is to
man, what a charm it gives to the society of men and women, how it
checks the petulant child and restrains the brutal husband; without
it the home would be a scene of strife; with it, it is the abode
of happiness. I know that this power is abused by the sly and the
spiteful; but what is there that is not liable to abuse? Do not
destroy the means of happiness because the wicked use them to our
hurt.

The toilet may attract notice, but it is the person that wins our
hearts. Our finery is not us; its very artificiality often offends,
and that which is least noticeable in itself often wins the most
attention. The education of our girls is, in this respect, absolutely
topsy-turvy. Ornaments are promised them as rewards, and they are
taught to delight in elaborate finery. "How lovely she is!" people
say when she is most dressed up. On the contrary, they should be
taught that so much finery is only required to hide their defects,
and that beauty's real triumph is to shine alone. The love of
fashion is contrary to good taste, for faces do not change with the
fashion, and while the person remains unchanged, what suits it at
one time will suit it always.

If I saw a young girl decked out like a little peacock, I should
show myself anxious about her figure so disguised, and anxious what
people would think of her; I should say, "She is over-dressed with
all those ornaments; what a pity! Do you think she could do with
something simpler? Is she pretty enough to do without this or that?"
Possibly she herself would be the first to ask that her finery might
be taken off and that we should see how she looked without it. In
that case her beauty should receive such praise as it deserves. I
should never praise her unless simply dressed. If she only regards
fine clothes as an aid to personal beauty, and as a tacit confession
that she needs their aid, she will not be proud of her finery, she
will be humbled by it; and if she hears some one say, "How pretty
she is," when she is smarter than usual, she will blush for shame.

Moreover, though there are figures that require adornment there
are none that require expensive clothes. Extravagance in dress is
the folly of the class rather than the individual, it is merely
conventional. Genuine coquetry is sometimes carefully thought out,
but never sumptuous, and Juno dressed herself more magnificently
than Venus. "As you cannot make her beautiful you are making her
fine," said Apelles to an unskilful artist who was painting Helen
loaded with jewellery. I have also noticed that the smartest clothes
proclaim the plainest women; no folly could be more misguided. If
a young girl has good taste and a contempt for fashion, give her a
few yards of ribbon, muslin, and gauze, and a handful of flowers,
without any diamonds, fringes, or lace, and she will make herself
a dress a hundredfold more becoming than all the smart clothes of
La Duchapt.

Good is always good, and as you should always look your best, the
women who know what they are about select a good style and keep
to it, and as they are not always changing their style they think
less about dress than those who can never settle to any one style.
A genuine desire to dress becomingly does not require an elaborate
toilet. Young girls rarely give much time to dress; needlework and
lessons are the business of the day; yet, except for the rouge,
they are generally as carefully dressed as older women and often
in better taste. Contrary to the usual opinion, the real cause of
the abuse of the toilet is not vanity but lack of occupation. The
woman who devotes six hours to her toilet is well aware that she
is no better dressed than the woman who took half an hour, but she
has got rid of so many of the tedious hours and it is better to
amuse oneself with one's clothes than to be sick of everything.
Without the toilet how would she spend the time between dinner and
supper. With a crowd of women about her, she can at least cause
them annoyance, which is amusement of a kind; better still she avoids
a tete-a-tete with the husband whom she never sees at any other
time; then there are the tradespeople, the dealers in bric-a-brac,
the fine gentlemen, the minor poets with their songs, their verses,
and their pamphlets; how could you get them together but for the
toilet. Its only real advantage is the chance of a little more
display than is permitted by full dress, and perhaps this is less
than it seems and a woman gains less than she thinks. Do not be
afraid to educate your women as women; teach them a woman's business,
that they be modest, that they may know how to manage their house
and look after their family; the grand toilet will soon disappear,
and they will be more tastefully dressed.

Growing girls perceive at once that all this outside adornment is
not enough unless they have charms of their own. They cannot make
themselves beautiful, they are too young for coquetry, but they
are not too young to acquire graceful gestures, a pleasing voice,
a self-possessed manner, a light step, a graceful bearing, to choose
whatever advantages are within their reach. The voice extends its
range, it grows stronger and more resonant, the arms become plumper,
the bearing more assured, and they perceive that it is easy to
attract attention however dressed. Needlework and industry suffice
no longer, fresh gifts are developing and their usefulness is
already recognised.

I know that stern teachers would have us refuse to teach little
girls to sing or dance, or to acquire any of the pleasing arts.
This strikes me as absurd. Who should learn these arts--our boys?
Are these to be the favourite accomplishments of men or women? Of
neither, say they; profane songs are simply so many crimes, dancing
is an invention of the Evil One; her tasks and her prayers we all
the amusement a young girl should have. What strange amusements
for a child of ten! I fear that these little saints who have been
forced to spend their childhood in prayers to God will pass their
youth in another fashion; when they are married they will try to
make up for lost time. I think we must consider age as well as sex;
a young girl should not live like her grandmother; she should be
lively, merry, and eager; she should sing and dance to her heart's
content, and enjoy all the innocent pleasures of youth; the time
will come, all too soon, when she must settle down and adopt a more
serious tone.

But is this change in itself really necessary? Is it not merely
another result of our own prejudices? By making good women the slaves
of dismal duties, we have deprived marriage of its charm for men.
Can we wonder that the gloomy silence they find at home drives them
elsewhere, or inspires little desire to enter a state which offers
so few attractions? Christianity, by exaggerating every duty, has
made our duties impracticable and useless; by forbidding singing,
dancing, and amusements of every kind, it renders women sulky,
fault-finding, and intolerable at home. There is no religion which
imposes such strict duties upon married life, and none in which
such a sacred engagement is so often profaned. Such pains has been
taken to prevent wives being amiable, that their husbands have
become indifferent to them. This should not be, I grant you, but
it will be, since husbands are but men. I would have an English
maiden cultivate the talents which will delight her husband as
zealously as the Circassian cultivates the accomplishments of an
Eastern harem. Husbands, you say, care little for such accomplishments.
So I should suppose, when they are employed, not for the husband,
but to attract the young rakes who dishonour the home. But imagine
a virtuous and charming wife, adorned with such accomplishments
and devoting them to her husband's amusement; will she not add to
his happiness? When he leaves his office worn out with the day's
work, will she not prevent him seeking recreation elsewhere? Have
we not all beheld happy families gathered together, each contributing
to the general amusement? Are not the confidence and familiarity
thus established, the innocence and the charm of the pleasures thus
enjoyed, more than enough to make up for the more riotous pleasures
of public entertainments?

Pleasant accomplishments have been made too formal an affair of
rules and precepts, so that young people find them very tedious
Instead of a mere amusement or a merry game as they ought to be.
Nothing can be more absurd than an elderly singing or dancing
master frowning upon young people, whose one desire is to laugh,
and adopting a more pedantic and magisterial manner in teaching his
frivolous art than if he were teaching the catechism. Take the case
of singing; does this art depend on reading music; cannot the voice
be made true and flexible, can we not learn to sing with taste and
even to play an accompaniment without knowing a note? Does the same
kind of singing suit all voices alike? Is the same method adapted
to every mind? You will never persuade me that the same attitudes,
the same steps, the same movements, the same gestures, the same
dances will suit a lively little brunette and a tall fair maiden
with languishing eyes. So when I find a master giving the same
lessons to all his pupils I say, "He has his own routine, but he
knows nothing of his art!"

Should young girls have masters or mistresses? I cannot say; I wish
they could dispense with both; I wish they could learn of their
own accord what they are already so willing to learn. I wish there
were fewer of these dressed-up old ballet masters promenading our
streets. I fear our young people will get more harm from intercourse
with such people than profit from their instruction, and that their
jargon, their tone, their airs and graces, will instil a precocious
taste for the frivolities which the teacher thinks so important,
and to which the scholars are only too likely to devote themselves.

Where pleasure is the only end in view, any one may serve as
teacher--father, mother, brother, sister, friend, governess, the
girl's mirror, and above all her own taste. Do not offer to teach,
let her ask; do not make a task of what should be a reward, and in
these studies above all remember that the wish to succeed is the
first step. If formal instruction is required I leave it to you
to choose between a master and a mistress. How can I tell whether
a dancing master should take a young pupil by her soft white hand,
make her lift her skirt and raise her eyes, open her arms and advance
her throbbing bosom? but this I know, nothing on earth would induce
me to be that master.

Taste is formed partly by industry and partly by talent, and by
its means the mind is unconsciously opened to the idea of beauty
of every kind, till at length it attains to those moral ideas which
are so closely related to beauty. Perhaps this is one reason why
ideas of propriety and modesty are acquired earlier by girls than
by boys, for to suppose that this early feeling is due to the
teaching of the governesses would show little knowledge of their
style of teaching and of the natural development of the human mind.
The art of speaking stands first among the pleasing arts; it alone
can add fresh charms to those which have been blunted by habit. It
is the mind which not only gives life to the body, but renews, so
to speak, its youth; the flow of feelings and ideas give life and
variety to the countenance, and the conversation to which it gives
rise arouses and sustains attention, and fixes it continuously on
one object. I suppose this is why little girls so soon learn to
prattle prettily, and why men enjoy listening to them even before
the child can understand them; they are watching for the first
gleam of intelligence and sentiment.

Women have ready tongues; they talk earlier, more easily, and more
pleasantly than men. They are also said to talk more; this may
be true, but I am prepared to reckon it to their credit; eyes and
mouth are equally busy and for the same cause. A man says what he
knows, a woman says what will please; the one needs knowledge, the
other taste; utility should be the man's object; the woman speaks
to give pleasure. There should be nothing in common but truth.

You should not check a girl's prattle like a boy's by the harsh
question, "What is the use of that?" but by another question at
least as difficult to answer, "What effect will that have?" At this
early age when they know neither good nor evil, and are incapable
of judging others, they should make this their rule and never say
anything which is unpleasant to those about them; this rule is all
the more difficult to apply because it must always be subordinated
to our first rule, "Never tell a lie."

I can see many other difficulties, but they belong to a later stage.
For the present it is enough for your little girls to speak the
truth without grossness, and as they are naturally averse to what
is gross, education easily teaches them to avoid it. In social
intercourse I observe that a man's politeness is usually more
helpful and a woman's more caressing. This distinction is natural,
not artificial. A man seeks to serve, a woman seeks to please. Hence
a woman's politeness is less insincere than ours, whatever we may
think of her character; for she is only acting upon a fundamental
instinct; but when a man professes to put my interests before his
own, I detect the falsehood, however disguised. Hence it is easy
for women to be polite, and easy to teach little girls politeness.
The first lessons come by nature; art only supplements them and
determines the conventional form which politeness shall take. The
courtesy of woman to woman is another matter; their manner is so
constrained, their attentions so chilly, they find each other so
wearisome, that they take little pains to conceal the fact, and
seem sincere even in their falsehood, since they take so little
pains to conceal it. Still young girls do sometimes become sincerely
attached to one another. At their age good spirits take the place
of a good disposition, and they are so pleased with themselves that
they are pleased with every one else. Moreover, it is certain that
they kiss each other more affectionately and caress each other more
gracefully in the presence of men, for they are proud to be able
to arouse their envy without danger to themselves by the sight of
favours which they know will arouse that envy.

If young boys must not be allowed to ask unsuitable questions, much
more must they be forbidden to little girls; if their curiosity is
satisfied or unskilfully evaded it is a much more serious matter,
for they are so keen to guess the mysteries concealed from them and
so skilful to discover them. But while I would not permit them to
ask questions, I would have them questioned frequently, and pains
should be taken to make them talk; let them be teased to make them
speak freely, to make them answer readily, to loosen mind and
tongue while it can be done without danger. Such conversation always
leading to merriment, yet skilfully controlled and directed, would
form a delightful amusement at this age and might instil into these
youthful hearts the first and perhaps the most helpful lessons in
morals which they will ever receive, by teaching them in the guise
of pleasure and fun what qualities are esteemed by men and what is
the true glory and happiness of a good woman.

If boys are incapable of forming any true idea of religion, much
more is it beyond the grasp of girls; and for this reason I would
speak of it all the sooner to little girls, for if we wait till
they are ready for a serious discussion of these deep subjects we
should be in danger of never speaking of religion at all. A woman's
reason is practical, and therefore she soon arrives at a given
conclusion, but she fails to discover it for herself. The social
relation of the sexes is a wonderful thing. This relation produces
a moral person of which woman is the eye and man the hand, but the
two are so dependent on one another that the man teaches the woman
what to see, while she teaches him what to do. If women could
discover principles and if men had as good heads for detail, they
would be mutually independent, they would live in perpetual strife,
and there would be an end to all society. But in their mutual
harmony each contributes to a common purpose; each follows the
other's lead, each commands and each obeys.

As a woman's conduct is controlled by public opinion, so is her
religion ruled by authority. The daughter should follow her mother's
religion, the wife her husband's. Were that religion false, the
docility which leads mother and daughter to submit to nature's
laws would blot out the sin of error in the sight of God. Unable
to judge for themselves they should accept the judgment of father
and husband as that of the church.

While women unaided cannot deduce the rules of their faith, neither
can they assign limits to that faith by the evidence of reason;
they allow themselves to be driven hither and thither by all sorts
of external influences, they are ever above or below the truth. Extreme
in everything, they are either altogether reckless or altogether
pious; you never find them able to combine virtue and piety. Their
natural exaggeration is not wholly to blame; the ill-regulated
control exercised over them by men is partly responsible. Loose
morals bring religion into contempt; the terrors of remorse make
it a tyrant; this is why women have always too much or too little
religion.

As a woman's religion is controlled by authority it is more
important to show her plainly what to believe than to explain the
reasons for belief; for faith attached to ideas half-understood
is the main source of fanaticism, and faith demanded on behalf of
what is absurd leads to madness or unbelief. Whether our catechisms
tend to produce impiety rather than fanaticism I cannot say, but
I do know that they lead to one or other.

In the first place, when you teach religion to little girls never
make it gloomy or tiresome, never make it a task or a duty, and
therefore never give them anything to learn by heart, not even
their prayers. Be content to say your own prayers regularly in their
presence, but do not compel them to join you. Let their prayers
be short, as Christ himself has taught us. Let them always be said
with becoming reverence and respect; remember that if we ask the
Almighty to give heed to our words, we should at least give heed
to what we mean to say.

It does not much matter that a girl should learn her religion young,
but it does matter that she should learn it thoroughly, and still
more that she should learn to love it. If you make religion a
burden to her, if you always speak of God's anger, if in the name
of religion you impose all sorts of disagreeable duties, duties
which she never sees you perform, what can she suppose but that
to learn one's catechism and to say one's prayers is only the duty
of a little girl, and she will long to be grown-up to escape, like
you, from these duties. Example! Example! Without it you will never
succeed in teaching children anything.

When you explain the Articles of Faith let it be by direct teaching,
not by question and answer. Children should only answer what they
think, not what has been drilled into them. All the answers in the
catechism are the wrong way about; it is the scholar who instructs
the teacher; in the child's mouth they are a downright lie, since
they explain what he does not understand, and affirm what he cannot
believe. Find me, if you can, an intelligent man who could honestly
say his catechism. The first question I find in our catechism is as
follows: "Who created you and brought you into the world?" To which
the girl, who thinks it was her mother, replies without hesitation,
"It was God." All she knows is that she is asked a question which
she only half understands and she gives an answer she does not
understand at all.

I wish some one who really understands the development of children's
minds would write a catechism for them. It might be the most useful
book ever written, and, in my opinion, it would do its author no
little honour. This at least is certain--if it were a good book it
would be very unlike our catechisms.

Such a catechism will not be satisfactory unless the child can
answer the questions of its own accord without having to learn the
answers; indeed the child will often ask the questions itself. An
example is required to make my meaning plain and I feel how ill
equipped I am to furnish such an example. I will try to give some
sort of outline of my meaning.

To get to the first question in our catechism I suppose we must
begin somewhat after the following fashion.

NURSE: Do you remember when your mother was a little girl?

CHILD: No, nurse.

NURSE: Why not, when you have such a good memory?

CHILD: I was not alive.

NURSE: Then you were not always alive!

CHILD: No.

NURSE: Will you live for ever!

CHILD: Yes.

NURSE: Are you young or old?

CHILD: I am young.

NURSE: Is your grandmamma old or young?

CHILD: She is old.

NURSE: Was she ever young?

CHILD: Yes.

NURSE: Why is she not young now?

CHILD: She has grown old.

NURSE: Will you grow old too?

CHILD: I don't know.

NURSE: Where are your last year's frocks?

CHILD: They have been unpicked.

NURSE: Why!

CHILD: Because they were too small for me.

NURSE: Why were they too small?

CHILD: I have grown bigger.

NURSE: Will you grow any more!

CHILD: Oh, yes.

NURSE: And what becomes of big girls?

CHILD: They grow into women.

NURSE: And what becomes of women!

CHILD: They are mothers.

NURSE: And what becomes of mothers?

CHILD: They grow old.

NURSE: Will you grow old?

CHILD: When I am a mother.

NURSE: And what becomes of old people?

CHILD: I don't know.

NURSE: What became of your grandfather?

CHILD: He died. [Footnote: The child will say this because she has
heard it said; but you must make sure she knows what death is, for
the idea is not so simple and within the child's grasp as people
think. In that little poem "Abel" you will find an example of the way
to teach them. This charming work breathes a delightful simplicity
with which one should feed one's own mind so as to talk with
children.]

NURSE: Why did he die?

CHILD: Because he was so old.

NURSE: What becomes of old people!

CHILD: They die.

NURSE: And when you are old----?

CHILD: Oh nurse! I don't want to die!

NURSE: My dear, no one wants to die, and everybody dies.

CHILD: Why, will mamma die too!

NURSE: Yes, like everybody else. Women grow old as well as men,
and old age ends in death.

CHILD: What must I do to grow old very, very slowly?

NURSE: Be good while you are little.

CHILD: I will always be good, nurse.

NURSE: So much the better. But do you suppose you will live for
ever?

CHILD: When I am very, very old----

NURSE: Well?

CHILD: When we are so very old you say we must die?

NURSE: You must die some day.

CHILD: Oh dear! I suppose I must.

NURSE: Who lived before you?

CHILD: My father and mother.

NURSE: And before them?

CHILD: Their father and mother.

NURSE: Who will live after you?

CHILD: My children.

NURSE: Who will live after them?

CHILD: Their children.

In this way, by concrete examples, you will find a beginning and end
for the human race like everything else--that is to say, a father
and mother who never had a father and mother, and children who will
never have children of their own.

It is only after a long course of similar questions that we are
ready for the first question in the catechism; then alone can we
put the question and the child may be able to understand it. But
what a gap there is between the first and the second question which
is concerned with the definitions of the divine nature. When will
this chasm be bridged? "God is a spirit." "And what is a spirit?"
Shall I start the child upon this difficult question of metaphysics
which grown men find so hard to understand? These are no questions
for a little girl to answer; if she asks them, it is as much or more
than we can expect. In that case I should tell her quite simply,
"You ask me what God is; it is not easy to say; we can neither
hear nor see nor handle God; we can only know Him by His works. To
learn what He is, you must wait till you know what He has done."

If our dogmas are all equally true, they are not equally important.
It makes little difference to the glory of God that we should perceive
it everywhere, but it does make a difference to human society, and
to every member of that society, that a man should know and do the
duties which are laid upon him by the law of God, his duty to his
neighbour and to himself. This is what we should always be teaching
one another, and it is this which fathers and mothers are specially
bound to teach their little ones. Whether a virgin became the mother
of her Creator, whether she gave birth to God, or merely to a man
into whom God has entered, whether the Father and the Son are of
the same substance or of like substance only, whether the Spirit
proceeded from one or both of these who are but one, or from both
together, however important these questions may seem, I cannot
see that it is any more necessary for the human race to come to a
decision with regard to them than to know what day to keep Easter,
or whether we should tell our beads, fast, and refuse to eat meat,
speak Latin or French in church, adorn the walls with statues,
hear or say mass, and have no wife of our own. Let each think as
he pleases; I cannot see that it matters to any one but himself;
for my own part it is no concern of mine. But what does concern my
fellow-creatures and myself alike is to know that there is indeed
a judge of human fate, that we are all His children, that He bids
us all be just, He bids us love one another, He bids us be kindly
and merciful, He bids us keep our word with all men, even with our
own enemies and His; we must know that the apparent happiness of
this world is naught; that there is another life to come, in which
this Supreme Being will be the rewarder of the just and the judge
of the unjust. Children need to be taught these doctrines and others
like them and all citizens require to be persuaded of their truth.
Whoever sets his face against these doctrines is indeed guilty; he
is the disturber of the peace, the enemy of society. Whoever goes
beyond these doctrines and seeks to make us the slaves of his private
opinions, reaches the same goal by another way; to establish his
own kind of order he disturbs the peace; in his rash pride he makes
himself the interpreter of the Divine, and in His name demands the
homage and the reverence of mankind; so far as may be, he sets himself
in God's place; he should receive the punishment of sacrilege if
he is not punished for his intolerance.

Give no heed, therefore, to all those mysterious doctrines which
are words without ideas for us, all those strange teachings, the
study of which is too often offered as a substitute for virtue, a
study which more often makes men mad rather than good. Keep your
children ever within the little circle of dogmas which are related
to morality. Convince them that the only useful learning is that which
teaches us to act rightly. Do not make your daughters theologians
and casuists; only teach them such things of heaven as conduce
to human goodness; train them to feel that they are always in the
presence of God, who sees their thoughts and deeds, their virtue
and their pleasures; teach them to do good without ostentation and
because they love it, to suffer evil without a murmur, because God
will reward them; in a word to be all their life long what they
will be glad to have been when they appear in His presence. This
is true religion; this alone is incapable of abuse, impiety, or
fanaticism. Let those who will, teach a religion more sublime,
but this is the only religion I know.

Moreover, it is as well to observe that, until the age when the
reason becomes enlightened, when growing emotion gives a voice to
conscience, what is wrong for young people is what those about have
decided to be wrong. What they are told to do is good; what they
are forbidden to do is bad; that is all they ought to know: this
shows how important it is for girls, even more than for boys,
that the right people should be chosen to be with them and to have
authority over them. At last there comes a time when they begin to
judge things for themselves, and that is the time to change your
method of education.

Perhaps I have said too much already. To what shall we reduce the
education of our women if we give them no law but that of conventional
prejudice? Let us not degrade so far the set which rules over us,
and which does us honour when we have not made it vile. For all
mankind there is a law anterior to that of public opinion. All other
laws should bend before the inflexible control of this law; it is
the judge of public opinion, and only in so far as the esteem of
men is in accordance with this law has it any claim on our obedience.

This law is our individual conscience. I will not repeat what has
been said already; it is enough to point out that if these two
laws clash, the education of women will always be imperfect. Right
feeling without respect for public opinion will not give them that
delicacy of soul which lends to right conduct the charm of social
approval; while respect for public opinion without right feeling
will only make false and wicked women who put appearances in the
place of virtue.

It is, therefore, important to cultivate a faculty which serves
as judge between the two guides, which does not permit conscience
to go astray and corrects the errors of prejudice. That faculty
is reason. But what a crowd of questions arise at this word. Are
women capable of solid reason; should they cultivate it, can they
cultivate it successfully? Is this culture useful in relation to the
functions laid upon them? Is it compatible with becoming simplicity?

The different ways of envisaging and answering these questions lead
to two extremes; some would have us keep women indoors sewing and
spinning with their maids; thus they make them nothing more than
the chief servant of their master. Others, not content to secure
their rights, lead them to usurp ours; for to make woman our superior
in all the qualities proper to her sex, and to make her our equal
in all the rest, what is this but to transfer to the woman the
superiority which nature has given to her husband? The reason which
teaches a man his duties is not very complex; the reason which
teaches a woman hers is even simpler. The obedience and fidelity
which she owes to her husband, the tenderness and care due to her
children, are such natural and self-evident consequences of her
position that she cannot honestly refuse her consent to the inner
voice which is her guide, nor fail to discern her duty in her
natural inclination.

I would not altogether blame those who would restrict a woman to
the labours of her sex and would leave her in profound ignorance
of everything else; but that would require a standard of morality
at once very simple and very healthy, or a life withdrawn from the
world. In great towns, among immoral men, such a woman would be
too easily led astray; her virtue would too often be at the mercy
of circumstances; in this age of philosophy, virtue must be able
to resist temptation; she must know beforehand what she may hear
and what she should think of it.

Moreover, in submission to man's judgment she should deserve his
esteem; above all she should obtain the esteem of her husband;
she should not only make him love her person, she should make him
approve her conduct; she should justify his choice before the world,
and do honour to her husband through the honour given to the wife.
But how can she set about this task if she is ignorant of our
institutions, our customs, our notions of propriety, if she knows
nothing of the source of man's judgment, nor the passions by which
it is swayed! Since she depends both on her own conscience and
on public opinion, she must learn to know and reconcile these two
laws, and to put her own conscience first only when the two are
opposed to each other. She becomes the judge of her own judges,
she decides when she should obey and when she should refuse her
obedience. She weighs their prejudices before she accepts or rejects
them; she learns to trace them to their source, to foresee what
they will be, and to turn them in her own favour; she is careful
never to give cause for blame if duty allows her to avoid it. This
cannot be properly done without cultivating her mind and reason.

I always come back to my first principle and it supplies the
solution of all my difficulties. I study what is, I seek its cause,
and I discover in the end that what is, is good. I go to houses
where the master and mistress do the honours together. They are
equally well educated, equally polite, equally well equipped with
wit and good taste, both of them are inspired with the same desire
to give their guests a good reception and to send every one away
satisfied. The husband omits no pains to be attentive to every
one; he comes and goes and sees to every one and takes all sorts
of trouble; he is attention itself. The wife remains in her place;
a little circle gathers round her and apparently conceals the rest
of the company from her; yet she sees everything that goes on,
no one goes without a word with her; she has omitted nothing which
might interest anybody, she has said nothing unpleasant to any
one, and without any fuss the least is no more overlooked than
the greatest. Dinner is announced, they take their places; the
man knowing the assembled guests will place them according to his
knowledge; the wife, without previous acquaintance, never makes
a mistake; their looks and bearing have already shown her what is
wanted and every one will find himself where he wishes to be. I
do not assert that the servants forget no one. The master of the
house may have omitted no one, but the mistress perceives what you
like and sees that you get it; while she is talking to her neighbour
she has one eye on the other end of the table; she sees who is not
eating because he is not hungry and who is afraid to help himself
because he is clumsy and timid. When the guests leave the table
every one thinks she has had no thought but for him, everybody thinks
she has had no time to eat anything, but she has really eaten more
than anybody.

When the guests are gone, husband and wife tails over the events
of the evening. He relates what was said to him, what was said and
done by those with whom he conversed. If the lady is not always
quite exact in this respect, yet on the other hand she perceived
what was whispered at the other end of the room; she knows what
so-and-so thought, and what was the meaning of this speech or that
gesture; there is scarcely a change of expression for which she
has not an explanation in readiness, and she is almost always right.

The same turn of mind which makes a woman of the world such an
excellent hostess, enables a flirt to excel in the art of amusing
a number of suitors. Coquetry, cleverly carried out, demands an
even finer discernment than courtesy; provided a polite lady is
civil to everybody, she has done fairly well in any case; but the
flirt would soon lose her hold by such clumsy uniformity; if she
tries to be pleasant to all her lovers alike, she will disgust them
all. In ordinary social intercourse the manners adopted towards
everybody are good enough for all; no question is asked as to
private likes or dislikes provided all are alike well received. But
in love, a favour shared with others is an insult. A man of feeling
would rather be singled out for ill-treatment than be caressed with
the crowd, and the worst that can befall him is to be treated like
every one else. So a woman who wants to keep several lovers at
her feet must persuade every one of them that she prefers him, and
she must contrive to do this in the sight of all the rest, each of
whom is equally convinced that he is her favourite.

If you want to see a man in a quandary, place him between two
women with each of whom he has a secret understanding, and see what
a fool he looks. But put a woman in similar circumstances between
two men, and the results will be even more remarkable; you will be
astonished at the skill with which she cheats them both, and makes
them laugh at each other. Now if that woman were to show the same
confidence in both, if she were to be equally familiar with both,
how could they be deceived for a moment? If she treated them alike,
would she not show that they both had the same claims upon her?
Oh, she is far too clever for that; so far from treating them just
alike, she makes a marked difference between them, and she does
it so skilfully that the man she flatters thinks it is affection,
and the man she ill uses think it is spite. So that each of them
believes she is thinking of him, when she is thinking of no one
but herself.

A general desire to please suggests similar measures; people would
be disgusted with a woman's whims if they were not skilfully managed,
and when they are artistically distributed her servants are more
than ever enslaved.

"Usa ogn'arte la donna, onde sia colto
Nella sua rete alcun novello amante;
Ne con tutti, ne sempre un stesso volto
Serba; ma cangia a tempo atto e sembiante."
Tasso, Jerus. Del., c. iv., v. 87.

What is the secret of this art? Is it not the result of a delicate
and continuous observation which shows her what is taking place in
a man's heart, so that she is able to encourage or to check every
hidden impulse? Can this art be acquired? No; it is born with women;
it is common to them all, and men never show it to the same degree.
It is one of the distinctive characters of the sex. Self-possession,
penetration, delicate observation, this is a woman's science; the
skill to make use of it is her chief accomplishment.

This is what is, and we have seen why it is so. It is said that
women are false. They become false. They are really endowed with
skill not duplicity; in the genuine inclinations of their sex they
are not false even when they tell a lie. Why do you consult their
words when it is not their mouths that speak? Consult their eyes,
their colour, their breathing, their timid manner, their slight
resistance, that is the language nature gave them for your answer.
The lips always say "No," and rightly so; but the tone is not
always the same, and that cannot lie. Has not a woman the same needs
as a man, but without the same right to make them known? Her fate
would be too cruel if she had no language in which to express her
legitimate desires except the words which she dare not utter. Must
her modesty condemn her to misery? Does she not require a means
of indicating her inclinations without open expression? What skill
is needed to hide from her lover what she would fain reveal! Is it
not of vital importance that she should learn to touch his heart
without showing that she cares for him? It is a pretty story that
tale of Galatea with her apple and her clumsy flight. What more
is needed? Will she tell the shepherd who pursues her among the
willows that she only flees that he may follow? If she did, it would
be a lie; for she would no longer attract him. The more modest
a woman is, the more art she needs, even with her husband. Yes,
I maintain that coquetry, kept within bounds, becomes modest and
true, and out of it springs a law of right conduct.

One of my opponents has very truly asserted that virtue is one;
you cannot disintegrate it and choose this and reject the other.
If you love virtue, you love it in its entirety, and you close your
heart when you can, and you always close your lips to the feelings
which you ought not to allow. Moral truth is not only what is,
but what is good; what is bad ought not to be, and ought not to be
confessed, especially when that confession produces results which
might have been avoided. If I were tempted to steal, and in confessing
it I tempted another to become my accomplice, the very confession
of my temptation would amount to a yielding to that temptation. Why
do you say that modesty makes women false? Are those who lose their
modesty more sincere than the rest? Not so, they are a thousandfold
more deceitful. This degree of depravity is due to many vices, none
of which is rejected, vices which owe their power to intrigue and
falsehood. [Footnote: I know that women who have openly decided on
a certain course of conduct profess that their lack of concealment
is a virtue in itself, and swear that, with one exception, they are
possessed of all the virtues; but I am sure they never persuaded
any but fools to believe them. When the natural curb is removed
from their sex, what is there left to restrain them? What honour
will they prize when they have rejected the honour of their sex?
Having once given the rein to passion they have no longer any reason
for self-control. "Nec femina, amissa pudicitia, alia abnuerit."
No author ever understood more thoroughly the heart of both sexes
than Tacitus when he wrote those words.]

On the other hand, those who are not utterly shameless, who take no
pride in their faults, who are able to conceal their desires even
from those who inspire them, those who confess their passion most
reluctantly, these are the truest and most sincere, these are they
on whose fidelity you may generally rely.

The only example I know which might be quoted as a recognised exception
to these remarks is Mlle. de L'Enclos; and she was considered a
prodigy. In her scorn for the virtues of women, she practised, so
they say, the virtues of a man. She is praised for her frankness
and uprightness; she was a trustworthy acquaintance and a faithful
friend. To complete the picture of her glory it is said that she
became a man. That may be, but in spite of her high reputation I
should no more desire that man as my friend than as my mistress.

This is not so irrelevant as it seems. I am aware of the tendencies
of our modern philosophy which make a jest of female modesty and
its so-called insincerity; I also perceive that the most certain
result of this philosophy will be to deprive the women of this
century of such shreds of honour as they still possess.

On these grounds I think we may decide in general terms what sort
of education is suited to the female mind, and the objects to which
we should turn its attention in early youth.

As I have already said, the duties of their sex are more easily
recognised than performed. They must learn in the first place
to love those duties by considering the advantages to be derived
from them--that is the only way to make duty easy. Every age and
condition has its own duties. We are quick to see our duty if we
love it. Honour your position as a woman, and in whatever station
of life to which it shall please heaven to call you, you will be
well off. The essential thing is to be what nature has made you;
women are only too ready to be what men would have them.

The search for abstract and speculative truths, for principles and
axioms in science, for all that tends to wide generalisation, is
beyond a woman's grasp; their studies should be thoroughly practical.
It is their business to apply the principles discovered by men, it
is their place to make the observations which lead men to discover
those principles. A woman's thoughts, beyond the range of her immediate
duties, should be directed to the study of men, or the acquirement
of that agreeable learning whose sole end is the formation of taste;
for the works of genius are beyond her reach, and she has neither
the accuracy nor the attention for success in the exact sciences; as
for the physical sciences, to decide the relations between living
creatures and the laws of nature is the task of that sex which
is more active and enterprising, which sees more things, that sex
which is possessed of greater strength and is more accustomed to
the exercise of that strength. Woman, weak as she is and limited
in her range of observation, perceives and judges the forces at
her disposal to supplement her weakness, and those forces are the
passions of man. Her own mechanism is more powerful than ours; she
has many levers which may set the human heart in motion. She must
find a way to make us desire what she cannot achieve unaided and
what she considers necessary or pleasing; therefore she must have
a thorough knowledge of man's mind; not an abstract knowledge of
the mind of man in general, but the mind of those men who are about
her, the mind of those men who have authority over her, either by
law or custom. She must learn to divine their feelings from speech
and action, look and gesture. By her own speech and action, look
and gesture, she must be able to inspire them with the feelings she
desires, without seeming to have any such purpose. The men will
have a better philosophy of the human heart, but she will read
more accurately in the heart of men. Woman should discover, so to
speak, an experimental morality, man should reduce it to a system.
Woman has more wit, man more genius; woman observes, man reasons;
together they provide the clearest light and the profoundest
knowledge which is possible to the unaided human mind; in a word,
the surest knowledge of self and of others of which the human race
is capable. In this way art may constantly tend to the perfection
of the instrument which nature has given us.

The world is woman's book; if she reads it ill, it is either her
own fault or she is blinded by passion. Yet the genuine mother of
a family is no woman of the world, she is almost as much of a recluse
as the nun in her convent. Those who have marriageable daughters
should do what is or ought to be done for those who are entering
the cloisters: they should show them the pleasures they forsake
before they are allowed to renounce them, lest the deceitful picture
of unknown pleasures should creep in to disturb the happiness of
their retreat. In France it is the girls who live in convents and
the wives who flaunt in society. Among the ancients it was quite
otherwise; girls enjoyed, as I have said already, many games and
public festivals; the married women lived in retirement. This was
a more reasonable custom and more conducive to morality. A girl
may be allowed a certain amount of coquetry, and she may be mainly
occupied at amusement. A wife has other responsibilities at home,
and she is no longer on the look-out for a husband; but women
would not appreciate the change, and unluckily it is they who set
the fashion. Mothers, let your daughters be your companions. Give
them good sense and an honest heart, and then conceal from them
nothing that a pure eye may behold. Balls, assemblies, sports, the
theatre itself; everything which viewed amiss delights imprudent
youth may be safely displayed to a healthy mind. The more they
know of these noisy pleasures, the sooner they will cease to desire
them.

I can fancy the outcry with which this will be received. What girl
will resist such an example? Their heads are turned by the first
glimpse of the world; not one of them is ready to give it up. That
may be; but before you showed them this deceitful prospect, did
you prepare them to behold it without emotion? Did you tell them
plainly what it was they would see? Did you show it in its true
light? Did you arm them against the illusions of vanity? Did you
inspire their young hearts with a taste for the true pleasures
which are not to be met with in this tumult? What precautions, what
steps, did you take to preserve them from the false taste which
leads them astray? Not only have you done nothing to preserve
their minds from the tyranny of prejudice, you have fostered that
prejudice; you have taught them to desire every foolish amusement
they can get. Your own example is their teacher. Young people on
their entrance into society have no guide but their mother, who
is often just as silly as they are themselves, and quite unable to
show them things except as she sees them herself. Her example is
stronger than reason; it justifies them in their own eyes, and the
mother's authority is an unanswerable excuse for the daughter. If
I ask a mother to bring her daughter into society, I assume that
she will show it in its true light.

The evil begins still earlier; the convents are regular schools
of coquetry; not that honest coquetry which I have described, but
a coquetry the source of every kind of misconduct, a coquetry which
turns out girls who are the most ridiculous little madams. When
they leave the convent to take their place in smart society, young
women find themselves quite at home. They have been educated for
such a life; is it strange that they like it? I am afraid what I
am going to say may be based on prejudice rather than observation,
but so far as I can see, one finds more family affection, more good
wives and loving mothers in Protestant than in Catholic countries;
if that is so, we cannot fail to suspect that the difference is
partly due to the convent schools.

The charms of a peaceful family life must be known to be enjoyed;
their delights should be tasted in childhood. It is only in our
father's home that we learn to love our own, and a woman whose
mother did not educate her herself will not be willing to educate
her own children. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as home
education in our large towns. Society is so general and so mixed there
is no place left for retirement, and even in the home we live in
public. We live in company till we have no family, and we scarcely
know our own relations, we see them as strangers; and the simplicity
of home life disappears together with the sweet familiarity which
was its charm. In this wise do we draw with our mother's milk a
taste for the pleasures of the age and the maxims by which it is
controlled.

Girls are compelled to assume an air of propriety so that men may
be deceived into marrying them by their appearance. But watch these
young people for a moment; under a pretence of coyness they barely
conceal the passion which devours them, and already you may read
in their eager eyes their desire to imitate their mothers. It is
not a husband they want, but the licence of a married woman. What
need of a husband when there are so many other resources; but
a husband there must be to act as a screen. [Footnote: The way of
a man in his youth was one of the four things that the sage could
not understand; the fifth was the shamelessness of an adulteress.
"Quae comedit, et tergens os suum dicit; non sum operata malum."
Prov. xxx. 20.] There is modesty on the brow, but vice in the
heart; this sham modesty is one of its outward signs; they affect
it that they may be rid of it once for all. Women of Paris and
London, forgive me! There may be miracles everywhere, but I am not
aware of them; and if there is even one among you who is really
pure in heart, I know nothing of our institutions.

All these different methods of education lead alike to a taste for
the pleasures of the great world, and to the passions which this
taste so soon kindles. In our great towns depravity begins at birth;
in the smaller towns it begins with reason. Young women brought up
in the country are soon taught to despise the happy simplicity of
their lives, and hasten to Paris to share the corruption of ours.
Vices, cloaked under the fair name of accomplishments, are the sole
object of their journey; ashamed to find themselves so much behind
the noble licence of the Parisian ladies, they hasten to become
worthy of the name of Parisian. Which is responsible for the
evil--the place where it begins, or the place where it is accomplished?

I would not have a sensible mother bring her girl to Paris to show
her these sights so harmful to others; but I assert that if she
did so, either the girl has been badly brought up, or such sights
have little danger for her. With good taste, good sense, and a love
of what is right, these things are less attractive than to those
who abandon themselves to their charm. In Paris you may see giddy
young things hastening to adopt the tone and fashions of the town
for some six months, so that they may spend the rest of their life
in disgrace; but who gives any heed to those who, disgusted with
the rout, return to their distant home and are contented with their
lot when they have compared it with that which others desire. How
many young wives have I seen whose good-natured husbands have taken
them to Paris where they might live if they pleased; but they have
shrunk from it and returned home more willingly than they went,
saying tenderly, "Ah, let us go back to our cottage, life is happier
there than in these palaces." We do not know how many there are who
have not bowed the knee to Baal, who scorn his senseless worship.
Fools make a stir; good women pass unnoticed.

If so many women preserve a judgment which is proof against temptation,
in spite of universal prejudice, in spite of the bad education of
girls, what would their judgment have been, had it been strengthened
by suitable instruction, or rather left unaffected by evil teaching,
for to preserve or restore the natural feelings is our main business?
You can do this without preaching endless sermons to your daughters,
without crediting them with your harsh morality. The only effect
of such teaching is to inspire a dislike for the teacher and the
lessons. In talking to a young girl you need not make her afraid
of her duties, nor need you increase the burden laid upon her by
nature. When you explain her duties speak plainly and pleasantly;
do not let her suppose that the performance of these duties is
a dismal thing--away with every affectation of disgust or pride.
Every thought which we desire to arouse should find its expression
in our pupils, their catechism of conduct should be as brief and
plain as their catechism of religion, but it need not be so serious.
Show them that these same duties are the source of their pleasures
and the basis of their rights. Is it so hard to win love by love,
happiness by an amiable disposition, obedience by worth, and honour
by self-respect? How fair are these woman's rights, how worthy of
reverence, how dear to the heart of man when a woman is able to
show their worth! These rights are no privilege of years; a woman's
empire begins with her virtues; her charms are only in the bud,
yet she reigns already by the gentleness of her character and
the dignity of her modesty. Is there any man so hard-hearted and
uncivilised that he does not abate his pride and take heed to his
manners with a sweet and virtuous girl of sixteen, who listens but
says little; her bearing is modest, her conversation honest, her
beauty does not lead her to forget her sex and her youth, her very
timidity arouses interest, while she wins for herself the respect
which she shows to others?

These external signs are not devoid of meaning; they do not rest
entirely upon the charms of sense; they arise from that conviction
that we all feel that women are the natural judges of a man's
worth. Who would be scorned by women? not even he who has ceased
to desire their love. And do you suppose that I, who tell them such
harsh truths, am indifferent to their verdict? Reader, I care more
for their approval than for yours; you are often more effeminate
than they. While I scorn their morals, I will revere their justice;
I care not though they hate me, if I can compel their esteem.

What great things might be accomplished by their influence if only
we could bring it to bear! Alas for the age whose women lose their
ascendancy, and fail to make men respect their judgment! This
is the last stage of degradation. Every virtuous nation has shown
respect to women. Consider Sparta, Germany, and Rome; Rome the
throne of glory and virtue, if ever they were enthroned on earth.
The Roman women awarded honour to the deeds of great generals, they
mourned in public for the fathers of the country, their awards and
their tears were alike held sacred as the most solemn utterance of
the Republic. Every great revolution began with the women. Through
a woman Rome gained her liberty, through a woman the plebeians
won the consulate, through a woman the tyranny of the decemvirs
was overthrown; it was the women who saved Rome when besieged by
Coriolanus. What would you have said at the sight of this procession,
you Frenchmen who pride yourselves on your gallantry, would you
not have followed it with shouts of laughter? You and I see things
with such different eyes, and perhaps we are both right. Such
a procession formed of the fairest beauties of France would be an
indecent spectacle; but let it consist of Roman ladies, you will
all gaze with the eyes of the Volscians and feel with the heart of
Coriolanus.

I will go further and maintain that virtue is no less favourable
to love than to other rights of nature, and that it adds as much
to the power of the beloved as to that of the wife or mother. There
is no real love without enthusiasm, and no enthusiasm without an
object of perfection real or supposed, but always present in the
imagination. What is there to kindle the hearts of lovers for
whom this perfection is nothing, for whom the loved one is merely
the means to sensual pleasure? Nay, not thus is the heart kindled,
not thus does it abandon itself to those sublime transports which
form the rapture of lovers and the charm of love. Love is an
illusion, I grant you, but its reality consists in the feelings it
awakes, in the love of true beauty which it inspires. That beauty
is not to be found in the object of our affections, it is the
creation of our illusions. What matter! do we not still sacrifice
all those baser feelings to the imaginary model? and we still feed
our hearts on the virtues we attribute to the beloved, we still
withdraw ourselves from the baseness of human nature. What lover is
there who would not give his life for his mistress? What gross and
sensual passion is there in a man who is willing to die? We scoff
at the knights of old; they knew the meaning of love; we know
nothing but debauchery. When the teachings of romance began to seem
ridiculous, it was not so much the work of reason as of immorality.

Natural relations remain the same throughout the centuries, their
good or evil effects are unchanged; prejudices, masquerading as
reason, can but change their outward seeming; self-mastery, even
at the behest of fantastic opinions, will not cease to be great

and good. And the true motives of honour will not fail to appeal to
the heart of every woman who is able to seek happiness in life in
her woman's duties. To a high-souled woman chastity above all must
be a delightful virtue. She sees all the kingdoms of the world before
her and she triumphs over herself and them; she sits enthroned in
her own soul and all men do her homage; a few passing struggles
are crowned with perpetual glory; she secures the affection, or it
may be the envy, she secures in any case the esteem of both sexes
and the universal respect of her own. The loss is fleeting, the gain
is permanent. What a joy for a noble heart--the pride of virtue
combined with beauty. Let her be a heroine of romance; she will
taste delights more exquisite than those of Lais and Cleopatra; and
when her beauty is fled, her glory and her joys remain; she alone
can enjoy the past.

The harder and more important the duties, the stronger and clearer
must be the reasons on which they are based. There is a sort of
pious talk about the most serious subjects which is dinned in vain
into the ears of young people. This talk, quite unsuited to their
ideas and the small importance they attach to it in secret, inclines
them to yield readily to their inclinations, for lack of any
reasons for resistance drawn from the facts themselves. No doubt
a girl brought up to goodness and piety has strong weapons against
temptation; but one whose heart, or rather her ears, are merely
filled with the jargon of piety, will certainly fall a prey to the
first skilful seducer who attacks her. A young and beautiful girl
will never despise her body, she will never really deplore sins which
her beauty leads men to commit, she will never lament earnestly in
the sight of God that she is an object of desire, she will never
be convinced that the tenderest feeling is an invention of the Evil
One. Give her other and more pertinent reasons for her own sake,
for these will have no effect. It will be worse to instil, as is
often done, ideas which contradict each other, and after having
humbled and degraded her person and her charms as the stain of sin,
to bid her reverence that same vile body as the temple of Jesus
Christ. Ideas too sublime and too humble are equally ineffective
and they cannot both be true. A reason adapted to her age and sex
is what is needed. Considerations of duty are of no effect unless
they are combined with some motive for the performance of our duty.

"Quae quia non liceat non facit, illa facit."
OVID, Amor. I. iii. eleg. iv.

One would not suspect Ovid of such a harsh judgment.

If you would inspire young people with a love of good conduct avoid
saying, "Be good;" make it their interest to be good; make them
feel the value of goodness and they will love it. It is not enough
to show this effect in the distant future, show it now, in the
relations of the present, in the character of their lovers. Describe
a good man, a man of worth, teach them to recognise him when they
see him, to love him for their own sake; convince them that such
a man alone can make them happy as friend, wife, or mistress. Let
reason lead the way to virtue; make them feel that the empire of
their sex and all the advantages derived from it depend not merely
on the right conduct, the morality, of women, but also on that of
men; that they have little hold over the vile and base, and that
the lover is incapable of serving his mistress unless he can do
homage to virtue. You may then be sure that when you describe the
manners of our age you will inspire them with a genuine disgust;
when you show them men of fashion they will despise them; you
will give them a distaste for their maxims, an aversion to their
sentiments, and a scorn for their empty gallantry; you will arouse a
nobler ambition, to reign over great and strong souls, the ambition
of the Spartan women to rule over men. A bold, shameless, intriguing
woman, who can only attract her lovers by coquetry and retain
them by her favours, wins a servile obedience in common things; in
weighty and important matters she has no influence over them. But
the woman who is both virtuous, wise, and charming, she who, in
a word, combines love and esteem, can send them at her bidding to
the end of the world, to war, to glory, and to death at her behest.
This is a fine kingdom and worth the winning.

This is the spirit in which Sophy has been educated, she has been
trained carefully rather than strictly, and her taste has been
followed rather than thwarted. Let us say just a word about her
person, according to the description I have given to Emile and the
picture he himself has formed of the wife in whom he hopes to find
happiness.

I cannot repeat too often that I am not dealing with prodigies.
Emile is no prodigy, neither is Sophy. He is a man and she is a
woman; this is all they have to boast of. In the present confusion
between the sexes it is almost a miracle to belong to one's own
sex. Sophy is well born and she has a good disposition; she is
very warm-hearted, and this warmth of heart sometimes makes her
imagination run away with her. Her mind is keen rather than accurate,
her temper is pleasant but variable, her person pleasing though
nothing out of the common, her countenance bespeaks a soul and it
speaks true; you may meet her with indifference, but you will not
leave her without emotion. Others possess good qualities which
she lacks; others possess her good qualities in a higher degree,
but in no one are these qualities better blended to form a happy
disposition. She knows how to make the best of her very faults,
and if she were more perfect she would be less pleasing.

Sophy is not beautiful; but in her presence men forget the fairer
women, and the latter are dissatisfied with themselves. At first
sight she is hardly pretty; but the more we see her the prettier
she is; she wins where so many lose, and what she wins she keeps.
Her eyes might be finer, her mouth more beautiful, her stature more
imposing; but no one could have a more graceful figure, a finer
complexion, a whiter hand, a daintier foot, a sweeter look, and
a more expressive countenance. She does not dazzle; she arouses
interest; she delights us, we know not why.

Sophy is fond of dress, and she knows how to dress; her mother has
no other maid; she has taste enough to dress herself well; but she
hates rich clothes; her own are always simple but elegant. She does
not like showy but becoming things. She does not know what colours
are fashionable, but she makes no mistake about those that suit
her. No girl seems more simply dressed, but no one could take
more pains over her toilet; no article is selected at random, and
yet there is no trace of artificiality. Her dress is very modest
in appearance and very coquettish in reality; she does not display
her charms, she conceals them, but in such a way as to enhance
them. When you see her you say, "That is a good modest girl," but
while you are with her, you cannot take your eyes or your thoughts
off her and one might say that this very simple adornment is only
put on to be removed bit by bit by the imagination.

Sophy has natural gifts; she is aware of them, and they have not
been neglected; but never having had a chance of much training she
is content to use her pretty voice to sing tastefully and truly;
her little feet step lightly, easily, and gracefully, she can always
make an easy graceful courtesy. She has had no singing master but
her father, no dancing mistress but her mother; a neighbouring
organist has given her a few lessons in playing accompaniments
on the spinet, and she has improved herself by practice. At first
she only wished to show off her hand on the dark keys; then she
discovered that the thin clear tone of the spinet made her voice
sound sweeter; little by little she recognised the charms of
harmony; as she grew older she at last began to enjoy the charms
of expression, to love music for its own sake. But she has taste
rather than talent; she cannot read a simple air from notes.

Needlework is what Sophy likes best; and the feminine arts have
been taught her most carefully, even those you would not expect,
such as cutting out and dressmaking. There is nothing she cannot
do with her needle, and nothing that she does not take a delight in
doing; but lace-making is her favourite occupation, because there
is nothing which requires such a pleasing attitude, nothing which
calls for such grace and dexterity of finger. She has also studied
all the details of housekeeping; she understands cooking and
cleaning; she knows the prices of food, and also how to choose it;
she can keep accounts accurately, she is her mother's housekeeper.
Some day she will be the mother of a family; by managing her father's
house she is preparing to manage her own; she can take the place
of any of the servants and she is always ready to do so. You cannot
give orders unless you can do the work yourself; that is why her
mother sets her to do it. Sophy does not think of that; her first
duty is to be a good daughter, and that is all she thinks about for
the present. Her one idea is to help her mother and relieve her of
some of her anxieties. However, she does not like them all equally
well. For instance, she likes dainty food, but she does not like
cooking; the details of cookery offend her, and things are never
clean enough for her. She is extremely sensitive in this respect
and carries her sensitiveness to a fault; she would let the whole
dinner boil over into the fire rather than soil her cuffs. She has
always disliked inspecting the kitchen-garden for the same reason.
The soil is dirty, and as soon as she sees the manure heap she
fancies there is a disagreeable smell.

This defect is the result of her mother's teaching. According to
her, cleanliness is one of the most necessary of a woman's duties,
a special duty, of the highest importance and a duty imposed by
nature. Nothing could be more revolting than a dirty woman, and a
husband who tires of her is not to blame. She insisted so strongly
on this duty when Sophy was little, she required such absolute
cleanliness in her person, clothing, room, work, and toilet, that
use has become habit, till it absorbs one half of her time and
controls the other; so that she thinks less of how to do a thing
than of how to do it without getting dirty.

Yet this has not degenerated into mere affectation and softness;
there is none of the over refinement of luxury. Nothing but clean
water enters her room; she knows no perfumes but the scent of
flowers, and her husband will never find anything sweeter than her
breath. In conclusion, the attention she pays to the outside does
not blind her to the fact that time and strength are meant for greater
tasks; either she does not know or she despises that exaggerated
cleanliness of body which degrades the soul. Sophy is more than
clean, she is pure.

I said that Sophy was fond of good things. She was so by nature; but
she became temperate by habit and now she is temperate by virtue.
Little girls are not to be controlled, as little boys are, to
some extent, through their greediness. This tendency may have ill
effects on women and it is too dangerous to be left unchecked.
When Sophy was little, she did not always return empty handed if
she was sent to her mother's cupboard, and she was not quite to be
trusted with sweets and sugar-almonds. Her mother caught her, took
them from her, punished her, and made her go without her dinner.
At last she managed to persuade her that sweets were bad for the
teeth, and that over-eating spoiled the figure. Thus Sophy overcame
her faults; and when she grew older other tastes distracted her from
this low kind of self-indulgence. With awakening feeling greediness
ceases to be the ruling passion, both with men and women. Sophy
has preserved her feminine tastes; she likes milk and sweets; she
likes pastry and made-dishes, but not much meat. She has never
tasted wine or spirits; moreover, she eats sparingly; women, who do
not work so hard as men, have less waste to repair. In all things
she likes what is good, and knows how to appreciate it; but she
can also put up with what is not so good, or can go without it.

Sophy's mind is pleasing but not brilliant, and thorough but not
deep; it is the sort of mind which calls for no remark, as she
never seems cleverer or stupider than oneself. When people talk to
her they always find what she says attractive, though it may not be
highly ornamental according to modern ideas of an educated woman;
her mind has been formed not only by reading, but by conversation
with her father and mother, by her own reflections, and by her
own observations in the little world in which she has lived. Sophy
is naturally merry; as a child she was even giddy; but her mother
cured her of her silly ways, little by little, lest too sudden a
change should make her self-conscious. Thus she became modest and
retiring while still a child, and now that she is a child no longer,
she finds it easier to continue this conduct than it would have
been to acquire it without knowing why. It is amusing to see her
occasionally return to her old ways and indulge in childish mirth
and then suddenly check herself, with silent lips, downcast eyes,
and rosy blushes; neither child nor woman, she may well partake of
both.

Sophy is too sensitive to be always good humoured, but too gentle
to let this be really disagreeable to other people; it is only
herself who suffers. If you say anything that hurts her she does
not sulk, but her heart swells; she tries to run away and cry. In
the midst of her tears, at a word from her father or mother she
returns at once laughing and playing, secretly wiping her eyes and
trying to stifle her sobs.

Yet she has her whims; if her temper is too much indulged
it degenerates into rebellion, and then she forgets herself. But
give her time to come round and her way of making you forget her
wrong-doing is almost a virtue. If you punish her she is gentle
and submissive, and you see that she is more ashamed of the fault
than the punishment. If you say nothing, she never fails to make
amends, and she does it so frankly and so readily that you cannot
be angry with her. She