A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

1

The Rights—and the Duties—That Come With Being Human

Given how society works right now, we have to do something that feels almost old-fashioned: go back to first principles. Not because we love abstractions, but because that’s where the simplest truths live—and because you don’t overturn a deep prejudice without fighting for every inch of ground.

So let me clear a path with a few plain questions. The answers should be as obvious as the basic rules of logic. And yet, once real life gets tangled up with ambition, fear, vanity, and habit, people will often contradict those answers—sometimes in what they say, and even more often in what they do.

What, exactly, makes humans “above” other animals?
Reason. The answer is as clear as the fact that half is less than the whole.

What achievement lifts one being above another?
Virtue, we all instinctively say.

Why do we have passions at all?
Experience gives the blunt reply: so that by wrestling with them, we can reach a kind of understanding that animals never get.

Put those together, and you get a simple yardstick. A person’s excellence—and their capacity for real happiness—should be measured by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge they develop. And if you look at humanity as a whole, the pattern holds: when reason is genuinely exercised, knowledge and virtue naturally follow.

Once you frame things that way, “rights” and “duties” start to look almost embarrassingly straightforward. It can feel unnecessary to explain truths that seem this solid. But we can’t pretend we live in a world where words like “virtue” and “wisdom” always mean what they should. Prejudices have fogged reason for so long—and counterfeit qualities have paraded around under noble names so successfully—that we have to trace how reason got twisted. We have to keep comparing the clean axiom to the messy exceptions life piles on top of it.

Here’s one of the messiest facts: most people don’t use reason to uproot their prejudices. They use it to defend them. They absorb opinions early, almost without noticing how, and later they build arguments to justify what they already believe. It takes a strong mind to form its own principles and stick to them. Most people don’t. A kind of intellectual cowardice is common: they shrink from the work, or do it halfway.

And yet, those half-formed conclusions can sound persuasive, because they’re often built on real experience—just partial experience, and therefore narrow, even when it’s “right” as far as it goes.

When we return to first principles, vice hates the light. Close inspection makes it look exactly as ugly as it is. That’s why a certain kind of shallow thinker always protests, “These arguments prove too much,” and then insists that a policy rotten at the core might still be “useful.” So expediency gets set against principle, again and again, until truth dissolves into a fog of clever phrases. Virtue turns into empty ritual. Knowledge becomes a loud, impressive nothing—smothered by the shiny prejudices that steal its name.

In the abstract, it strikes any thoughtful person as obvious that the best society is the one whose constitution fits human nature. It almost feels arrogant to offer proof. But proof is exactly what we need, because otherwise the iron grip of “that’s how it’s always been” will never be pried open by reason. And to cite tradition as a reason for stripping people—men or women—of their natural rights is one of those absurd arguments that insults common sense every day.

Look at Europe. The “civilization” most people live under is painfully incomplete. You could even ask whether people have gained any virtues worth the name in exchange for the innocence they lost—virtues that truly balance the misery produced by vices carefully plastered over ignorance, and by the freedom traded away for a glittering kind of slavery.

So much of what passes for “pre-eminence” is just display:

• the urge to dazzle others with wealth
• the pleasure of commanding flatterers
• the small, calculating strategies of aging self-love
• the whole machinery of rank, titles, and inherited distinction

All of it weighs down the many, while “liberty” becomes a convenient prop for fake patriotism. When a society worships titles, genius is told to bow its head. And with few exceptions, a nation is in trouble when a genuinely capable person—without rank or property—pushes into public view. Think of the misery poured out to purchase some churchman’s hat for an ambitious nobody who wanted to be counted among princes, or even dominate them by grabbing the highest religious crown.

The misery produced by hereditary honors, vast fortunes, and monarchy has been so brutal that sensitive people have nearly spoken blasphemy just to justify divine providence. In those stories, humanity gets pictured as independent of its creator—as if we were a rogue planet escaping its orbit to steal the fire of reason, only to be punished by the very flame we stole, like Pandora’s box releasing hidden disasters into the world.

Rousseau took these scenes of disorder to heart. Worn out by colliding with what he saw as artificial, ridiculous social life, he fell in love with solitude. And because he was also an optimist, he argued—brilliantly—that humans were naturally solitary. Out of reverence for God’s goodness (and really, who with sense and feeling can doubt that life was given to communicate happiness?), he treated evil as something purely human-made. But he didn’t see that he was praising one divine attribute by shrinking another—when both are necessary if you’re going to talk coherently about divine perfection.

That false starting point makes his case for a “state of nature” sound convincing, but it doesn’t make it true. To say that a raw state of nature is better than civilization at its possible best is, in effect, to put supreme wisdom on trial. And the dramatic claim—“God made everything right, and the creature introduced error”—is as unphilosophical as it is irreverent, because it pretends God created humans while somehow not knowing what humans were.

A wiser view is this: the creator allowed passions to unfold our reason because present evil can produce future good. Could a helpless creature called out of nothing somehow break loose from providence—learn good by practicing evil—without permission? No. So how could Rousseau, who elsewhere argues so powerfully for immortality, reason so inconsistently here?

If humanity had stayed forever in the brute state of nature—a state that even his gifted pen can’t honestly paint as one where a single real virtue ever took root—then the conclusion would be grim: humans would have been born simply to run the loop of life and death, like decorative plants in a garden, for some purpose that’s hard to reconcile with divine attributes. But if rational creatures exist—creatures allowed to grow in excellence by exercising the powers planted in them—then the picture changes.

If benevolence chose to bring into being a creature above the animals, capable of thought and self-improvement, why call that gift—because it is a gift—a curse? It would only be a curse if this world were the whole story. Then, yes: why give us passions and reflection merely to sour our days and inflate us with confused ideas of dignity? Why lead us from basic self-interest into the higher emotions stirred by recognizing divine wisdom and goodness, if those feelings weren’t meant to improve our nature—and to fit us for a more godlike share of happiness?

Persuaded that nothing exists—no “evil” included—that God did not allow for a purpose, I build my belief on divine perfection. Rousseau strains to prove everything was right at the beginning. Many writers insist everything is right now. I maintain everything will be right.

Yet Rousseau, faithful to his first claim, ends up praising barbarism as the next-best thing to nature. He calls on the spirit of Fabricius as if Roman virtue were the model, forgetting that Rome—while conquering the world—never seriously aimed to secure liberty on a firm foundation or to extend the rule of virtue. Determined to protect his system, he brands nearly every effort of genius as corrupt. He glorifies “savage virtues,” raising to near-divine status people who were barely humane—like the Spartans, who, in cold blood and in contempt of justice and gratitude, murdered the slaves who had heroically saved their very oppressors.

What went wrong for him is simple: disgusted by artificial manners and fake virtues, the citizen of Geneva didn’t properly sift the subject. He threw out the wheat with the chaff. He didn’t pause to ask whether the evils that horrified him came from civilization itself—or from lingering barbarism dressed up in polished clothes.

He saw vice crushing virtue, and the appearance of goodness replacing the real thing. He saw talents bent by power toward ugly purposes. But he didn’t trace the monster back to its source: arbitrary power, and the hereditary distinctions that clash with the kind of mental superiority that, by nature, lifts one person above another. He didn’t notice how royal power, over generations, breeds stupidity into noble bloodlines—and how it offers incentives that make thousands idle and vicious.

Nothing makes kingship look more contemptible than the crimes that have often carried men to the top. Petty plots, unnatural crimes, and every vice that degrades human nature have served as steps to “supreme dignity.” And still, millions have passively allowed the limp descendants of rapacious predators to sit calmly on blood-stained thrones.

What kind of poisoned air hangs over a society when its chief ruler is trained either in inventing crimes or in the stupid routine of childish ceremonies? Will people never learn? Will they never stop expecting wheat from weeds—and figs from thorns?

Even under the best circumstances, no one can gain enough knowledge and strength of mind to carry the duties of a king holding unchecked power. So what happens when that power is held by someone whose very position blocks the growth of wisdom and virtue—when flattery smothers all human feeling, and pleasure locks out reflection? It’s madness to let the fate of thousands depend on the whims of a weak fellow creature whose station almost guarantees he will be, in the most important sense, lower than the poorest of his subjects.

Still, the answer isn’t to knock down one tyranny only to build another. Power intoxicates, especially weak men, and its abuses teach the same lesson again and again: the more equality we establish among people, the more virtue and happiness can take root in society. But say that aloud—say anything grounded in plain reason—and you’ll hear the panic: the church is in danger, the state is in danger, unless we treat the “wisdom of antiquity” as unquestionable. And those who, moved by human suffering, dare to challenge human authority are smeared as enemies of God and enemies of humanity.

They’re bitter lies. And they struck one of the best of men—one whose memory still urges peace, and whose name deserves respect when we argue about matters so close to his heart.

After challenging the sacred aura around kings, it should surprise no one if I add this: any profession built on extreme rank and subordination is corrosive to morality.

Take a standing army. It cannot coexist with freedom, because subordination and harshness are the muscle of military discipline, and despotism is the fuel that gives force to plans directed by a single will. A romantic “code of honor”—a morality shaped by the fashion of the age—might animate a few officers. But the main body moves by command, like ocean waves driven by wind. Authority shoves the mass of subordinates forward; they often barely know, or care, why they rush ahead with such violence.

And consider what the occasional presence of idle young officers does to country towns. Their “occupation” is flirtation. Their polished manners make vice more dangerous by hiding it under bright decorations. An air of fashion—which is really a badge of servitude, proof of a soul without a strong individual character—overawes simple people into copying the vices even when they can’t imitate the slippery graces of politeness. Each corps becomes a chain of little despots: men who submit and tyrannize without thinking, turning into dead weight—vice and folly—on the community. A man of rank or fortune, guaranteed advancement through connections, needs only to indulge some extravagant whim. Meanwhile the poor “gentleman” who must rise “by merit” too often becomes either a servile parasite or a contemptible go-between.

Sailors and naval gentlemen belong to the same general picture, though their vices look rougher. When they aren’t performing the rituals of rank, they tend to be more openly idle. The soldier’s fussiness is “active idleness”; the sailor’s is heavier and lazier. Confined more to the company of men, sailors pick up a taste for jokes and mischievous tricks, while soldiers—mixing more often with fashionable women—catch a sentimental kind of posing. Either way, thought is pushed aside, whether they’re roaring with coarse laughter or wearing a polished smile.

And if you’ll allow me to extend the comparison to a profession where you do find more intelligence: the clergy. They have better chances to improve themselves, and yet subordination still cramps them almost as tightly. Blind submission to prescribed beliefs at college becomes a training ground for the curate, who must bow to the opinions of a rector or patron if he wants to advance. Few contrasts are sharper than the dependent, submissive walk of a poor curate and the courtly ease of a bishop. The mixture of respect and contempt they inspire makes both of their functions, in practice, equally hollow.

This matters because a person’s character is shaped, in part, by their profession. A thoughtful person may carry a certain “look” from his role that fades as you get to know him as an individual. But the weak, average person rarely has much character beyond what the role provides. His opinions have been steeped so long in the vat blessed by authority that you can’t taste anything of his own. The faint spirit pressed from his own vine disappears.

So as society becomes more enlightened, it should be extremely cautious about creating organized bodies of men who are almost guaranteed to be made foolish or vicious by the structure of their work.

Early in society—when people were just climbing out of barbarism—chiefs and priests, working the strongest levers of savage behavior, hope and fear, naturally held enormous power. An aristocracy, then, is usually the first form of government. But competing interests quickly throw things out of balance. Monarchy and hierarchy emerge from the chaos of ambition, and both take firm root through feudal arrangements. That’s the origin of royal and priestly power, and the first light of civilization.

Yet this material is too combustible to stay contained. It bursts out in foreign wars and internal revolts. In the turmoil, the people gain some power—enough to force rulers to cover oppression with the appearance of right. And as war, agriculture, commerce, and literature expand the mind, despots are pushed into a new strategy: corruption, quietly and systematically, must hold the power that used to be seized openly by force. That hidden rot spreads fastest through luxury and superstition, the bitter dregs of ambition. The idle puppet of a court becomes first a luxury-soaked monster or a picky sensualist, and then turns the contagion of his unnatural life into an instrument of tyranny.

It’s that poisoned “purple” of court and crown that turns civilization’s progress into a curse. It twists the understanding until even sensitive people wonder whether expanding the mind brings more happiness—or more misery. But the nature of the poison tells you the antidote. If Rousseau had climbed just one step higher in his investigation—if his eye could have pierced the fog he almost refused to breathe—his active mind would have leapt forward to imagine humanity’s perfection in true civilization, instead of making its fierce retreat back into the dark of sensual ignorance.

2

The Popular “Sex Difference” Argument—and Why It Doesn’t Hold Up

People have invented all sorts of clever-sounding theories to explain—and excuse—men’s tyranny. The most popular one goes like this: since men and women are supposedly built for different “virtues,” they should aim at fundamentally different kinds of character. Put plainly, the claim is that women don’t have enough mental strength to develop what truly deserves the name virtue.

But if we admit that women have souls at all, then the logic collapses. There isn’t one moral road for men and another for women. There’s only one path—toward virtue and happiness—and it’s the same for every human being.

So if women aren’t just a buzzing swarm of short-lived, frivolous creatures, why are they deliberately kept ignorant under the flattering label of “innocence”? Men complain—often with good reason—about women’s follies and sudden mood swings, and they don’t hold back when they mock women’s stubborn passions and low, petty vices. My answer is simple: look at the environment you’ve created. Ignorance produces exactly this. A mind that has nothing but prejudice to lean on will always wobble. And when there are no solid barriers—no principles, no understanding—emotion rushes through like a flood, doing damage because nothing has been built to hold it back.

From early childhood, girls are taught (and watch their mothers model) a very specific set of “skills” that society rewards:

• a small, practiced knowledge of human weakness—what people politely call “cunning”
• a soft, pleasing temper
• outward obedience
• anxious attention to a childish version of “proper behavior”

The lesson is clear: perform these traits and you’ll “earn” men’s protection. And if you’re beautiful, you’re told you hardly need anything else—at least for the first twenty years.

This is the same spirit in which Milton portrays Eve. When he says women were made for softness and “sweet attractive grace,” I honestly can’t see what he means unless he’s speaking in that old, thoroughly patriarchal tone that quietly strips women of souls. As if women exist only to charm, to obey, and to satisfy men’s senses once men are too tired—or too shallow—to live by thought and reflection.

What an insult it is to advise women to turn themselves into gentle, domestic animals. Take the endlessly praised “winning softness” that supposedly rules by obeying. What does that even mean? What kind of being—especially an immortal one—would choose to govern through manipulation and indirect tricks?

Lord Bacon had it right: man is related to beasts by his body, and unless he’s related to God by his spirit, he’s a low and ignoble creature. Yet men behave in the most unphilosophical way imaginable when they try to guarantee women’s good behavior by keeping women permanently childlike. Rousseau, at least, was consistent: he wanted to stop the progress of reason in both sexes. Because if men insist on eating from the tree of knowledge, women will eventually taste it too. The tragedy is that, given how poorly women’s minds are cultivated, they’re left with only a stunted education—one that teaches them mostly about evil, because it gives them no steady way to understand what is good.

Yes, children should be innocent. But when people call adult men or women “innocent,” it’s usually just a polite way of saying weak. If women are truly meant to acquire human virtues—and to build that stable character we all depend on for our hopes—then they must be allowed to turn toward the fountain of light itself, not forced to navigate by the weak flicker of a mere satellite.

Milton disagrees—at least often. He seems to bow to beauty as an unquestionable right, and it’s hard to make his own passages line up with each other. But great men are frequently pulled into contradiction by their senses.

Milton puts these words into Eve’s mouth:

To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorn’d.
My Author and Disposer, what thou bidst
Unargued I obey; so God ordains;
God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more
Is Woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise.

Those are exactly the kinds of arguments I use with children. But I add something crucial: your reason is growing. Until it matures, you should look to a wiser guide for advice. And then, once you can truly think, you should rely on God—not on another human mind replacing your own.

And yet, in another moment, Milton sounds far closer to my view when he has Adam argue with his Maker:

Hast thou not made me here thy substitute,
And these inferior far beneath me set?
Among unequals what society
Can sort, what harmony or true delight?
Which must be mutual, in proportion due
Giv’n and receiv’d; but in disparity
The one intense, the other still remiss
Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove
Tedious alike: of fellowship I speak
Such as I seek, fit to participate
All rational delight—

So when we talk about women’s manners and character, let’s ignore the lazy, sensual arguments and ask a more serious question: what should we try to make women, so they can—if the phrase isn’t too bold—cooperate with the supreme Being in the moral work of life?

By individual education (a term people use loosely), I mean something concrete: close, sustained attention to a child that gradually sharpens the senses, shapes the temper, and regulates passions as they begin to stir—while also putting the understanding to work before the body reaches maturity. That way, adulthood isn’t the starting line for thinking and reasoning; it’s the stage where a person continues a task already underway.

To avoid misunderstanding, I should say this plainly: I don’t believe private education can perform the miracles some overly optimistic writers promise. Men and women are educated, to a large extent, by the opinions and habits of the society around them. Every era has its powerful current of public opinion that sweeps people along and stamps its own “family resemblance” on the century. Until society itself is organized differently, we shouldn’t expect education alone to transform everything.

Still, one point matters for what I’m arguing here: whatever circumstances do to our abilities, any being can become virtuous by using its own reason. Because if even one creature were made with built-in vicious inclinations, that would be a terrible mark against creation itself. What could keep us from atheism then? And if we did worship a god under those conditions, wouldn’t that “god” look more like a devil?

So the best education, in my view, is the kind of disciplined exercise of the understanding that strengthens the body and shapes the heart—in other words, it forms habits of virtue that make a person inwardly independent. It’s a farce to call someone virtuous if their “virtue” doesn’t grow out of their own reasoning. Rousseau believed this about men. I apply it to women, and I’ll say it plainly: women have been pushed out of their true sphere not by trying to become “masculine,” but by a false, delicate refinement that warps their nature.

And the problem feeds itself. The royal, theatrical homage women receive can be intoxicating. Until the manners of the age change—until society is built on more reasonable principles—it may be almost impossible to convince many women that the power they gain by diminishing themselves is not a gift but a curse. If they want the calm satisfaction that honest, unspoiled affection brings, they must return to nature and equality.

But we’ll have to wait for that turning point—perhaps until kings and nobles, guided by reason and choosing real human dignity over childish status, throw off their glittering inherited costumes. And if, after that, women still refuse to give up the arbitrary rule of beauty, then they’ll prove they have less mind than men.

You may call me arrogant. Still, I have to say what I truly believe: the writers who have shaped modern thinking about women’s education and manners—from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory—have helped make women more artificial and weaker than they otherwise would have been, and therefore less useful members of society. I could say this more softly, but then it would sound like performative whining instead of the honest conclusion my experience and reflection have forced on me.

Later, when I reach that part of my subject, I’ll point to the passages I most strongly reject in those authors. For now, it’s enough to say that my objection isn’t to a stray sentence here and there; it’s to the entire direction of these books, which, in my view, degrade half the human species and train women to be pleasing at the cost of every solid virtue.

Now, if we reasoned strictly on Rousseau’s assumptions—if a man truly reached mature mental perfection at the same time his body matured—then perhaps, to make husband and wife “one,” it might make sense for a wife to rely entirely on her husband’s understanding. In that picture, the graceful ivy clinging to the oak would create a whole where strength and beauty are both visible.

But look around. Husbands, like their wives, are often just overgrown children. Worse, early debauchery can leave them barely men even in outward form. And when the blind lead the blind, you don’t need divine revelation to know what happens next.

There are many forces in our present corrupt society that enslave women by shrinking their minds and sharpening their senses. One of the most quietly destructive is their general disregard for order.

Doing things in an orderly way is a crucial rule of life. Yet women, speaking generally, receive an education that is itself disorderly—and so they rarely learn to value method with the same precision as men, who are trained from infancy to follow systems and routines. This sloppy guesswork—what else can we call those random efforts of a kind of instinctive “common sense” that has never been tested by reason?—keeps women from learning how to generalize from facts. So they do today what they did yesterday simply because they did it yesterday.

This early contempt for understanding has consequences far worse than people suppose. Even when women with strong minds manage to learn something, their knowledge is often scattered. It comes from piecemeal observation of daily life more than from the disciplined act of comparing what they’ve seen with broader conclusions drawn through careful thought. Their dependent position and domestic duties throw them into society in a particular way, and they learn in scraps and snatches. Since learning is treated as secondary, they rarely pursue any subject with the sustained intensity needed to strengthen the mind and clarify judgment.

In our current world, boys are expected to acquire at least a little learning to support the social role of a “gentleman,” and they’re forced through a few years of discipline. But girls’ education almost always makes the cultivation of the mind subordinate to some bodily “accomplishment.” Ironically, even as their bodies are weakened by confinement and misguided ideas of modesty, their physical development is blocked from reaching the very grace and beauty that people claim to prize—because relaxed, half-formed limbs don’t produce real elegance.

On top of that:

• girls’ abilities aren’t pushed forward by competition and emulation in the same way
• without serious scientific study, natural sharpness gets redirected too early toward social life and manners
• they focus on effects and surface variations without tracing them back to causes
• complicated rules for “correct behavior” replace simple, firm principles

If you want proof that education can manufacture this appearance of weakness, look at many military men—who, like women, are often sent into the world before their minds are stocked with knowledge or fortified by principles. The results are strikingly similar. Soldiers pick up a thin layer of information from the muddy stream of conversation, and because they constantly mix in company, they gain what people call “knowledge of the world.” Too often, that familiarity with manners and customs is mistaken for knowledge of the human heart.

But does the unripe fruit of casual observation—never tested by judgment, never shaped by comparing thought with experience—really deserve such a title?

Soldiers, like women, practice the minor virtues with meticulous politeness. So where is the supposed “sexual difference” when the education has been essentially the same? The only difference I can see comes from one advantage: liberty. Men have more freedom, and that freedom lets them witness more of life.

This may sound like a political detour, but the thought arises naturally, so I won’t swallow it. Standing armies rarely contain resolute, robust men. They may be well-drilled machines, but you won’t often find, inside that system, people driven by strong passions or equipped with vigorous faculties. As for deep understanding, I’ll dare to say it’s as rare in the army as it is among women—and for the same reason.

Officers, too, are famously attentive to their appearance, fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures, and ridicule. Like women, the “business” of their lives becomes gallantry. They were trained to please, and they live to please. Yet their place in the hierarchy of sex remains untouched: they’re still counted superior to women, even though it’s hard to find the substance of that superiority beyond the freedom I’ve already named.

The deeper misfortune is this: both groups often acquire manners before morals, and a “knowledge of life” before they’ve built—through reflection—any acquaintance with the grand ideal outline of human nature. The outcome is predictable. Content with ordinary, unexamined nature, they become prey to prejudice. They take opinions on credit and bow to authority without thinking. If they have any sense at all, it becomes a quick, instinctive glance that judges social proportions and rules of behavior—useful on the surface, helpless in deeper argument, incapable of analyzing the ideas underneath.

Can’t we say the same about women? And we can push the argument further. Both soldiers and women are shoved out of truly useful roles by the unnatural distinctions of “civilized” life. Wealth and inherited honor turn women into decorative zeros that make the family number look larger. And idleness breeds a strange mix of gallantry and despotism: the very men who act as slaves to their mistresses often turn around and tyrannize over their sisters, wives, and daughters.

Yes, this still keeps women “in rank,” so to speak—within the structure. But enlarge the female mind, strengthen it, and blind obedience ends. And since power always hunts for blind obedience, tyrants and sensualists make perfect sense (by their own rotten logic) when they try to keep women in darkness. Tyrants want slaves. Sensualists want toys.

In fact, the sensualist has often been the most dangerous tyrant of all. Women have been tricked by lovers the way princes are tricked by ministers—imagining they ruled, while being managed.

Here I’m mainly thinking of Rousseau. His portrait of Sophia is undeniably charming. But to me it’s deeply unnatural—not so much in its decorative “superstructure,” but in its foundation: the principles of education beneath it. Much as I admire Rousseau’s genius (and I’ll quote him often), my admiration repeatedly gives way to indignation. His lush, sensual daydreams wipe the smile away and bring up the hard frown of insulted virtue.

Is this the same man who, in his zeal for virtue, would banish the gentle arts of peace and drag us back toward Spartan discipline? Is this the thinker who loves to describe the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of good dispositions, the heroic leaps that lift a glowing soul beyond itself? How small those grand feelings become when he starts lingering over a pretty foot and the enticing manners of his “little favorite.”

But I’ll set that aside for now. Instead of sharply condemning these passing outbursts of inflated sensibility, I’ll simply note something many kind observers of society have felt. We’ve often been touched by the sight of humble, mutual love—love not dressed up as “sentiment,” not strengthened by shared intellectual pursuits. The small events of daily life become cheerful conversation; innocent affection softens work that demands no great mental strain.

And yet, hasn’t that gentle happiness tended to stir more tenderness than respect? It’s the same feeling we get watching children play, or animals at sport. By contrast, when we contemplate the noble struggles of suffering merit, we feel admiration—and our thoughts rise toward a world where sensation gives way to reason.

So we’re left with a stark conclusion. Women must be regarded either as moral beings, or as creatures so weak that they should be completely subjected to the superior faculties of men.

Let’s examine that.

Rousseau insists that a woman should never feel independent—not even for a moment. In his view, she should be kept in a state of fear so she’ll rely on “cunning,” trained into a kind of flirtatious servitude so she stays desirable, and treated like a charming accessory a man can enjoy whenever he feels like relaxing. He then pushes his so-called “nature” argument even further: he hints that truth and courage—the bedrock of human virtue—should be taught to women only with limits, because for women, he says, the great lesson is obedience, drilled in with relentless severity.

What nonsense. When will someone with real intellectual muscle show up and blow away the toxic haze that pride and sensuality have spread over this topic?

If women really are “inferior” to men by nature, then their virtues must still be the same kind of virtues—maybe not in degree, but in quality—otherwise “virtue” becomes a moving target that changes depending on who you’re talking about. And if virtue is relative like that, it stops being virtue at all. So women’s conduct should rest on the same principles and aim at the same moral ends as men’s.

Yes, women are linked to men as daughters, wives, and mothers, and you can often judge their moral character by how they carry out those everyday responsibilities. But that can’t be the whole story. The main goal of their effort—just like men’s—should be to develop their own abilities and earn the dignity that comes from conscious virtue: knowing what’s right, choosing it, and owning that choice.

They can try to make the path of life pleasant. Of course. But they should never forget—again, just like men—that life doesn’t hand out the kind of happiness that can fully satisfy an immortal soul. I’m not saying either sex should float off into abstract philosophy and ignore the people and duties right in front of them. Those affections and obligations are exactly where life’s “fruit” grows. I’m simply saying they bring the most real satisfaction when we see them clearly and soberly, not through sentimental fantasy.

That widespread belief—that woman was made for man—probably got a boost from Moses’s poetic creation story. But since almost no one who’s thought seriously about it believes Eve was literally carved from Adam’s rib, the argument collapses. Or rather, we should only accept it in this limited sense: from the earliest times, men found it convenient to use their strength to dominate their companions, and then used their ingenuity to invent reasons women “ought” to submit—to bow their necks under the yoke—because supposedly the whole world was made for men’s comfort and pleasure.

Don’t misread me as trying to flip the hierarchy just for the thrill of reversal. I’ve already conceded that, because of bodily constitution, men as a group seem intended to reach a higher degree of virtue. I’m speaking in generalities about the sexes, not denying individual exceptions. But I see no reason—none at all—to conclude that women’s virtues should be different in nature. How could they be, if virtue has one eternal standard? If I’m being consistent, I have to insist on the same basic moral direction for women as firmly as I insist that God exists.

And once you grant that, a lot of popular nonsense falls apart. You can’t set up these false oppositions:

• Cunning versus wisdom
• “Little cares” versus serious effort
• A bland, sugary “softness” (marketed as gentleness) versus the fortitude that only big aims can produce

Someone will object: “But women would lose their special graces.” And, as people love to do, they’ll quote a famous poet—Pope—speaking for men:

Yet ne’er so sure our passion to create,
As when she touch’d the brink of all we hate.

What does that quip say about men and women? Any thoughtful reader can judge. I’ll only note this: I can’t see why—unless women are treated as if they’re merely mortal, made for this brief life alone—they must always be dragged down and made subordinate to love or lust.

I know: speaking plainly about love sounds like treason against “fine feeling.” But I want to use the simple language of truth and speak to the mind as much as the heart. Trying to reason love out of the world would be as absurd as outdoing Don Quixote—it would offend common sense. But trying to discipline this stormy passion, and arguing that it must not be allowed to overthrow our higher faculties or seize the throne that should belong to steady understanding—that is far less crazy.

Youth is the season of love for both sexes. But in those thoughtless, pleasure-first years, you ought to prepare for the more important years ahead—when reflection replaces raw sensation. Rousseau, and the crowd of male writers trailing behind him, keep preaching one central dogma: that the whole purpose of female education should be to make women pleasing.

So let me ask anyone defending that idea who actually understands human nature: do you really think marriage erases the habits a person has been trained into for years? A woman educated only to please will quickly discover that her “charms” are like slanting rays of sunlight—pretty, but not powerful when they shine on the same scene every day. Once novelty fades—once the “summer” passes—those tricks don’t reach her husband’s heart the way they once did.

What happens then? Does she have enough inner strength to turn inward for comfort and begin developing the abilities she’s neglected? Or is it more realistic to expect that she’ll seek admiration elsewhere—trying to please other men—and, fueled by the thrill of new conquests, dull the sting of wounded pride and disappointed love?

And when the husband stops being a lover—and he will, inevitably—her hunger to please either goes limp or turns sour. Love, maybe the most short-lived of passions, gives way to jealousy or vanity.

I’m thinking here of women held back by principle or by social prejudice. They might recoil from an affair with genuine disgust, yet still crave the flattering attention of “gallantry” just to reassure themselves they’re being cruelly neglected at home. They can spend days—weeks—fantasizing about the bliss of perfectly matched souls, until discontent wrecks their health and breaks their spirits.

So how can “the great art of pleasing” be such an essential study? It’s useful mainly to a mistress. A chaste wife and serious mother should treat her ability to please as the polish on her virtues—not the substance. Her husband’s affection can be one comfort among others, something that lightens her work and sweetens her days. But loved or neglected, her first aim should be to make herself respectable—not to stake her entire happiness on someone as fallible as herself.

Dr. Gregory made a similar mistake. I respect his intentions, but I can’t endorse his famous Legacy to His Daughters.

He tells girls to cultivate a love of dress because, he claims, it’s “natural” to women. I honestly don’t know what he—or Rousseau—means when they toss around that vague word natural. If they claimed the soul loved clothes in some pre-existent life and carried that taste into the body, I’d half-smile the way I do when people rant about “innate elegance.” But if he means that exercising the mind naturally produces this obsession, I reject it. It isn’t natural. It arises—like men’s false ambition—from a love of power.

Gregory goes even further. He recommends dissimulation—telling an innocent girl to deny her real feelings. He even suggests she shouldn’t dance with spirit, even when she’s genuinely joyful and her feet want to speak for her, so long as her movements aren’t immodest.

In the name of truth and common sense: why shouldn’t one woman admit she can exercise more than another—in plain terms, that she’s healthy and robust? And why, to damp down harmless liveliness, should she be vaguely warned that men will “draw conclusions” she never intended? Let the libertine infer what he wants. But I hope no sensible mother will crush the honest openness of youth by planting such indecent suspicions.

A simple moral truth applies here: what people say tends to reflect what’s inside them. The point is to cleanse the heart, not to obsess over trivial rituals—rituals that can be performed perfectly even while vice rules within.

Women should work to purify their hearts. But how can they, if their minds are left uncultivated—if they’re made so dependent on sensation for work and amusement that nothing noble lifts them above petty vanities or helps them rein in emotions that toss them around like a reed in every breeze?

And if a woman hopes to earn the affection of a virtuous man, is affectation really necessary? Nature has given women a weaker frame than men, yes. But must a wife—who has kept her body strong and her nerves healthy through exercise of mind and body while faithfully serving as daughter, wife, and mother—must she stoop to “art,” pretending to be fragile and sickly just to secure her husband’s love?

Weakness can provoke tenderness. It can flatter a man’s arrogant pride. But the patronizing caresses of a “protector” won’t satisfy a strong mind that longs for—and deserves—respect. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.

In a seraglio, I’ll grant it: these manipulative arts are the whole game. An indulgent man must have his palate constantly tickled or he falls into boredom. But is women’s ambition really so small that they’d accept that as a life? Will they sleepwalk through existence—either lulled by pleasure or numb with dullness—instead of claiming their right to pursue reasonable joys and to stand out by practicing the virtues that dignify humanity?

Surely no one who possesses an immortal soul can be content to drift through life merely decorating herself—existing to fill a few languid hours, to soften the cares of another person who wants entertainment once the “serious business” of life is done.

A woman who strengthens her body and trains her mind, on the other hand, can run a household and practice real virtues in a way that makes her her husband’s friend, not his dependent. And if she truly merits his respect by solid qualities, she won’t need to hide her affection or pretend to be unnaturally cold just to spark his desire.

History backs this up. The women who’ve truly distinguished themselves have rarely been the most beautiful or the most conventionally “gentle.”

Nature—or, more precisely, God—made things right. Human beings are the ones who invent schemes that ruin the design. That’s what I mean when I point to Gregory’s advice that a wife should never let her husband see the full extent of her sensibility or affection. What a voluptuous “precaution”—and as useless as it is absurd.

Love, by its nature, is temporary. Hunting for a secret to make it permanent is as foolish as hunting for the philosopher’s stone or a universal cure—and the “discovery” would be not only pointless, but harmful. The most sacred bond in society is friendship. As a sharp satirist put it: rare as true love is, true friendship is rarer still.

That’s obviously true, and the reason isn’t hard to find.

Love—ordinary love, where chance and sensation replace choice and reason—is something most people feel, at least in some form. (I’m not talking here about feelings that rise above love or sink below it.) When obstacles and uncertainty feed it, love jolts the mind out of its usual track and heightens the emotions. But marriage, by providing security, lets the fever break. And then the calmer state—healthy, steady tenderness—seems “insipid” only to those who lack the intellect to trade blind admiration and raw craving for something better:

• the calm warmth of friendship
• the confidence that grows from respect

That is the natural course. Friendship or indifference follows love.

And this pattern fits the moral world. Passion spurs action and wakes up the mind; but once the goal is reached, passion sinks into appetite—brief, personal gratification. A man may show virtue while he’s fighting for a crown and turn into a pleasure-drunk tyrant once he wears it. Likewise, if the lover isn’t transformed into the husband—if he clings to the lover’s fever—he becomes a foolish old child, prey to petty whims and jealousies. He neglects real duties, and the affection that should build trust in his children gets wasted on an overgrown child: his wife.

To do the work of life—to pursue with energy the many tasks that shape moral character—the head of a household and his partner should not go on loving each other with constant passion. I mean they shouldn’t indulge feelings that disrupt society and consume thoughts that ought to be used elsewhere. A mind that’s never been absorbed by anything lacks vigor. But a mind that can stay absorbed by one object for too long is weak.

A mistaken education, a narrow and uncultivated mind, and a heap of sexual prejudices tend to make women more constant than men—but I won’t chase that thread right now. I’ll even go further, without trying to be clever: an unhappy marriage is often beneficial to a family, and the neglected wife is usually the best mother.

That would almost always be true if women’s minds were broader. Why? Because it often seems to be Providence’s arrangement that what we gain in immediate pleasure gets subtracted from the deeper storehouse of life: experience. When we’re picking today’s flowers and gorging on delight, we aren’t harvesting the solid fruit of effort and wisdom at the same time. The path splits; we must choose. And anyone who spends life bouncing from pleasure to pleasure can’t complain if they end up with neither wisdom nor a respectable character.

If, for a moment, we assume the soul isn’t immortal—if human beings exist only for this present scene—then yes, we’d have reason to protest that love and tender attachment ever grow dull. “Let us eat, drink, and love, for tomorrow we die” would sound like cold logic, and only a fool would trade a tangible pleasure for a fading shadow.

But if, struck by the mind’s astonishing powers, we refuse to cage our hopes within so small a field—if things seem truly grand only when they connect to a boundless future and sublime expectation—then why do we need falsehood at all? Why violate the sacred majesty of truth just to hold on to a counterfeit pleasure that eats away at virtue’s foundations?

Why poison women’s minds with flirtatious tricks to gratify a sensualist and to keep love from settling into friendship—or at least compassionate tenderness—when there are no qualities there on which friendship could be built? Let the honest heart show itself. Let reason teach passion to accept necessity. Or let the noble pursuit of virtue and knowledge lift the mind above emotions that, when left unchecked, do more to sour life than to sweeten it.

I’m not talking about the romantic passion that travels with genius. Who can clip that wing? But that towering passion—so out of proportion to life’s small enjoyments—remains faithful to the feeling itself and feeds on its own fire. The “everlasting” passions people celebrate have almost always been unhappy ones. They grow strong through absence and a melancholic temperament. Imagination circles a half-seen beauty; familiarity might have turned admiration into disgust—or at least indifference—and given the mind time to chase new prey.

Seen this way, Rousseau is perfectly consistent when he has Eloisa, the mistress of his soul, love St. Preux as life is slipping away. But that doesn’t prove love is immortal.

The same strange logic shows up in Gregory’s advice about “delicacy of sentiment”—which he tells a woman not to acquire if she plans to marry. That plan, though perfectly consistent with his earlier advice, he calls “indelicate” and urges his daughters to conceal it—even if it governs their behavior—as if it were shameful to have the ordinary appetites of human nature.

Noble morality! And exactly what you’d expect from the cautious “wisdom” of a small soul that can’t see beyond the narrow slice of the present moment.

If you treat every part of a woman’s mind as something to be trained only for her dependence on men—if the moment she “gets a husband” you declare her finished, crowned, and done—then sure: let her be satisfied with that tiny prize. In that story, she’s expected to crouch low, hardly lifted by her daily tasks above the level of an animal. But if she’s aiming higher—if she’s reaching for what she’s capable of as a full human being—then she has to look past the immediate scene and educate her mind for its own sake, not for the sake of whatever man she may someday marry.

Let her decide, calmly and without panicking about short-term happiness, to develop the qualities that dignify a rational person. Then even a rough, unpolished husband might offend her taste without disturbing her inner peace. She won’t shape her soul around his weaknesses; she’ll shape it to endure them without becoming them. His personality may test her, but it won’t block her from living with integrity.

If Dr. Gregory meant only to warn against the fantasy of constant romance and perfectly matched feelings, he should have remembered something basic: life experience will eventually puncture illusions that advice can’t erase, especially when imagination is kept on life support by starving reason.

And yes—I’ll admit it happens all the time. Some women, trained into an artificial, romantic delicacy, spend their lives daydreaming about how blissful they would’ve been with a husband who loved them with a hot, ever-growing passion—every day, all day. But they might as well pine while married as while single. Longing for a great husband can make you just as miserable as living with a bad one.

I’ll also grant this: a solid education—a well-stocked mind—can help a woman live single with dignity. But telling her not to refine her taste because her husband might occasionally offend it is trading something real for a shadow. What’s the point of “improved taste” if it doesn’t make you sturdier—if it doesn’t make you less dependent on luck, and open up new pleasures that come from the mind itself, even when you’re alone?

People with taste—married or single—will always be irritated by plenty of things that barely register to less observant minds. That’s not the hinge this argument should swing on. The real question is bigger and sharper:

• Is taste, overall, a blessing?
• Does it bring more pleasure than pain?

Answer that, and you’ll know whether Dr. Gregory’s advice is sensible—or whether it’s absurd and tyrannical, a polished attempt to lay down a blueprint for slavery. Because you can’t educate moral beings by any rules except those drawn from pure reason, and those rules apply to the whole human species.

Now, take gentleness. Gentleness, patience, forbearance—these are genuinely admirable, almost godlike traits. Poets have even used them to describe the divine, and few images move human hearts more than the picture of a goodness that is rich in mercy and ready to forgive. Seen that way, gentleness looks grand: strength held back by choice, softened by grace.

But look at what “gentleness” becomes in the usual script for women. It turns into the submissive posture of dependence: the “virtue” of someone who behaves softly because she needs protection; who endures injury because she must; who smiles under the whip because she isn’t allowed even to growl. Ugly as that sounds, it’s the standard portrait of the “accomplished woman” in conventional thinking—female excellence cut off from ordinary human excellence. Or, in a show of kindness, some writers “give her back the rib” and declare that man and woman together make one moral being—while still insisting she must keep all the so-called submissive charms.

And what, exactly, are women supposed to do in a world where there is “neither marrying nor giving in marriage”? We’re never told. Moralists love to say that the shape of life suggests people are being prepared for a future state. Yet they consistently tell women to prepare only for the present one. On that basis, they recommend gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like devotion as women’s cardinal virtues. One author even declared it “masculine” for a woman to be melancholy—as if she were manufactured to be a man’s toy, his rattle, meant to jingle whenever he’s bored enough to dismiss reason and demand amusement.

To recommend gentleness on broad, human grounds is perfectly sensible. Anyone who is physically vulnerable has good reason to cultivate gentleness. But the moment forbearance starts blurring right and wrong, it stops being a virtue. And however convenient that softness might be in a companion, the “gentle” person will be treated as an inferior—inviting not deep respect but a thin, watery tenderness that easily decays into contempt.

Besides, if advice could truly make someone gentle when their nature wasn’t suited to that refinement, perhaps we’d gain something in social order. But if—what is easy to show—this kind of indiscriminate preaching produces only affectation, then it actually blocks real improvement and genuine growth of character. In that case, women gain little by trading solid virtues for surface graces, even if those graces buy them a few years of petty power.

As a philosopher, I can’t read without anger the flattering labels men use to soften their insults. As a moralist, I have to ask: what do these absurd phrases even mean—“fair defects,” “amiable weaknesses,” and the rest? If there is only one standard of morality—one model for what a human being should be—then women are left hanging, like in the old tale of Mahomet’s coffin: suspended between two worlds. They’re denied the reliable instinct of animals, and they’re also prevented from fixing the eye of reason on an ideal. They’re told they exist to be loved, but must not aim to be respected, because if they do, society will chase them out as “masculine.”

But let’s shift the angle. Even if we talk only about this life—only about practical outcomes—do passive, idle women really make the best wives? Let’s be honest about what happens.

Do women who win a few superficial accomplishments and then reinforce the standard prejudices do anything more than contribute to their husbands’ comfort? Are they taught to display their charms mainly to entertain? And if a woman has been trained from childhood in passive obedience, does she have the strength of character needed to run a household or raise children?

Hardly. After reading the history of women, I can’t help agreeing with the sharpest satirists: women have been made the weakest—and also the most oppressed—half of the human species. What does history show, again and again, except the stamps of imposed inferiority? How few women have truly broken free of the heavy yoke of male rule? So few that the exceptions feel almost unreal. They remind me of that clever speculation about Newton: that he must have been a higher order of being, accidentally trapped in a human body. Following that same line of thought, I’ve sometimes imagined that the rare extraordinary women who burst out in strange, “eccentric” directions beyond the orbit assigned to their sex were male spirits mistakenly confined in female frames.

Yet it isn’t philosophical to talk about sex when we talk about the soul. So if inferiority exists, it must come from the body—or else the “heavenly fire” meant to animate the clay hasn’t been given equally.

Still, I’ll avoid what I’ve avoided so far: a blunt comparison of the sexes as groups, or a frank declaration that women are naturally inferior. I’ll insist on something simpler and more damning: men have actively increased women’s apparent inferiority, until women are nearly pushed below the standard of rational creatures. Give women room for their powers to unfold and for their virtues to strengthen, and then decide where they stand on the intellectual scale. And remember: I’m not arguing for a special pedestal for a handful of “remarkable” women. That’s not the point.

It’s hard for us short-sighted mortals to know how far human discovery and improvement could go once the fog of despotism lifts—the fog that makes us stumble at every step. But when morality is finally grounded on something firmer, I can predict—without claiming prophecy—that woman will end up as either man’s friend or his slave. We won’t keep wobbling, as we do now, between treating her as a moral agent and treating her as a link between men and animals.

If it turns out that women, like animals, were created mainly for men’s use, then men should at least be honest: let women bite the bridle in silence, and don’t insult them with empty praise. But if women’s rationality is proven—and it can be—then men must stop blocking their development just to feed male appetite. They won’t, with elegant rhetoric, urge women to surrender their understanding to male guidance. They won’t claim, in discussing women’s education, that women should never have free use of reason. And they won’t recommend cunning and deception to beings who, like men themselves, are supposed to be learning the virtues of humanity.

Because there can be only one rule of right if morality rests on an eternal foundation. Anyone who trades real virtue for convenience—anyone who lives only for the day’s comfort—can’t be a truly accountable creature.

That’s why the poet should’ve swallowed his sneer:

If weak women go astray,
The stars are more in fault than they.

If women are truly chained by destiny—if they are never to use their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, never to feel the dignity of a will that bows only to God—then yes, their bondage is real. And that will, when it wakes, doesn’t exist merely to flatter society’s expectations. It turns outward toward a model of perfection, and in that fierce attention it can almost forget the rest of the universe, so intent is it on the attributes it adores—attributes that, when softened into human virtues, can be imitated in kind, even if the degree overwhelms the mind.

But I don’t want to win this point by shouting when Reason can shine her steadier light. So I’ll put it plainly: if women are capable of acting like rational creatures, then don’t treat them like slaves. Don’t treat them like animals who borrow their reason from men. Educate their minds. Give them the healthy, bracing restraint of principle. Let them gain a conscious dignity by feeling that they are dependent only on God. Teach them—alongside men—to submit to necessity, rather than inventing a separate, “female” morality designed only to make them more pleasing.

And if experience eventually shows that women can’t reach the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance, and fortitude, then fine: let their virtues still be the same in kind, even if they can’t match the same degree. In that case, male superiority would be clear—perhaps clearer than it is now. But truth, because it is simple and cannot be bent into different shapes, would still belong to both.

And no, society wouldn’t be thrown upside down. Woman would simply take the rank that reason assigns her. There would be no need for tricks to “even the balance,” much less to tip it.

Call all this utopian if you like. I thank the Being who planted these thoughts in my soul—and gave me enough strength of mind to dare to use my own reason. Now, depending only on him to sustain my virtue, I look with indignation at the mistaken ideas that enslave my sex.

I love man as my fellow creature. But his scepter—whether truly earned or merely seized—doesn’t reach me, unless the reason of an individual deserves my respect. And even then, my submission is to reason, not to man. The conduct of any accountable being has to be governed by its own rational judgment—or else what does “God’s authority” even mean?

I dwell on these plain truths because women have been set apart, almost insulated. They’ve been stripped of the virtues that should clothe all humanity, and then decorated with artificial graces that let them wield a short-lived kind of tyranny. With love taking the place of every nobler passion, their main ambition becomes to be beautiful—to provoke feeling instead of earning respect. That small ambition, like the servility that grows in absolute monarchies, destroys strength of character.

Liberty is the mother of virtue. And if women are made into slaves by their very social constitution—if they aren’t allowed to breathe the sharp, invigorating air of freedom—then they’ll wither like exotic plants kept from their proper climate, admired as beautiful flaws in nature.

Finally, there’s the old argument that women must be inferior because they’ve always been kept subordinate. That argument rebounds on men. In every age, the many have been enslaved by the few. People with scarcely any real grasp of human excellence have tyrannized over thousands. So why have men of greater gifts submitted to humiliation like that? Everyone admits that kings, taken as a group, have usually been inferior in ability and virtue to the same number of ordinary men—yet kings have been treated with a reverence that insults reason. China isn’t the only place where living men have been made into gods.

Men have surrendered to superior force in exchange for the dirty pleasures of the moment. Women have often done the same. So until someone proves that the courtier who grovels and gives up the birthright of manhood is not a moral agent, no one can prove that woman is essentially inferior simply because she has been subjugated.

Brute force has ruled the world so far, and the science of politics is still in its infancy. You can see it in the way philosophers hesitate to clearly name and teach the knowledge most useful to humanity.

I won’t chase this argument further than one obvious conclusion: as sound politics spreads liberty, humanity—including women—will grow wiser and more virtuous.

3

The Same Subject, Continued

Once upon a time, raw physical strength was the badge of a hero. Now it’s treated with a strange, almost undeserved disdain—so much so that both men and women often act as if strength doesn’t matter. Women are told to avoid it because it supposedly steals their “feminine” charm and their “lovely weakness,” the very weakness that’s said to give them a certain kind of social leverage. Men avoid it because it doesn’t fit the polished image of a “gentleman.”

So yes: we’ve sprinted from one extreme to the other. But before we argue about where the balance should land, we need to clear up a popular mistake—one that’s been dressed up as wisdom by confusing cause and effect.

Here’s the mistake: people notice that many brilliant thinkers have wrecked their health through obsessive study, neglect, or emotional intensity. Their passions run as hot as their minds run sharp, and the old saying about “the sword destroying the scabbard” captures it perfectly: a powerful mind can wear down the body it lives in. From that, casual observers leap to the conclusion that “genius” usually comes with a weak—or, in the fashionable word, “delicate”—constitution.

I don’t buy it. In fact, careful observation points the other way. Mental strength is often paired with natural physical sturdiness—a sound constitution—though not necessarily the thick-muscled toughness that comes from manual labor done while the mind sleeps or simply tells the hands what to do.

Even the numbers lean that way. Joseph Priestley noted that most great figures live past forty-five. And think about the way many of them spend themselves. Some burn through their energy chasing a favorite science, forgetting time entirely, as if they’re feeding their life into the lamp well past midnight. Others, swept up in poetry, let imagination build whole worlds until emotion shakes the body itself—until the mind’s own creations fade from sheer exhaustion. People who live like that don’t survive on fragile frames. They need something close to iron.

Look at Shakespeare. He didn’t “grasp the airy dagger” with trembling hands. Look at Milton. He didn’t quiver as he marched Satan out beyond the gates of hell. Those visions aren’t the fever-dreams of weakness or the sickly dribble of a diseased mind. They’re imagination in full overflow—“in a fine frenzy”—and not constantly yanked back by the body’s chains.

I know this line of thought could carry me farther than some expect. But I’m following the argument where it leads. So I’ll grant my starting point: bodily strength does seem to give men a natural advantage over women, and this is the one solid foundation people can point to for male superiority.

But that doesn’t settle the larger question—not even close. I still insist that virtue and knowledge should be the same in kind for both sexes, even if not identical in degree. Women are not just moral beings; they are rational ones. They should work to acquire human virtues—human perfections—by the same general means as men, instead of being educated as some fanciful half-creature, one of Rousseau’s elaborate fantasies.

And if men have any right to brag about strength, why are women encouraged—why are they so easily persuaded—to take pride in a defect? Rousseau hands them a convenient excuse, one that could only come from a writer whose imagination runs wild and who refines every sensation into a theory: women, he suggests, can use weakness as a pretext for yielding to desire while still appearing modest in a romantic, theatrical way—a “modesty” that flatters male pride and quietly licenses male libertinism.

Under that spell, some women even boast of their weakness, then use it as a tool—winning influence by playing on men’s weaknesses. In that narrow sense, they may feel triumphant, and like Turkish governors they can end up with more practical power than the people who supposedly rule them. But the price is steep:

• Virtue gets traded for short-lived rewards.
• The respectability of a whole life gets gambled for the thrill of a moment.

In fact, women—like despots—may sometimes hold more power under today’s messy, tradition-soaked social order than they would in a world consistently governed by laws drawn from reason. But the way they obtain that power degrades their character and spreads licentiousness through society. The many become a pedestal for the few.

That’s why I’m willing to say, plainly: until women are educated more rationally, human virtue and the growth of knowledge will keep getting tripped up and stalled. And if we agree that woman wasn’t created merely to satisfy a man’s appetite, or to serve as his highest-ranking domestic—cooking his meals and minding his linen—then a parent’s first duty, when educating girls, should be this: if not to make the body strong, at least don’t ruin it through warped ideas of beauty and “female excellence.” Girls should never be allowed to swallow the poisonous idea that a weakness can be alchemized—by clever talk—into a virtue.

On this point, I’m glad to find that the author of one of the most instructive books our country has produced for children agrees with me. I’ll quote him, because his respected authority adds weight to what reason already says.

But even if it were proven that women are naturally weaker than men, how would it follow that it’s “natural” for them to work at becoming even weaker than nature made them? Arguments like that insult common sense and serve passion, not truth.

The so-called divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, can—one hopes—be challenged in an enlightened age without inviting danger. Conviction may not silence the loudest objectors. Still, when a widely held prejudice is attacked, thoughtful wives will reflect, while the narrow-minded will rage at “innovation” with all the force of empty habit.

A mother who wants her daughter to have real dignity must ignore the sneers of ignorance and do the opposite of what Rousseau recommends, even when he sells it with gorgeous eloquence and philosophical tricks. His eloquence can make nonsense sound persuasive, and his dogmatic conclusions can confuse people who don’t yet have the tools to dismantle them.

Look at nature: across the animal kingdom, the young need almost constant exercise. Children, too, should spend early years in harmless play that works their hands and feet without requiring constant micromanagement from an adult mind or the unblinking supervision of a nurse. In fact, the very first training of the understanding is simple self-preservation—learning by doing. Small inventions made to amuse the moment also unfold the imagination.

But adults sabotage these sensible designs through misguided affection or blind zeal. A child—especially a girl—is hardly allowed a moment of self-direction. She’s trained into dependence, and then we call that dependence “natural.”

All for the sake of “beauty”—woman’s supposed glory. Her limbs and abilities are cramped with restraints worse than binding bands, and the sedentary life she’s sentenced to, while boys run and climb outside, weakens muscles and slackens nerves.

As for Rousseau’s endlessly repeated claim (echoed by others) that girls are born—independent of education—with a special love of dolls, dress, and chatter: it’s so childish it hardly deserves serious debate. If you force a girl to sit for hours listening to the empty talk of foolish nurses or to hover around her mother’s dressing table, of course she’ll try to join in. And if she watches her mother and aunts decorate themselves, of course she’ll copy them by decorating a doll—poor innocent baby—because you’ve handed her no better option. Even the greatest minds rarely fully rise above the “air” they breathe; genius itself is smeared by the prejudices of its time. So we should make allowances for a sex that—like kings—tends to see the world through a distorting lens.

Once you see that, women’s passion for dress doesn’t need some grand theory about an innate desire to please the sex they depend on. And the idea that a girl is naturally a coquette—that sexual desire, tied to reproduction, shows up before bad education heats the imagination and drags it forward too soon—is so unphilosophical that Rousseau wouldn’t have embraced it if he hadn’t made a habit of bending reason to his need to be “original,” and trading truth for a pet paradox.

And there’s an even deeper inconsistency. How can someone argue fiercely and brilliantly for the soul’s immortality, yet turn around and treat the mind as if it has a fixed “sex” the way bodies do? But truth is a flimsy barrier when it blocks a cherished hypothesis. Rousseau nearly worshipped virtue, and yet he loved with openly sensual attachment. His imagination kept piling kindling onto his senses, and to reconcile that with his admiration for self-denial, courage, and heroic virtue, he tries to flip nature’s law on its head and spreads a doctrine that does real harm and insults the wisdom of the universe.

His little stories meant to prove that girls naturally fuss over their appearance—without emphasizing the power of daily example—are beneath contempt. The claim that a young girl would skip the pleasant task of practicing letters simply because she sensed it looked “ungraceful” belongs in the same cabinet as the famous tales of the learned pig.

I’ve probably watched more girls in early childhood than Rousseau did. I remember my own feelings, and I’ve paid attention. And I’ll say this: I don’t agree with him at all about the first forming of “female character.” A girl whose spirit hasn’t been crushed by inactivity, whose innocence hasn’t been poisoned by false shame, will be a lively, fearless child. She’ll romp. A doll won’t hold her attention unless confinement leaves her nothing else to do.

In a healthier world, boys and girls would play together harmlessly. The heavy “distinction of sex” is drilled into them long before nature itself creates any meaningful difference. I’ll go further: most of the women I’ve known who behaved like rational beings—who showed real vigor of mind—were women who, by accident, were allowed to “run wild,” as some refined critics of the “fair sex” like to sneer.

The damage from neglecting health in infancy and youth goes farther than people think. Dependence in the body breeds dependence in the mind. And how can a woman be a good wife or mother if most of her time is spent fighting off illness, managing weakness, or simply enduring pain? Nor should we expect her to work steadily at strengthening herself and refusing draining indulgences if her motives were tangled early on with artificial beauty standards and cheap, false stories about “sensibility.”

Men, at least, are often forced to tolerate discomfort—to face bad weather, to endure inconvenience, to live through physical irritation. But “genteel” women become, in the most literal sense, slaves to their bodies—and then take pride in the chains.

I once knew a fashionable woman who was unusually proud of her fragility and sensitivity. She thought a fussy “refined taste” and a tiny appetite were the pinnacle of human perfection, and she performed that role faithfully. I watched her neglect the serious duties of life, lounge with smug pleasure on a sofa, and brag about barely eating as proof of a delicate sensibility—though it’s hard to translate such nonsense into plain language. And yet I also saw her, in the same season of her life, treat cruelly a decent older woman who had fallen into dependence through misfortune—someone who, in better days, had real claims on her gratitude.

Could anyone become so weak and morally spoiled if, like the Sybarites lost in luxury, every trace of virtue hadn’t been worn away—or never planted in the first place? Mere instruction is a poor substitute for cultivating the mind, yes. But it can still function as a fence against vice.

This woman wasn’t a more irrational monster than certain Roman emperors, corrupted by unchecked power. Yet because modern kings have been somewhat restrained by law and—however flimsy—the curb of honor, European history isn’t filled with the same concentration of unnatural folly and cruelty. The kind of despotism that kills virtue and genius at birth doesn’t hang over Europe with the same poisonous wind that devastates Turkey and leaves the men, like the soil, barren.

Women, however, are in a miserable condition almost everywhere. In the name of preserving their “innocence”—a polite word for ignorance—truth is hidden from them. They are pushed into an artificial role before their minds have any strength. From childhood they’re taught that beauty is woman’s scepter, so the mind bends itself around the body and, circling inside a gilded cage, learns only to worship its own prison.

Men have many occupations and pursuits that capture attention and shape a growing mind. Women are usually confined to one—obsessed, by design, with the most trivial part of themselves—and so they rarely look beyond the brief triumph of a moment.

But if women’s understanding were ever freed from the slavery that male pride and sensuality, and women’s own short-sighted hunger for immediate sway (so similar to the tyrant’s love of domination), have imposed on them—then we would probably read about their “weaknesses” with astonishment. Let me push this argument a bit farther.

If you allow the idea of an evil being—someone who “goes about seeking whom he may devour”—it would be hard to imagine a more efficient way to degrade human character than to give one man absolute power.

From there the argument spreads in many directions. Birth, wealth, and every outside advantage that lifts a man above his equals without requiring any effort of mind actually pulls him below them in reality. The weaker he is internally, the more easily crafty people manipulate him, until the swollen creature loses every trace of humanity. And for crowds of men to follow such a leader like sheep—quietly, obediently—is a contradiction that can only be explained by a hunger for immediate pleasure and a cramped understanding.

When people are trained in slavish dependence, softened by luxury and idleness, where will we find men ready to stand up for the rights of man—ready to claim the privilege of moral beings, who should have only one road to excellence? The world is still not free of its slavery to monarchs and ministers, a bondage whose deadly grip keeps strangling the growth of the human mind.

So let men, in their pride of power, stop borrowing the same excuse that tyrant kings and corrupt ministers have always used: “women must be subjected because they always have been.” No. When men, under reasonable laws, enjoy their natural freedom, then let them look down on women if women refuse to share that freedom. But until that better era arrives, any man who lectures about women’s folly should not forget his own.

It’s true: when women gain power through unjust means—by practicing vice or encouraging it—they plainly lose the place reason would give them. They become either obedient slaves or moody tyrants. In grabbing power, they trade away simplicity and dignity of mind, and they end up acting just as men do when they’re raised by the same corrupt methods.

So yes: it’s time for a revolution in women’s manners—a real one. Time to restore lost dignity. Time for women, as part of the human species, to work on reforming themselves so they can help reform the world. It’s time to separate unchangeable morals from local customs.

If men are demigods—why should we serve them? And if women’s rational dignity is treated as no more certain than the dignity of animals—if women’s reason is said to be too dim to guide them, while they’re also denied the clarity of instinct—then they are, of all creatures, the most miserable. Bent beneath an iron fate, they must submit to being a beautiful flaw in creation. And if someone tried to justify Providence by offering an airtight reason for making so large a portion of humanity both accountable and not accountable, he would baffle the subtlest moral casuist.

The only solid foundation for morality, it seems to me, is the character of God. That character is coherent because it’s a balance of qualities—and, said with reverence, each quality almost requires the others. God must be just because he is wise. He must be good because he is all-powerful.

When people praise one divine attribute by shrinking the others, that isn’t deep theology—it’s human distortion. It’s passion dressed up as devotion. We’re used to kneeling before sheer force in our “savage” state, and even after we learn that mental strength beats brute strength, we struggle to shake the habit. So even when we think about God, old reflexes creep in: we let omnipotence swallow everything else. We act as though anyone who says God’s power is guided by God’s wisdom is “limiting” him—and therefore being irreverent.

I don’t buy that kind of performative humility—the kind that studies nature and then refuses to think any further because “God did it.” Yes, the “High and Lofty One” who inhabits eternity surely has attributes we can’t even imagine. But reason tells me those unknown qualities can’t contradict the ones we already admire—wisdom, goodness, justice. And I can’t, in honesty, mute reason’s voice.

People naturally go looking for excellence. When they worship, they either recognize excellence in the being they worship—or they blindly drape “perfection” over the object of worship like a costume. But what does that second kind of worship actually do for someone’s moral life? It teaches him to bow to power. He ends up adoring a dark cloud that might open into a bright sky—or might burst into angry, lawless destruction on his head, for no reason he can understand. If you assume God acts from a vague, undirected will, then you’re pushed into an impossible choice:

• Either you follow your own will just as vaguely, because “rules” would be presumptuous,
• Or you try to live by rules drawn from principles—while calling those same principles irreverent.

Both religious enthusiasts and cool “rational” skeptics have walked straight into this trap when they tried to free people from the healthy restraints that come from a just understanding of God’s character.

There’s nothing impious about thinking carefully about God’s attributes. Anyone who uses their mind can’t avoid it. And for a person who wants virtue or knowledge, the only worship that helps is this: loving God as the source of wisdom, goodness, and power. A blind, unstable affection can stir the heart the way human passions do—while the real work of morality gets forgotten: to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. I’ll return to this later when I discuss religion as the opposite of what Dr. Gregory recommends, since he treats it as a matter of feeling or taste.

Now, back to the point that might have seemed like a detour. I wish women would build their affection for their husbands on the same principle that devotion should rest on: not on shifting sentiment, but on something steady and rational. Because sentiment is a treacherous lantern—far too often it’s just a polite name for sensuality.

And if that’s true, then a hard conclusion follows. From childhood, women must be treated in one of two ways:

• either shut away like “eastern princes,” sheltered and confined,
• or educated so they can think and act for themselves.

Why do men wobble between these two options and still demand miracles? Why do they expect virtue from a slave—from a being civil society has deliberately made weak, and therefore easily pushed toward vice?

I know this won’t change quickly. The prejudices sensualists have planted are deep-rooted, and tearing them out will take time. It will also take time to convince women that they hurt their own real, long-term interests when they cultivate—or pretend to have—weakness under the flattering name of “delicacy.” And it will take time to convince the world that the toxic source of women’s so-called “vices and follies” (if we must keep using those loose, customary labels) has been the sensual worship of beauty—especially beauty of features.

A German writer made a sharp observation: men of every type tend to agree on what counts as a pretty woman when she’s seen primarily as an object of desire. But a truly fine woman—one who stirs higher feelings by showing intellectual beauty—may be overlooked, or met with indifference, by men whose happiness centers on satisfying appetite.

I can already hear the obvious comeback: as long as man remains as imperfect as he has been, he’ll always be, to some degree, a slave to appetite. And since women gain the most power by gratifying the strongest appetite, the whole sex is degraded—by physical necessity, if not moral necessity.

That objection has some bite. But as long as a command exists like “be pure as your heavenly Father is pure,” it suggests that human virtue isn’t narrowly capped by the very Being who could cap it. People are meant to press forward, not anxiously ask whether they’ve stepped “out of their sphere” by reaching for something noble.

Nature shows us boundaries: the sea is told, “This far, and no further,” and its proud waves break in vain. Planets strain, but stay in their orbits. Matter yields to the governing Spirit. Yet an immortal soul isn’t bound by mechanical laws. When it struggles to free itself from the chains of matter, it doesn’t disrupt creation’s order—it supports it, precisely when it cooperates with the Father of spirits and tries to govern itself by the same steady rule that, on a scale our imagination can barely grasp, orders the universe.

Now consider what happens if women are educated for dependence—that is, trained to follow the will of another fallible human being, and to submit to power whether it’s right or wrong. Where does that end? Are women supposed to be little vice-regents, ruling a tiny domain, accountable to a higher tribunal, yet still liable to error?

It’s not hard to show how such “delegates” behave. Like anyone governed by fear, they tend to pass the tyranny downward. They make children and servants bear the weight they themselves have accepted. Because they submit without reason, they have no fixed standards to guide them. So they become kind or cruel depending on the mood of the moment. And we shouldn’t be surprised if, chafed by their own heavy yoke, they sometimes take a bitter pleasure in resting it on weaker shoulders.

Suppose, though, a woman trained to obey marries a sensible man—one who guides her judgment without making her feel the humiliation of servitude. Even if she manages to act decently by this borrowed “reflected light,” she still can’t guarantee that her protector will live. He may die and leave her with a large family.

Then a double responsibility falls on her:

• to educate the children as both father and mother,
• to shape their principles and protect their property.

But she has never thought—much less acted—for herself. She has learned only how to please men, and how to depend on them with grace. Now she’s burdened with children. How is she to find another protector—another husband to replace, effectively, the role that reason should have played in her own mind?

Let’s stay on realistic ground. A rational man might find her pleasing and docile, but he won’t choose to marry a whole family out of “love” when the world is full of other pretty, unencumbered women. So what happens to her? She usually faces one of two fates:

• She becomes easy prey for a petty fortune-hunter who cheats her children out of their inheritance and makes her miserable.
• Or she becomes the victim of dissatisfaction and blind self-indulgence.

She can’t properly educate her sons or command their respect. And it isn’t wordplay to say this: people aren’t respected—even in an important position—unless they are actually respectable. So she wastes away in the pain of useless regret. The “serpent’s tooth” sinks into her soul, and the vices of her children’s wild youth bring her—through sorrow, and often poverty—to the grave.

This isn’t exaggerated. If anything, it’s painfully plausible; some version of it must have crossed the path of any attentive observer.

Up to now I’ve assumed she began with a good disposition. Yet experience shows that the blind can be led into a ditch as easily as along a safe road. So imagine, quite plausibly, that someone taught only to please will still locate her happiness in pleasing. What kind of model will she become for her innocent daughters? The mother disappears into the coquette. Instead of making her daughters her friends, she looks at them sideways—as rivals. And they’re rivals in a particularly cruel way, because they invite comparison and push her off the throne of beauty—a throne she clings to because she has never imagined sitting on the bench of reason.

You don’t need a dramatic imagination, or the sharp lines of caricature, to sketch the small cruelties and domestic miseries such a woman spreads through her household. And yet she’s simply behaving as she “ought” to behave if she was raised under Rousseau’s system. No one can accuse her of being “masculine,” or stepping out of her sphere. She may even follow his celebrated rule of guarding her reputation with extreme caution, staying outwardly spotless—and so be counted a good kind of woman.

But in what sense is she good? Yes, she avoids blatant crimes, and not with much struggle. But what about duties? “Duties!” In truth, she has plenty to do already: decorate her body and nurse a delicate constitution.

As for religion, she never dared to judge for herself. Like the dependent creature she has been trained to be, she conforms to the church ceremonies of her upbringing, devoutly believing that wiser heads settled all that. For her, perfection is not to doubt. She dutifully pays her “tithe of mint and cumin”—the tiny outward observances—and thanks God that she is not like other women. These are the “blessed effects” of a good education. These are the virtues of man’s helpmate.

I need to breathe by painting a different picture.

Imagine a woman of decent understanding—nothing extraordinary. Her body, strengthened through exercise, grows into full vigor. At the same time, her mind gradually expands as she learns the moral duties of life and what human virtue and dignity really are.

Formed by actually practicing the responsibilities of her situation, she marries from affection without letting prudence slip. And because she looks beyond the first glow of marital happiness, she secures her husband’s respect early—before she ever has to resort to petty tricks to keep his attention or feed a fading flame. Nature meant that flame to fade once the beloved becomes familiar; then friendship and patience take the place of hotter passion. That’s love’s natural death, and a peaceful home isn’t wrecked by frantic struggles to prevent it. I also assume her husband is virtuous—because if he isn’t, she needs independent principles even more.

Then fate cuts the tie. She becomes a widow, perhaps without enough money. But she isn’t desolate. She feels the raw pain of loss; yet as time softens grief into a quieter melancholy, her heart turns toward her children with doubled tenderness. In her urgency to provide for them, love gives her maternal work a sacred, heroic shape.

She believes—not just as an abstract doctrine, but as a living comfort—that the eye watching her efforts is the One from whom her remaining consolation must flow, whose approval now feels like life itself. And her imagination, lifted and thinned by sorrow, clings to a hopeful thought: that the eyes her trembling hand closed may still see how she disciplines every unruly passion so she can carry the double role of father and mother.

Misfortune raises her into heroism. She smothers the first faint stirring of a natural attraction before it ripens into love. In the bloom of life, she forgets her sex—meaning, she stops living for the pleasures of awakening desire, even though she might have felt love again and had it returned. She no longer tries to please. And her sense of dignity keeps her from taking pride in the praise her conduct earns. Her children receive her love, and her brightest hopes stretch beyond the grave, where her thoughts often wander.

I can almost see her—children gathered around, her care coming back to her as reward. Their clear, intelligent eyes meet hers. Health and innocence glow on their round cheeks. As they grow, the burdens of life lighten because of their grateful attention. She lives long enough to watch the virtues she planted not just as ideas, but as principles, settle into habits. She sees her children reach a strength of character that lets them endure hardship without forgetting their mother’s example.

With the work of life finished, she waits calmly for death’s sleep—and, rising from the grave, she can say: “Look—you gave me one talent, and here are five.”

Now I want to gather what I’ve argued into a few words. Here I throw down my gauntlet: I deny that there are sexual virtues—not even modesty. If “truth” means what it should mean, it must be the same for men and women. Yet the fanciful “female character” poets and novelists love to sketch demands that women sacrifice truth and sincerity. Virtue then turns into a relative thing—grounded only in “utility,” with men arrogating to themselves the right to define that utility however it suits their convenience.

Yes, women may have different tasks in life. But they’re still human tasks. And the principles that should govern how those tasks are done must be the same.

If women want to be respectable, they must exercise their understanding. There is no other foundation for independence of character. Put plainly: they must bow only to the authority of reason, not become “modest” slaves of public opinion.

Look at the upper ranks of society. How rarely do we meet a man of truly superior ability—or even solid, ordinary learning? The explanation seems simple: the condition they’re born into is unnatural. Human character is shaped by what a person—or a class—does. If necessity doesn’t sharpen the faculties, they grow dull.

The same argument applies to women. Rarely occupied with serious responsibilities, they chase pleasure, and that pursuit gives their character a smallness that makes high society so dull. The same lack of firmness, produced by the same cause, pushes both men and women to flee from themselves into loud entertainments and artificial passions—until vanity replaces nearly every social affection and the basic marks of humanity are barely visible.

Such are the “blessings” of civil governments as they’re currently organized: wealth and cultivated female softness work together to debase humanity, and they come from the same source. But if we admit that women are rational creatures, then we should urge them to acquire virtues they can truly call their own—because how can any rational being be ennobled by something it didn’t earn through its own effort?

4

Observations on the Degraded State of Women—and Why It Happens

It’s obvious, I think, that women either start out with less physical power than men or end up made weak by the way society treats them—or, more often, by a messy combination of both. But notice how quickly some “sensible” men say something similar when they’re defending aristocracy: most people can’t be much of anything. If they could, the argument goes, those obedient crowds—those “slaves” who let themselves be pushed along—would eventually realize their own worth and snap their chains.

And yet, the same men will point out that people submit to oppression almost everywhere even when, in theory, they could simply stand up and throw off the yoke. Instead of claiming their birthright, they keep their heads down, take what they can get, and basically say, “Let’s eat and drink, because tomorrow we die.”

My point is that women are pushed into degradation by a similar habit of mind: the temptation to live for the immediate moment. Over time, that habit becomes a kind of learned resignation. Eventually, a person can even come to despise freedom—not because freedom is worthless, but because they’ve never built the moral strength to fight for it. Let me be clearer.

Reason Has No Sex—But Society Pretends It Does

When it comes to “cultivating the heart,” people love to say sex doesn’t matter. Fine. But the moment we talk about the mind—judgment, intellect, authority to think—society suddenly insists on a strict hierarchy. Women are praised as “perfectly lovely,” but the share of rationality allowed to them is treated as tiny. Once you strip away genius and judgment, what’s left that could even count as intellect?

Here’s the deeper issue: the “seed” of immortality, if I’m allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason—our capacity to keep improving, correcting, and moving toward truth. If human beings were created already perfect, or if knowledge flooded in at adulthood so completely that error was impossible, I’m not sure life beyond the body would even make sense. But in the world we actually live in, the hardest moral questions—those that escape ordinary debate, frustrate careful thinkers, and still outrun even flashes of genius—become, to me, part of the case for the immortality of the soul.

Because reason isn’t some decorative extra. It is the power by which we improve—more precisely, the power by which we recognize truth. Each person, in that respect, is a world unto themselves. One person may show more of this power than another, but if reason is truly a divine spark—the link between creature and Creator—then its basic nature must be the same in all. And how could a soul carry a “heavenly stamp” if it never grows by exercising its own reason?

Yet women, though carefully dressed up and trained to please—ornamented so that a man may “love with honor”—are denied this dignity. A man is placed between woman and reason, and she is constantly portrayed as a creature meant to see the world through a thick lens, trusting what she’s told rather than understanding for herself. Set aside the poetic theories for a moment and look at the plain question: is woman a whole human being or merely a part of man? Does she have reason, or doesn’t she?

If she does—and for the moment I’ll assume she does—then she wasn’t created merely as man’s comfort. And the sexual aspect of life should never be allowed to erase the human one.

The Mistake About Education That Warps Everything

Men have likely fallen into this mess because they’ve misunderstood education. They don’t treat it as the first step in shaping a being who can advance, gradually, toward moral and intellectual perfection. They treat it as mere “prep for life”—as training for roles, appearances, and social survival.

That error is fundamentally sensual, and I’ll call it what it is. On it, society has built a whole false system of “female manners” that strips women of dignity and groups them with pretty things that exist mainly to decorate the landscape—different faces of the same bouquet. Men have spoken this way for ages, and the fear of straying from a supposed “female nature” has pressured even very intelligent women into repeating the same ideas.

So, in practice, women have been denied understanding in the strict sense. In its place, society installs a polished version of instinct—turned into wit, charm, and cunning—useful for getting through daily life, but not for developing the mind.

What Real Knowledge Looks Like—and Why Women Are Blocked From It

The ability that truly deserves to be called knowledge—especially for an immortal being—is this:

• Generalizing ideas: taking individual observations and drawing broad, coherent conclusions.

Simple observation without explanation can help you muddle through everyday life. It produces a sort of rough “common sense.” But where is the inner store—the durable intellectual wealth—that could “clothe” the soul when it leaves the body?

This higher power is not only withheld from women; many writers insist it’s largely incompatible with their “sexual character,” except in a few rare cases. Prove that, and I’ll concede that woman exists only for man. But we need honesty here: the ability to generalize well isn’t especially common among men either. Still, exercising it is what truly cultivates understanding, and almost everything in society makes that cultivation harder for women than for men.

That brings me to the heart of this chapter: the causes that degrade women and prevent them from turning experience into insight.

Two Traps That Both Ruin Reason: Slavery and Despotism

I’m not going to drag you through ancient history. It’s enough to admit that women have usually been cast as either slaves or despots, and to notice that both roles sabotage reason. In either case, the mind narrows. That narrowness—more than anything—breeds folly and vice.

Civil governments themselves have piled up obstacles that make it brutally hard for women to develop their understanding. And yet virtue can rest on no other foundation. What’s more, the same pattern appears among the rich: similar barriers, similar consequences.

Why Ease Makes People Worse at Virtue

People love to say necessity is the mother of invention. The same is true of virtue. Virtue isn’t something you inherit like a title; it’s something you acquire—and acquiring it means sacrificing pleasure. But who gives up pleasure that’s right in reach, unless their mind has been strengthened by hardship or driven forward by the pursuit of knowledge under pressure?

In a strange way, it’s good when people have real problems to wrestle with. Struggle keeps them from sinking into soft, weakening vices born of boredom. But if men and women are placed from birth in a kind of permanent “tropical climate” of pleasure—heat and light pouring down all day—how are they supposed to toughen their minds enough to meet life’s duties, or even to fully value the affections that pull us out of ourselves?

When “Pleasure” Becomes Women’s Job Description

In our current social setup, pleasure is treated as woman’s primary occupation. As long as that’s true, we can’t expect much strength from people trained to be weak.

Women inherit what society treats as the “sovereignty” of beauty, and to maintain that power they often surrender the natural rights they could have gained by exercising reason. They choose, in effect, to be short-lived queens rather than work toward the steadier satisfactions that come from equality. They are “exalted by their inferiority”—a contradiction in words, but not in practice.

And here’s the bitter twist: women demand homage as women, even though experience should teach them that the men who insist most loudly on these elaborate rituals of “respect for the sex” are often the very men most inclined to tyrannize over women and despise the weakness they claim to cherish.

This is why the observation Mr. Hume makes—when contrasting French and Athenian manners—lands so sharply. He compares it to Saturnalia, that festival where, for a few days, masters served their slaves. In Athens it was a temporary joke. In France, he says, the joke became a year-round way of life: society “seriously” elevated those whom nature had placed in a subordinate position, treating women as sovereigns even when they lacked virtue. The spectacle is absurd—and it only deepens the corruption.

The “Queen” Treatment Is a Cage

So why do women accept a special kind of attention and “respect” from strangers—attention that goes beyond ordinary human civility? Why don’t they see, at the height of beauty’s power, that they’re treated like queens largely to be deceived by flattering rituals—until they’re coaxed into giving up, or never even claiming, their natural prerogatives?

They’re kept like birds in elegant cages: fed and dressed, yes, but expected to do little besides preen and move from perch to perch with a performance of majesty. They don’t toil; they don’t “spin.” But they trade away health, liberty, and virtue.

And where, honestly, do we find a mind strong enough to renounce these tempting, accidental privileges? Who rises above public opinion with the calm dignity of reason and dares to value only the rights inherent in being human? It’s foolish to expect many people to do it while hereditary power suffocates affection and crushes reason before it matures.

How Men Built the Throne—and Why Women Sit on It

Men’s passions have placed women on thrones. And until humanity becomes more reasonable, women will likely keep using whatever power they can gain with the least effort—especially when that power seems the most secure.

They will smile—even if warned that, in the empire of beauty, there’s no stable middle ground: woman is either slave or queen, and once she’s no longer adored, she’s quickly scorned. But adoration comes first, and people rarely believe the scorn will come for them.

Louis XIV, in particular, spread artificial manners and, through glittering sophistication, drew a whole nation into his trap. By building a clever chain of despotism, he made it in everyone’s interest, individually, to respect his station and uphold his power. Women, flattered by a childish, indiscriminate attention to “the sex,” gained in his reign that prince-like distinction that is so fatal to reason and virtue.

Why “A Woman Is Always a Woman” Is a Social Disaster

In polite society, a king is always treated as a king—and a woman is always treated as a woman. His authority and her sex stand between them and genuine rational conversation.

With a lover, I admit, it’s natural for a woman’s sensitivity to shine. She may try to stir emotion—not from vanity, but from affection. That isn’t coquetry; it’s often the honest impulse of the heart. What I object to is the sexual hunger for conquest when the heart has nothing to do with it.

And yes, men have that hunger too. Lord Chesterfield bragged that he tried to win the hearts of twenty women whose persons he wouldn’t have valued at a fig. Compared with that cold, calculating cruelty, even the impulsive libertine who exploits unsuspecting tenderness looks almost saintly. I’m choosing strong words on purpose.

But when women are taught only to please, they become permanently on watch to please. With a kind of misguided “heroism,” they try to win hearts simply in order to drop them—or crush them—once the victory is clear and publicly visible.

The Petty Rituals That Train Women to Be Small

Now I have to get down into the details. Women are systematically degraded by the trivial attentions men congratulate themselves for paying—attentions that, in truth, quietly reinforce male superiority. It isn’t “condescension” to bow to someone you consider beneath you.

These rituals often look so ridiculous to me that I can barely keep a straight face: a man leaping up with grave seriousness to pick up a handkerchief or close a door that the woman could have handled herself if she’d simply taken two steps.

My Wish: Stop Performing “Sex” in Public—Except Where Love Belongs

A wild wish just flashed through me, and I won’t suppress it even if it invites laughter: I want society to blur the distinction of sex—except where love genuinely shapes behavior. Because I’m convinced that this manufactured distinction is the foundation of the “weakness” people attribute to women. It’s why women’s understanding is neglected while “accomplishments” are drilled into them with obsessive care. It also explains why they’re pushed to value grace over truly heroic virtues.

Why This Hits Women Like It Hits the Rich

Everyone wants to be loved and respected by someone. Most people will take the shortest path to get it. And the easiest, most obvious forms of respect are the ones paid to wealth and beauty—the kinds of respect that require little understanding to give and none to receive.

For men, abilities and virtues are often necessary to rise from the middle ranks into public notice. That’s why the middle ranks tend to contain the most virtue and talent: they have room—and pressure—to grow by real exertion.

But women, as a class, are placed—at least until their character forms—in much the same situation as the rich. In civilized society, they’re born with certain “sexual privileges.” And while those privileges are handed to them for free, very few will take on extra moral labor just to earn the esteem of a smaller number of truly discerning people.

So when do we hear of women who burst out of obscurity and claim respect because of great abilities or daring virtue? Where are they?

Someone will answer, smugly, “They only want to be noticed—attended to—approved of with sympathy and admiration.” True enough. But before my male readers congratulate themselves, they should remember: that line was not originally written about women. It was written about the rich.

In Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, you can find a general portrait of people of rank and fortune that fits the female condition in society with unsettling precision. The full comparison is worth reading, but one passage matters especially for my argument against any supposedly “natural” sexual character.

If—apart from warriors—almost no great men have ever emerged from the hereditary nobility, isn’t it fair to infer that their local situation swallowed up the man? That it produced a character resembling that of women, who are “localized,” so to speak, by the rank society courteously assigns them?

Consider what “Ladies” are trained to be:

• They aren’t contradicted in company.
• They aren’t allowed to use physical strength.
• When virtues are expected at all, they are mostly negative virtues: patience, docility, good humor, flexibility.

But these are not the virtues that grow a vigorous intellect. Add to this that women live more constantly among others and are seldom truly alone. That makes them more governed by sentiments than by passions.

Yet solitude and reflection are what give wishes the force of passions. They allow imagination to enlarge an object and make it intensely desirable. The same limitation shows up among the rich: they don’t work enough with general ideas—either through intense thought or calm investigation—to build the strength of character from which great resolutions are made.

Listen, then, to what a sharp observer says about “the great”:

“Do the great seem unaware of how cheaply they could earn public admiration? Or do they imagine that, like other men, it must be bought with sweat or blood? What important disciplines train the young nobleman to uphold the dignity of his rank and prove himself worthy of superiority over his fellow citizens—a superiority supposedly raised by the virtue of his ancestors? Is it knowledge? industry? patience? self-denial? virtue of any kind? No. Because all his words and movements are watched, he learns a constant attention to the smallest details of ordinary behavior and studies to perform these little duties with exact propriety. Conscious of how closely he is observed—and how ready people are to indulge him—he acts, even on trivial occasions, with a freedom and elevation that this thought inspires. His air, his manner, his bearing all display an elegant, graceful sense of superiority that those born to lower stations can scarcely ever reach. These are the arts by which he hopes to make others submit more easily to his authority and to bend their inclinations to his pleasure—and he is seldom disappointed. Backed by rank and preeminence, these arts are usually enough to govern the world. Louis XIV, for most of his reign, was regarded not only in France but across Europe as the perfect model of a great prince. But what talents and virtues earned him that reputation? Was it scrupulous, inflexible justice in all his undertakings? Was it the immense dangers and difficulties he faced? Was it tireless, unrelenting application in pursuing them?”

Was it his deep learning, his razor-sharp judgment, or some legendary bravery that made him famous? None of the above. His real advantage was simpler: he was the most powerful monarch in Europe, which automatically put him at the top of the pecking order—and he looked and sounded the part. His historian says he outshone his courtiers in the elegance of his build and the “majestic beauty” of his face. His voice, supposedly noble and stirring, won over the very people his intimidating presence had already put on edge. Even the way he walked and carried himself was treated as a kind of royal miracle—something that would look laughable on anyone without his title. And the awkwardness he induced in others, the same source claims, quietly pleased him because it confirmed what he already believed: that he was superior.

Here’s the point: these are frivolous qualities—social polish, physical presence, the aura of rank. Yet, backed by status (and perhaps a modest dose of real competence), they were enough to secure his reputation in his own time and to earn him respect even from later generations. In his presence, other virtues seemed to shrink. Knowledge, hard work, courage, generosity—all of it, the author says, trembled and lost its dignity next to the performance of grandeur.

How the same trick works for women

A similar spell is cast over women when they’re trained to be “complete” in the same shallow sense—when they’ve mastered the showy accomplishments their culture rewards. Then reality itself starts to bend around them: whatever they choose to do or say is treated as the wisest, most virtuous, most discreet option. People defer. “Higher knowledge” suddenly looks awkward. Wisdom, standing next to her, seems to blush and lose its authority. Reason and judgment become her attendants.

And what is that authority built on? Not on learning or character, but on loveliness—on charm elevated into a kind of social power.

Two life tracks: purpose for men, performance for women

In the middle ranks of society, the difference becomes even clearer. Young men are trained for a trade or profession. Marriage matters, of course, but it isn’t framed as the single defining project of their lives. For women, by contrast, society gives them one main life plan—and it’s not a vocation, an intellectual ambition, or a public responsibility. It’s marrying well.

So while men often build their minds by aiming their efforts at a long-term goal—something that concentrates attention and strengthens the will—women are pushed to treat pleasure and admiration as the main business of existence. Men, absorbed by work, treat pleasure as rest. Women, trained to hunt pleasure, treat work—real work of the mind—as optional or even unfeminine. Their time is sacrificed to this one pursuit, and their bodies are too often treated like bargaining chips, legalized by custom.

But none of that proves women are naturally shallow. It proves something else: education shapes character. Claiming women “must” be ruled by pleasure because many are trained that way is no more reasonable than claiming the pampered courtiers of a despot are “not men” because they trade liberty and virtue for vanity. When a society rewards the wrong things, people adapt. That’s human nature—tragically so.

What pleasure-training does to everyday behavior

Once the “love of pleasure” is cultivated as a governing principle, it spills into everything. Women become trained to focus on secondary things—the little details that create effect—while drifting away from steady duties. Even travel becomes a telling example:

• A man typically starts a journey with the destination in mind.
• A woman, trained to live for impression, is taught to think about the side scenes: what might happen on the road, how she will appear to strangers, what attention she might attract.
• And above all, she worries about her finery—the portable self she’s bringing to the next stage where she hopes to “make a sensation.”

Can real dignity of mind grow where energy is spent this way?

Civilization’s worst bargain: inflamed senses, neglected minds

Zoom out and the author’s broader claim is harsh: women, like the wealthy of both sexes, often absorb the follies and vices of civilization while missing its best fruit—the disciplined use of understanding. Yes, there are exceptions; he’s talking about general trends. When senses are continually stimulated and the mind is left undertrained, people become governed by sensation—what the culture likes to rename “sensibility.” They’re blown around by every gust of feeling.

This kind of “refinement” doesn’t elevate morality; it weakens it. It leaves women restless and anxious, uncomfortable to themselves and—gently put—difficult for others. Their thoughts become magnetized toward whatever will produce emotion. They feel when they should reason. Their opinions swing, not because they’re thoughtfully revising them, but because they’re ricocheting between conflicting moods. They get passionate “by fits and starts,” then the heat burns itself out because it never hardens into perseverance. With no steady center of judgment, one fleeting desire cancels another, and the result is a kind of emotional neutrality—exhaustion pretending to be calm.

A mind cultivated only to inflame passion is a miserable thing. And we should distinguish inflaming passions from strengthening them. When passion is pampered and judgment left unformed, what follows? A messy blend of folly and something that borders on madness.

The author adds: this danger isn’t unique to women. But he’s focusing on them here because society trains them into it so deliberately.

Entertainment as a training program for instability

Novels, music, poetry, flirtation—these aren’t condemned because they exist, but because they’re used as a full curriculum. They shape women into creatures of sensation, and “accomplishments” become the only form of improvement society encourages. Overstretched sensibility weakens the rest of the mind and blocks intellect from taking the lead—the leadership it needs if a person is to be useful to others and at peace with herself.

Nature, he argues, has a simple method for calming passion as life goes on: exercise the understanding. A thinking mind steadies the emotional weather.

Satiety—having too much pleasure—does something different. He compares it to a vivid picture of damnation: a spirit eternally hovering around a polluted body, hungry but unable to enjoy anything except through the worn-out organs of sense. It’s an image of craving without satisfaction, appetite without renewal. And women are made slaves to their senses, he says, because sensibility is the lever by which they gain immediate social power.

So are moralists really going to insist that half the human race should be encouraged to remain in this condition—idle, dependent, and passively content? “Kind instructors,” he snaps, what were we made for? To stay “innocent”—meaning, to stay childish. By that logic, women might as well not have been born except to serve as the background against which men display reason, learning to discern good from evil while women sink back into dust without ever being expected to rise.

Charm and weakness as a life sentence

It would take forever, he says, to list the petty humiliations and real sorrows produced by the belief that women were made to feel rather than think, and that any power they gain must come through charm and helplessness—“fine by defect, and amiably weak.”

Once “amiable weakness” becomes the core identity, women are made dependent on men not just for protection but for guidance. They avoid the very trials that would strengthen the mind. Instead, they learn to decorate their deficiencies—to give their weakness a graceful costume that heightens their appeal to pleasure-seekers, even as it drops them lower on the scale of moral excellence.

The author then turns biting: in this fragile state, women are trained to cling in the smallest alarms, pleading for rescue. The “protector” extends his arm, raises his voice, and saves the trembling beauty—from what, exactly? Maybe the glare of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse. A rat would be considered a true crisis.

Even if such fears aren’t faked, what do they advertise? A kind of weakness that invites contempt, however soft and fair the person may be. And even when these fears produce “pretty” poses, they still reveal a degrading fact: love and esteem aren’t the same thing.

Bodies matter: fear is trained, not fated

He’s convinced we’d hear far less of these childish displays if girls were allowed real physical exercise instead of being shut indoors until their muscles slacken and their digestion breaks. Push the point further: if fear in girls were handled the way cowardice in boys is handled—discouraged rather than indulged or even manufactured—we’d soon see women carrying themselves with more dignity.

Yes, that would make it harder to call them the “sweet flowers” lining a man’s path. But they’d be more respectable members of society, able to do the serious work of life by the light of their own reason.

Rousseau, he notes, admits the truth while trying to weaponize it: “Educate women like men,” Rousseau says, “and the more they resemble our sex the less power they will have over us.” Exactly. That is the goal. The author doesn’t want women to have power over men; he wants them to have power over themselves.

The same argument used to keep the poor ignorant

He’s heard the same style of reasoning used against educating the poor. Aristocracy wears many costumes, but the line is familiar: “Teach them to read and write and you’ll pull them out of the station nature assigned them.” A French writer answered this, and the author borrows the idea: if you turn a person into a brute, don’t be shocked when, at any moment, the brute becomes a beast. Without knowledge there can be no morality.

Ignorance is a shaky foundation for virtue. Yet many writers insist ignorance is precisely what women were “made for,” especially those who argue most aggressively for male superiority—not superiority in degree, but in essence. To make it sound generous, they say the sexes shouldn’t even be compared: man was made to reason, woman to feel; together they form a perfect whole, blending reason and sensibility into one harmonious character.

What “sensibility” really is

But what is sensibility? Dr. Johnson defines it as quickness of sensation, quickness of perception, delicacy. That definition, the author says, sounds like exquisitely polished instinct—not intellect. You won’t find anything divine in mere sensation or in matter. Refine sensation “seventy times seven” and it’s still material. Fire won’t turn lead into gold.

So he returns to his central claim: if a woman is allowed to have an immortal soul, then the proper work of her life must include an understanding to improve. Otherwise, nature is being actively contradicted—or else she was born only to reproduce and decay. If you want to rescue the opposing view, you’d have to go further and claim that animals of all kinds have souls too, just not reasonable ones, and that instinct and sensibility are their step toward reason in some future life—meaning they would trail behind man forever, while man, for reasons no one can explain, was granted reason in his first form of existence.

Domestic life still requires a strong mind

When he later talks about women’s particular duties—as he would talk about the duties of a citizen or father—he isn’t saying most women should be removed from family life. He quotes Lord Bacon: the man with wife and children has “given hostages to fortune,” since family ties can hinder great enterprises, noble or wicked; and many public achievements have come from the unmarried and childless. The author says the same could be said of women.

But society isn’t built on rare heroics. And if society were organized more reasonably, it would need fewer towering geniuses and fewer “heroic virtues” just to keep things upright.

In family life—running a household, educating children—what’s needed isn’t dainty decoration. It’s plain, unsophisticated understanding, plus strength of body and mind. Yet the men who write most loudly about “domesticating” women often do it from crude appetite, and then—made picky by indulgence—try to weaken women’s bodies and cramp their minds.

Even if those tactics succeeded in keeping women at home, the author says he would hesitate before attacking ideas that at least push women toward right conduct, making motherhood and household stewardship central—though it would still be an insult to reason. But experience points the other way: when the understanding is neglected, women become more, not less, detached from domestic responsibilities. They drift from steady work just as easily as they would drift into serious intellectual pursuits (and most people, he notes, never chase intellectual goals with real vigor anyway).

So he draws the conclusion he keeps returning to: reason is necessary if a woman is to perform any duty well. And he repeats it bluntly: sensibility is not reason.

The rich, the shallow current, and unearned pleasure

The comparison to the wealthy keeps returning for him. When men neglect duties of humanity, women tend to follow; the same current drags both along. Wealth and honors can stunt a man’s understanding and weaken his powers by flipping nature’s order: nature makes true pleasure the reward of labor. But enervating pleasure is also available to women without earning it.

Until inherited wealth is spread more widely, he asks, how can men be proud of virtue? And until they are, women will continue to rule them by the most direct route—neglecting “dull” domestic duties to chase pleasure as it flits by.

Someone once said, “The power of woman is her sensibility.” Men, without realizing what they’re doing, often strengthen that power until it swallows everything else. The more you exercise sensibility, the more you have of it; poets, painters, composers live in it. But if sensibility grows at the expense of reason—and even of imagination—why do philosophers complain that women are fickle?

Sexual attention, he says, acts strongly on female sensibility, and girls are trained in this sympathetic responsiveness from youth. A husband can’t keep up intense romantic attention forever, at the pitch that produces continual emotional fireworks. And a heart trained to crave that intensity, once it’s accustomed to vivid feeling, will either look for a new lover or suffer in secret, caught between virtue and prudence. He adds an important nuance: this applies when the heart has truly been made susceptible and taste formed. In fashionable life, he suspects education fosters vanity even more often than genuine sensibility. Coquetry, in other words, frequently comes from vanity—not from the natural inconstancy produced by overwound emotion.

A practical cruelty: the unprovided-for daughter

One argument weighs especially heavily on him because it’s not abstract—it’s painfully common. Girls educated to be weak are often left by their parents without any financial provision, and so they become dependent on the “reason” and generosity of their brothers.

To be charitable, these brothers are often decent men. They give support. But they give it as a favor, not as something the sister has an equal right to as a child of the same parents. For a while, a compliant sister may live in this awkward position with some comfort. Then the brother marries—which is likely. The sister, once treated as the household’s mistress, becomes an object of sidelong looks: an intruder, a needless burden on the master of the house and his new partner.

Who can measure the misery of women in that situation—minds and bodies both weakened by education—unable to work, ashamed to beg? The wife, imagined here as cold-hearted and narrow (and the author says this isn’t an unfair guess, because the same education that shrinks the mind doesn’t enlarge the heart), grows jealous of her husband’s small kindnesses to his relatives. Her “sensibility” doesn’t rise into humanity. She resents seeing her children’s property, as she views it, spent on a helpless sister-in-law.

These aren’t theories, the author insists. He has watched this happen—again and again.

The outcome is painfully predictable. The wife, afraid to challenge her husband’s misplaced attachment head-on, turns to strategy instead. She uses whatever tools she has—tears, affection, flattery, scenes—until she succeeds in driving the “spy” out of the house. Then he’s tossed into the world with no preparation for it, or shipped off as a supposed act of generosity (or a nod to appearances) with a tiny allowance and an uncultivated mind—essentially sentenced to a lonely, joyless life.

And here’s the uncomfortable part: these two women—the wife and the sister—may not be very different in basic reason or humanity. Swap their positions, and either might have played the same selfish role. The real difference isn’t “nature.” It’s education.

With a better education, the wife wouldn’t have developed that inward, self-centered kind of “sensibility” that makes every feeling orbit around me. Reason could have taught her not to demand—and not even to feel flattered by—her husband’s affection when it requires him to betray prior duties. She’d want to love him not because he adores her, but because he’s genuinely worthy of love. And the sister, properly strengthened, might have been able to stand on her own instead of surviving on the bitter bread of dependence.

Cultivation opens the heart—and the mind. I’m convinced of it. It even strengthens the body’s “organs,” though that point may be less obvious. And I’m not talking about quick, dramatic bursts of feeling. I mean enduring affections—the stable attachments that shape character.

That’s why education is so hard to get right for either sex. You have to find a balance:

• Don’t narrow the understanding just as the heart is warming with the generous energy of youth.
• But don’t dry up the feelings by forcing the mind into abstract inquiries that feel disconnected from real life.

What “Careful Education” Often Produces in Women

When women are given what society calls a “careful” education, they’re often pushed into one of two molds:

1. The fine lady: overflowing with delicacy and “sensibility,” full of whims and capricious fancies.
2. The notable woman: the capable household manager—practical, prudent, and often more useful in daily life than the sentimental lady, even if she lacks breadth of mind or refined taste.

The “notable” woman is frequently honest and kind, with a sharp, worldly sort of good sense. But the larger intellectual world is closed to her. Take her out of her family circle and neighborhood routines, and she stalls. Her mind has no work to do, because she was never taught to enjoy literature as a source of pleasure—often she was taught to dismiss it outright. So when she meets people with more cultivated taste, she tends to see it as ridiculous. In close relationships she might tolerate it; among acquaintances she calls it affectation.

A sensible man can only love such a woman for one reason: she’s a woman. He respects her mainly as a reliable helper. To keep his own peace, he lets her boss the servants and go to church dressed in the finest fabric money can buy. Oddly enough, a man with the same level of understanding might clash with her more, because he’d want a say in the domestic territory she treats as her domain.

And yet—and this is crucial—women whose minds haven’t been enlarged by real cultivation (or whose natural selfishness of “sensibility” hasn’t been widened by reflection) are often terrible at running a household well. They tend to overreach. They become little tyrants, trying to prop up a “superiority” that rests only on arbitrary differences of wealth.

Sometimes the damage is worse: servants are denied small, innocent comforts and driven past their strength, all so the “notable” woman can set a more impressive table and outshine the neighbors with display and finery. And if she pays attention to her children, it’s usually to dress them expensively. Whether that comes from vanity or genuine fondness, the result is the same: it harms them.

Why “Good Management” Isn’t a Full Life

How many women like this live their days—or at least their evenings—in constant dissatisfaction? Their husbands praise them as competent managers and faithful wives, but still leave home to find something more enjoyable—something more piquant, if I may borrow the French word. Meanwhile the patient drudge, trudging through her tasks like a blind horse turning a mill, is cheated of what she considers her rightful pay: her husband’s affection. And a woman with few inner resources doesn’t bear that deprivation calmly.

The Fine Lady: More Tender, Less Grounded

The “fine lady,” by contrast, is trained to despise the ordinary work of life. She’s urged to collect “accomplishments” that sit just above common sense—often without building the understanding that makes any skill precise. Even bodily grace, done well, depends on a mind strengthened by exercise.

Without a foundation of principles, taste becomes superficial, and grace can’t come from anything deeper than imitation. Her imagination is overheated; her feelings become picky, even artificial, because she never gains the counterweight of judgment. The heart may remain innocent—but it becomes too tender.

These women are often genuinely charming. Their hearts are usually more responsive to general kindness and the sentiments that soften and civilize life than the hard-edged household drudge. But because they lack reflection and self-command, they mainly inspire love, not respect. They rule their husbands as long as they can hold their affection, and they become the “platonic friends” of his male friends.

These are what you might call nature’s pretty flaws: women treated as if they were made not to share true companionship with men, but to keep men from sinking into brute behavior—to smooth their rough corners, to give a touch of dignity to raw appetite through playful flirtation.

And at this point I can’t help but protest: What a bleak purpose to assign to half the human race. Has the Creator made woman—capable of tracing wisdom in the world and feeling reverence for what is truly higher—only so she can submit to a man who is, by nature, her equal? Both are sent into the world to acquire virtue. Can she accept being trained merely to please him, merely to decorate the earth, when her soul is capable of rising toward God? Can she remain lazily dependent on a man for her reasoning power, when she ought to climb with him the hard slopes of knowledge?

If Love Is Everything, Then Say So

If love is the highest good, then educate women only to inspire it. Polish every charm until it intoxicates the senses. But if women are moral beings, then they deserve the chance to become intelligent. Let love for a particular man be only one part of a larger, brighter fire—universal love—that circles humanity and then rises, in gratitude, toward God.

Why Domestic Virtue Requires More Than Emotion

To carry out domestic duties well takes real strength: resolution, and a serious perseverance that can’t rest on emotion, no matter how vivid and “natural” that emotion feels. To model order—the very soul of virtue—you sometimes need a certain firmness that you can’t expect from someone trained from infancy to spin like a weathercock in every gust of feeling.

Anyone who wants to be useful needs a plan. Even in simple duties, you’re often forced to act against the immediate impulse of tenderness or compassion. And paradoxically, severity can be the surest—and even the noblest—proof of affection: the kind of love that chooses a loved one’s future good over a present indulgence.

When people lack that power over their feelings—when they lack that dignified affection—mothers spoil their children. It becomes hard to tell whether neglect or indulgence does more harm. I’m inclined to think indulgence has done the worse damage.

Who Should Raise Children?

People generally agree that children should be left primarily under women’s care during early childhood. But from what I’ve seen, women of heightened “sensibility” are the least suited for this work, because their feelings will carry them away and they will almost certainly ruin a child’s temper.

And temper—a child’s early habits of self-control, resilience, and emotional balance—is the first and most important branch of education. Shaping it requires the steady eye of reason and a consistent plan, held at equal distance from two extremes:

• tyranny
• indulgence

Yet those who pride themselves on “sensibility” bounce between these two poles, always overshooting the mark.

Following this line of thought, I’ve gone so far as to conclude that a person of genius is often the worst choice for an educator, public or private. Exceptional minds see things in sweeping masses, not in patient particulars, and they rarely have even tempers. That habitual cheerfulness we call “good humor” seems almost as rare alongside great intellect as it is alongside intense feeling.

So if you admire a brilliant mind’s dazzling flights—or if you calmly take in the careful instruction of a profound thinker—don’t be shocked if the genius is irritable and the deep thinker is gloomy. A lively imagination and a tenacious, powerful mind don’t easily coexist with the flexible politeness that leads someone, at least a man, to bend to others’ opinions and prejudices rather than smash into them headfirst.

But when we talk about education and manners, we shouldn’t build our expectations around rare, superior minds. They can be left to chance. It’s the vast majority—people of ordinary, moderate ability—who most need instruction, because they absorb the moral “weather” of the atmosphere they live in.

And this is my point: this respectable crowd—men and women alike—should not have their sensations overheated in a hothouse of luxurious idleness at the expense of understanding. Without the ballast of understanding, people will never become either virtuous or free. An aristocracy—whether founded on property or genuine talent—will always sweep aside the alternately timid and ferocious slaves of feeling.

Arguments “From Nature” Used to Degrade Women

Men have produced countless arguments—moral and physical—dressed up as “reason” and supposedly grounded in nature, to degrade women. I’ll only touch a few.

One claim is that the female mind matures earlier than the male, and that this deserves contempt. I won’t answer by listing early proofs of genius in famous boys. I’ll simply appeal to experience: don’t young men, when introduced very early into adult company (and there are plenty of examples now), become just as precocious?

The fact is so common that merely mentioning it conjures a familiar picture: a crowd of swaggering little apes of men, their minds narrowed by adult society when they should’ve been spinning tops and playing games.

Another claim, made by some naturalists, is that men don’t reach full growth and strength until thirty, while women mature by twenty. I suspect this rests on a biased assumption: that a woman’s perfection is beauty, meaning mere prettiness of features and complexion, while male “beauty” is allowed to include something of the mind.

But women don’t gain real bodily strength—or that character in the face the French call physionomie—before thirty any more than men do. The innocent tricks of childhood can be delightful, yes. But once the fresh bloom of youth fades, those “artless” graces often turn into practiced little performances that offend anyone with genuine taste.

In a girl’s face we look for liveliness and shy modesty. After the springtime of life has passed, we look instead for steadier sense—for traces of passion rather than the dimples of mere animal spirits. We expect to see an individual character, because character is what truly fastens affection. At that stage we want to converse, not simply to fondle—to engage imagination as well as the heart.

At twenty, the beauty of both sexes is equal. The distinction is largely manufactured by male libertinism—and older coquettes often agree, because when they can’t inspire love anymore, they purchase the vigor and freshness of youth. The French, who tend to include more of the mind in their idea of beauty, often prefer women of thirty. That is, they see women as most perfect when youthful sparkle gives way to reason and a more majestic seriousness that marks maturity—the “resting point.”

Physically, youth to twenty is a period of rapid growth; from twenty to thirty the body’s solid parts become denser. Muscles, once flexible, gradually stiffen and give the face its character. In other words, time engraves the mind’s habits onto the countenance with something like an iron pen—showing not only what powers exist within, but how they’ve been used.

It’s worth noting that animals that mature slowly tend to live longer and belong to nobler kinds. But men can’t claim natural superiority from longevity, because nature hasn’t favored the male in this respect.

Polygamy and the “More Girls Are Born” Argument

Polygamy is another kind of physical degradation. A plausible defense is often built on a well-attested fact: in countries where polygamy is established, more girls are born than boys. That looks like a sign from nature, and “reasonable” speculation is supposed to yield to nature. From there the conclusion slides into view: if polygamy is necessary, then woman must be inferior and made for man.

But we know very little about how the fetus forms in the womb. It seems likely to me that some accidental physical cause could explain the phenomenon—meaning it isn’t a law of nature at all. I’ve seen a useful set of observations that clarifies what I mean. The claim is this: among animals, the more vigorous, “hotter” constitution tends to prevail and reproduce its own kind. Applied to parts of Africa, the reasoning goes:

• Men, accustomed to polygamy, are weakened by the use of many women and become less vigorous.
• Women, meanwhile, have a “hotter” constitution—not only because their nerves are more irritable and their organization more sensitive, with livelier imagination, but also because marriage deprives them of the share of physical love that, in monogamy, would be wholly theirs.
• For these reasons, children are more often born female.

And in most of Europe, accurate mortality lists show the ratio of men to women is nearly equal; if anything, slightly more males are born—about 105 boys to 100 girls.

So the “necessity” of polygamy doesn’t hold.

What Justice Would Require

Still, when a man seduces a woman, I believe it should count as a kind of left-handed marriage: the man should be legally bound to maintain the woman and her children—unless the woman commits adultery, which is a natural divorce that would cancel the obligation.

Such a law should remain in force as long as women’s weakness makes “seduction” a ready excuse for their lack of principle—and, more importantly, as long as women must depend on men for subsistence instead of earning it through their own hands or minds.

But these women shouldn’t be called “wives” in the full sense, because that would wreck the very purpose of marriage. Marriage is meant to protect the tender charities that grow from personal fidelity and give the bond its sanctity. If you strip away fidelity—if neither love nor friendship unites the hearts—those charities dissolve into selfishness.

A woman faithful to the father of her children deserves respect and should not be treated like a prostitute. And I readily grant this: if it’s truly necessary for a man and woman to live together to raise their children, then nature never intended a man to have more than one wife.

Compassion Isn’t Enough—Justice Is

As highly as I value marriage as the foundation of most social virtue, I can’t help feeling deep compassion for the women who are snapped off from society—torn away, by a single mistake, from the relationships and affections that refine both heart and mind.

Often it scarcely even deserves to be called a “mistake.” Many innocent girls are fooled by sincere affection. Many more are, in the strongest sense of the word, ruined before they even understand the difference between virtue and vice. Educated in a way that prepares them for shame, they predictably fall into it.

Asylums and “magdalens” aren’t the real remedy for these abuses. What the world lacks is not charity, but justice.

A woman who has “lost her honor” tends to believe she can’t sink any lower, and that returning to her former standing is impossible—that no effort can wash the stain away. With every motive for self-respect gone, and with no other way to survive, prostitution becomes her only refuge. And the character is quickly corrupted by circumstances over which the poor wretch has little control—unless she possesses an unusually strong share of sense and loftiness of spirit.

Necessity almost never turns prostitution into the defining work of a man’s life. For women, though, it has done exactly that—on a massive scale—because society trains them for it.

Here’s the basic setup: girls are raised in enforced idleness and taught, from the beginning, to expect a man to support them. They’re taught to treat their bodies as the “payment” for his labor. In that world, flirting becomes a kind of career skill, and the “science” of sexual display ends up with stronger incentives than hunger or even simple vanity. No wonder the culture then doubles down on the brutal rule: if a woman loses chastity, she loses everything that supposedly makes her “respectable.”

That’s not morality. That’s a trap. It reduces a woman’s character to one virtue—sexual purity—while the one passion society actively cultivates in her is love. Worse, her “honor” isn’t even framed as something that depends on her own will. When Richardson has Clarissa tell Lovelace that he robbed her of her honor, he reveals an upside-down idea of honor and virtue. Because think about what that implies: a person can be degraded without consent. That is misery in its purest form.

People sometimes defend this extreme strictness as a “useful” mistake—as if the harsh rule scares women into good behavior. But as Leibniz put it, “Errors are often useful; but it is commonly to remedy other errors.” In other words: if your system needs a lie to keep it standing, the real problem is the system.

Most of the damage in human life comes from chasing immediate pleasure so hard that it wrecks what it was supposed to provide. The kind of obedience demanded of women in marriage fits this pattern perfectly. When a mind is trained to rely on authority, it doesn’t practice its own strength. So the “perfectly obedient” wife too often becomes a weak, idle mother. And even when that isn’t the outcome, something essential still goes missing: when you educate someone only in negative virtues—the virtues of not doing things—you crowd out the larger moral horizon, including the idea of living for anything beyond the present world.

Writers, especially when they write about women, have narrowed “virtue” into something cramped and practical: whatever is convenient for society right now. Even worse, they’ve made virtue rest on an even flimsier foundation—the shifting tastes and feelings of men. Yes: virtue, and even religion, get handed over to fashion. “Good” becomes whatever the dominant taste happens to applaud.

It would be funny, if it weren’t everywhere and so destructive, how eager men are to degrade the very sex they claim provides them life’s greatest pleasures. I’ve often found Pope’s sarcasm fits not just men, but humanity as a whole: people tend to split into two camps—those who live for pleasure and those who live for power. The small tyrant who rules his “little harem” thinks only about his comfort and enjoyment.

And the pursuit of pleasure can warp even “prudent” men—or exhausted libertines—into something worse than openly selfish. Some marry not out of friendship or respect, but to secure a compliant bedfellow. Then, incredibly, they go on to corrupt their own wives: they push them toward the very looseness society will later punish. Marriage is supposed to bring dignity and mutual respect, yet too often it becomes the moment modesty is driven out and any hope of chaste love disappears.

Love and Its Burnout

If you treat love as nothing more than an animal appetite, it can’t keep feeding on itself forever. It burns hot, and then it burns out. That collapse—love dying in its own flame—is love’s “violent death.”

Now consider the wife who has been coached into being sexually available and constantly pleasing. When her husband’s attention fades, she’s left with a void, and she’ll likely try to fill it elsewhere. Why wouldn’t she? She can’t calmly accept being reduced to a household manager—an “upper servant”—after being worshiped like a goddess. She’s still attractive, still hungry for the spotlight, and instead of turning her energy toward her children, she keeps dreaming about staying in life’s sunshine.

Some husbands are so lacking in sense and parental feeling that, during the first intoxicated phase of passion, they won’t even let their wives nurse their babies. They want their wives for decoration and entertainment, not motherhood. The result is predictable: even innocent love slides into lust when duty is sacrificed to indulgence.

Why Marriage Needs More Than Romance

A strong personal attachment can be a wonderful starting point for friendship. But even when two genuinely virtuous young people marry, it might actually help if something slightly cooled their passion—something that forced a wider view. A remembered former attachment, or a disappointed affection, might make the match, at least for one person, rest more on esteem than on fever.

In that case, they’d stop living only for the present moment. They’d aim to make the whole of life respectable by building a friendship—an intentional plan for partnership—that only death should end.

Because friendship is not a mood; it’s a serious, principled affection, strengthened and “cemented” by time. In that sense, it’s the most elevated of human bonds. Romantic love, by contrast, is often its opposite. Love and friendship rarely live comfortably in the same heart. Even when directed at different people, they compete; directed at the same person, they usually arrive in sequence, not together. The jealousies and fears that fan romantic flame—whether managed “wisely” or manipulated “artfully”—don’t mix with the steady confidence and sincere respect that friendship requires.

The Danger of Idealized Love

The “love” that poets and brilliant novelists paint in glowing colors usually doesn’t exist in real life—except perhaps inside overheated imaginations. And those gorgeous portraits are dangerous.

They’re dangerous in two ways:

• They give the sensualist a convenient excuse: he wraps plain lust in sentimental language and calls it “love.”
• They spread affectation and quietly erode the dignity of virtue.

Virtue—if the word means what it should—ought to look serious, even a little stern. Dressing virtue up as pleasure because someone once used “pleasure” as another name for beauty is like building a cathedral on sand. It’s a sneaky way to topple virtue while pretending to honor it.

In real life, virtue and pleasure are not nearly as closely linked as eloquent writers like to claim. Pleasure braids the fading garland and pours the intoxicating cup. The reward virtue offers is different: it’s the payoff of effort. It ripens slowly, and when it arrives it doesn’t shout—it settles in as calm satisfaction, so natural you hardly notice it. It’s like bread: the basic food that quietly keeps you alive and well, rarely celebrated. Feasts, meanwhile, thrill the heart—even though sickness and death can hide in the very delicacies that excite the palate.

A vivid imagination does to love what it does to everything else: it paints in blazing colors, stealing from the rainbow. In a world like ours, a mind that senses its own higher origin often proves it by yearning for perfection it can’t reach—always chasing what it knows is, in part, a dream. Such an imagination can give “reality” to what has no substance and make fantasies feel stable when actual life feels dull. Then it builds love into something celestial, worships an idealized partner, and imagines a mutual devotion so pure it refines the soul and doesn’t die once it has served as a ladder “to heaven.” Like intense religious devotion, it swallows up every lesser affection and desire.

In that fantasy, the lovers’ arms become a temple, its summit lost in clouds. The world is shut out. Every thought and wish that doesn’t nourish pure affection and lasting virtue is banished.

Lasting virtue! Rousseau—honorable dreamer—your paradise wouldn’t survive its first uninvited guest. Like Milton’s Eden, it would have room only for angels… or for people who have fallen below the dignity of rational beings.

Happiness isn’t a physical substance. You can’t hold it, or see it, or touch it. And yet our fierce pursuit of “the good”—each of us shaping it to our own taste—signals something important: humans are not meant merely to receive happiness, but to earn it. That restless striving shows us as thinking creatures, not passive animals. So when people complain about passion’s illusions, they forget what they’re really railing against: one of the strongest signs that the soul reaches beyond this life. That hunger for more—more meaning, more perfection—points toward immortality.

But leaving exceptional minds to correct themselves (and pay dearly for the lesson), there’s a more practical point to make. What I want to protect in women is not the kind of deep, steady passion that can persist and build a life. It’s the romantic, wavering feelings—the “paradise” daydreams—that are best restrained by strengthening the understanding. Because those dreamy reveries are more often the product of idleness than of true imaginative power.

Idleness as a Machine That Makes Triflers

Women rarely have serious work—work weighty enough to quiet the constant churn of feeling. Instead, they’re handed a cycle of small worries and empty pursuits that drain their energy and dull their minds. Their bodies and their appearance become the center of everything, so they end up treated as objects meant primarily for the senses.

In short, “female education”—meaning the education society gives women—pushes even the best-disposed women toward romance and inconsistency, and leaves the rest vain and petty. In today’s social structure, I’m afraid this harm can’t be fully repaired. But if a more honorable ambition ever became common—an ambition to be capable rather than merely admired—women could be brought closer to nature and reason, and grow more virtuous and genuinely useful as they grow more respected.

Still, I’ll say it plainly: women’s reason will never grow strong enough to guide their conduct as long as making an appearance in the world remains the first wish of most people. That one weak desire consumes everything around it. Natural affection and the most valuable virtues get sacrificed to it.

That’s why girls so often marry “to better themselves”—the blunt phrase is ugly because it’s accurate. They train their hearts to stay locked up until a man with a bigger fortune appears. I’ll return to this in another chapter; for now, it’s enough to note how often women are degraded when the cold, calculating prudence of age chills the warmth and courage of youth.

Needlework, Dress, and the Shrinking of the Mind

From the same source comes the idea that young girls should spend a huge portion of their time on needlework. But of all the tasks you could assign, this one does more than almost any other to narrow the mind—because it traps attention on the self and one’s appearance.

Men order clothes and stop thinking about them. Women often make their own clothes—both necessary and decorative—and then talk about them constantly. Their thoughts follow their hands.

To be clear: making necessities doesn’t weaken the mind. Making endless frills does. When a working-class woman makes clothes for her husband and children, she’s doing her share of the family’s real labor. But when women sew mainly so they can dress more expensively than they can honestly afford, it’s worse than wasted time—it’s training in vanity.

If we want the poor to be virtuous, they must have steady employment. And if middle-class women weren’t busy copying the fashions of the rich (without sharing any of the rich people’s leisure), they could employ poorer women while they themselves ran their households, educated their children, and exercised their own minds.

Imagine what could replace the endless chatter about trimmings:

• Gardening
• Experimental science
• Literature

Those would give them real subjects to think about and talk about—topics that actually sharpen the understanding.

People sometimes praise French women for being less “nailed to their chairs” twisting lace and tying ribbons. Their conversation can be superficial, yes. But I’d argue it’s still less painfully dull than the talk of English women who spend their time making caps and bonnets and obsessing over the entire mischief of trimming—plus shopping, bargain-hunting, and all the rest. And here’s the worst part: it’s often the decent, prudent women who are most degraded by these habits, because their motive is simply vanity. The openly “wanton” woman, shaping her appearance to inflame desire, at least has a clearer aim.

All of this points back to a general truth I’ve already insisted on, and can’t insist on too often: the work our thoughts do—what they dwell on, what they practice—shapes character, both in whole groups and in individual lives.

If women’s thoughts are trained to hover around their appearance, why be surprised that their appearance is treated as their most valuable asset?

And yet, even the body—“the person”—needs some freedom of mind to be formed with grace. That may be one reason why some gentle wives seem to have few attractions beyond sex itself. Add another cost: sedentary “feminine” work makes many women physically sickly. And then, thanks to warped ideas of female excellence, they’re encouraged to be proud of that delicacy—another chain that keeps attention fixed on the body and cramps the mind’s activity.

Women of high rank usually don’t do the manual work of dressing. Their taste is exercised, but not their hands. And because they think less about finery once the toilet is finished, they often have a natural ease that’s rarely seen in women who dress for the sake of dressing.

That same observation about the middle rank—often the class where talent thrives—doesn’t apply to women in the same way it does to men. Upper-class women, by picking up at least a little literature and by talking more with men about general topics, often gain more knowledge than middle-class women who imitate their fashions and vices without sharing their advantages.

As for virtue—in the broad, real sense—I’ve seen the most of it among the poor. Many poor women feed their children by hard labor and hold families together that the fathers’ vices would have torn apart. Gentlewomen, by contrast, are often too indolent to practice active virtue; “civilization” softens them rather than refining them.

In fact, the solid good sense I’ve met in poor women—women with little formal education who nonetheless acted with genuine heroism—has confirmed my belief that trivial occupations have made “woman” into a trifler. Men claim the body; the mind is left to rust. Physical love, as man’s favorite recreation, weakens him; then he turns around and tries to enslave the woman he has weakened. And who can say how many generations it might take to restore vigor to the virtue and talents of descendants born into that kind of abasement?

The Root Cause: Starved Understanding

As I trace the causes that have degraded women, I’ve focused on the ones that act widely—forces that shape the morals and manners of the sex as a whole. And to me, they share a single root: a lack of cultivated understanding.

Is that lack physical—some natural weakness—or merely accidental, the product of history and education? Only time can answer. I don’t put much weight on the example of a few women who, after receiving what people call a “masculine” education, developed courage and determination. My point is simpler: men placed in similar conditions develop similar character. I’m talking about whole classes of people, not a handful of exceptions. And genius and talent have emerged among men from social groups in which women have never yet been allowed to stand.

5

5. Taking Aim at the Writers Who Turn Women into “Pitiable” Creatures

A set of fashionable modern books about women—their “nature,” their education, their supposed role—has quietly set the tone for almost everything people say about the sex, even when they’re only skimming the subject. Those opinions still need a careful audit.

Section I — Starting with Rousseau

I’ll begin with Rousseau. I’m going to lay out his picture of women largely in his own words, with my reactions woven in. Yes, what I’ll argue rests on a few basic principles, and you could probably predict most of my conclusions from what I’ve already said. But this whole elaborate system has been built with such cleverness that it deserves a more detailed takedown—one where I follow the logic step by step and show exactly where it leads.

Rousseau says that “Sophia” should be as perfectly female as “Emile” is perfectly male, and that to make her so we must first study what “nature” has supposedly assigned to women.

From there he tries to prove that women ought to be weak and passive because, on average, they have less physical strength than men. And from that single fact he leaps to a whole moral universe: women, he claims, were made to please men and to submit to them; their duty is to make themselves agreeable to their “master,” and this becomes the grand purpose of their existence. Yet, to dress raw appetite up in a fake ceremonial robe, he also insists that men shouldn’t simply use force, but should make their pleasure depend on the woman’s “will.”

Then he adds a third claim, drawn from what he calls the different “constitutions” of the sexes. In his telling:

• the stronger sex should look like the ruler,
• but in reality should be dependent on the weaker,
• because women supposedly have more power to arouse desire than men have to satisfy it,
• which forces men to try to please women in order to gain consent—so the man can be “the stronger.”

Notice what he’s really selling here: a story in which domination stays intact, but gets repackaged as a kind of flirtatious negotiation. Rousseau even says that one of the sweetest parts of a man’s “victory” is not knowing whether he won by strength or whether the woman yielded because she wanted to—and that women are “artful” enough to keep him guessing. He goes on to claim that women’s minds match this setup: rather than being embarrassed by weakness, they supposedly celebrate it. They make a show of being too delicate to lift anything, and would blush at being thought strong. Why? Not just to seem refined, he says, but as a strategic move: if you’ve already performed fragility, you’ve prepared an excuse—and even a “right”—to be helpless whenever it’s useful.

I quoted him at length so no one can accuse me of twisting his reasoning to fit my argument. I’ve already said that educating women on these foundations naturally produces a culture of cunning and sexualized manipulation. And if you accept his premise—that woman exists only to please and obey—then the conclusion follows with brutal consistency: she should sacrifice everything else to make herself desirable. Self-preservation becomes the engine of all her actions, and her character is treated like something to be stretched or squeezed to fit an iron frame, with no regard for moral or physical distinctions.

But if rules built on that ugly base end up undermining even the practical aims of everyday life—if they make human life worse rather than better—then I’m allowed to question the premise itself. I’m allowed to doubt that women were made for men. And if people want to shout “irreligion” or “atheism” at me for saying so, I’ll answer plainly: even if an angel came down and told me that Moses’s beautiful poetic account of creation and the fall were literally true, I still couldn’t accept anything that my reason tells me insults the goodness of the Supreme Being. I’m not going to lean my own weakness on the convenient story of the devil as the first seducer of my “frail” sex. I’ll call it what it is: a conclusion drawn by reason.

Rousseau continues: once you “demonstrate” that men and women are not—and ought not to be—built alike in temperament and character, then of course they should not be educated alike. They should cooperate, he says, but not do the same work. Their goals should match, but their methods—and therefore their tastes and inclinations—must differ.

He doubles down. However you look at women, he claims—by their “destination,” their inclinations, or their duties—you’ll be driven to a special education designed just for them. Men and women were made for each other, he argues, but their dependence isn’t equal:

• men depend on women mainly for desire,
• women depend on men for desire and for necessities,
• and, he says, men could live without women more easily than women could live without men.

So, he concludes, women’s education should always be relative to men. He lists what women should be trained for:

• to please men,
• to be useful to men,
• to make men love and esteem them,
• to raise men when they are young,
• to care for men when they are grown,
• to advise and console them,
• to make their lives easy and agreeable.

That, he says, is what girls should learn from infancy. If you forget this principle, he argues, you miss the point, and everything taught contributes neither to women’s happiness nor to men’s.

Then come the “evidence” and the stereotypes: Rousseau claims that girls, from their earliest years, love dress. They don’t only want to be pretty; they want to be thought pretty. They quickly learn to be guided by what others will think of their behavior, long before they can understand much else. Boys, he says, don’t respond the same way; you have to spend time and effort to make that social pressure work on them.

From there he offers another framing: since the body develops before the “soul,” our first task is to cultivate the body. That’s true for both sexes, he says—but the aim should differ. For boys: develop physical power. For girls: develop personal charm. He adds a disclaimer that neither strength nor beauty belongs exclusively to one sex—only that the order of cultivating them is reversed. Women need enough strength to move with grace; men need enough dexterity to act with ease.

He extends the argument to childhood play. Children share many amusements, and should. But, he says, each sex has its own taste:

• boys like loud, active play—drums, tops, pulling carts,
• girls like display and ornament—mirrors, trinkets, dolls.

The doll, he claims, is the signature toy because it reveals a girl’s “destination.” The physical side of the “art of pleasing,” he says, is dress—and that’s all children can really practice.

And once that “propensity” is established, he says, you simply guide it. A girl will want to dress her doll—tie ribbons, add frills, arrange a headdress. To do that she must ask others for help, so it becomes pleasing to her to learn skills that make her self-sufficient in these decorative tasks. This, he claims, explains why early lessons for girls can be framed not as drudgery but as “helpful.” In fact, he says, most girls learn reading and writing reluctantly, but take readily to needlework. They imagine themselves already grown, and enjoy thinking that these skills will let them decorate themselves.

Let’s call this what it is: an education aimed mainly at the body. And Rousseau isn’t the only man to imply—sometimes without even meaning to—that the mere appearance of a young woman is delightful even if she has no mind to speak of (unless we’re supposed to count lively animal spirits as “mind”). To keep her weak—and what some people call “beautiful”—her understanding is neglected. Girls are forced to sit still, play with dolls, and listen to foolish chatter, and then habit is triumphantly presented as proof of “nature.”

Yes, Rousseau believed the earliest years should be used to form the body—though in educating Emile he doesn’t strictly follow his own plan. But there’s a world of difference between strengthening the body (which supports strength of mind) and merely training it into easy, pleasing motion.

It also matters where Rousseau was speaking from. His observations were shaped by a society where “the art of pleasing” had been refined not to produce virtue, but to disguise the coarseness of vice. If he had truly returned to nature—if his appetites hadn’t interfered with his reason—he wouldn’t have drawn conclusions this crude.

In France (in the times I’m talking about), boys and girls—especially girls—were educated primarily to please: to manage their appearance and polish their outward behavior. Their minds were corrupted early by the worldly and pious warnings they were given about “immodesty.” Even the confessions children were forced to make—and the questions holy men asked them, on reliable authority—were enough to stamp a premature sexual character onto them. Society itself became a school of coquetry and art. By ten or eleven, often earlier, girls began flirting and spoke freely, without reprimand, about “establishing themselves” through marriage.

In short, they were treated like women almost from birth. Compliments replaced instruction. With minds weakened this way, people then acted as if nature had been a cruel stepmother—creating women as an afterthought.

And once you deny women a real understanding, it becomes “consistent,” in that warped system, to subject them to authority that has nothing to do with reason. To prepare them for subjection, Rousseau gives advice like this: girls should be active and diligent, but also early trained in restraint. This “misfortune,” he says, is inseparable from their sex. They’ll be under constant and severe restraint all their lives—the restraint of decorum—so they must be used to confinement early, and taught to suppress their whims so they can more easily submit to others. Even if they like working, he says, they should sometimes be forced to stop. If indulged, their early propensities become dissipation, levity, and inconstancy; so above all, teach them to restrain themselves. And then he delivers the bleak punchline: by our absurd institutions, the life of a modest woman is a perpetual conflict with herself—though, he adds, it’s only fair that women share in the sufferings that arise from the evils they’ve caused men.

Why should a “modest” woman’s life be a perpetual inner battle? My answer is straightforward: this very education creates that war. Modesty, temperance, and self-denial are steady children of reason. But when you cultivate sensibility and neglect the understanding, you end up with fragile people who must be controlled by arbitrary force and kept in constant struggle. Give the mind more room to move, and higher motives and nobler passions will begin to govern appetite and feeling.

Rousseau then claims that a mother will be loved by her children through ordinary attachment—or even mere habit—if she does nothing to earn their hatred. He adds that even the constraints she imposes, if directed well, will increase their affection, because dependence is “natural” to women, and they feel they were made for obedience.

That’s simply assuming what he needs to prove. Servitude doesn’t just degrade the individual; its effects seem to echo into the next generation. After so many ages of dependence, is it surprising that some women cling to their chains and fawn like a spaniel? A naturalist remarks that some dogs once held their ears upright, but custom overruled nature and what began as a sign of fear was turned into a beauty. The parallel is hard to miss.

Rousseau adds: for the same reason, women have—or ought to have—little liberty, and they tend to overindulge in whatever freedom they’re given. They go to extremes, he says, and are even more carried away in their amusements than boys.

The answer is not complicated. Slaves and mobs have always behaved the same way when suddenly released from control. A bow held bent snaps back violently the moment the hand lets go. If sensibility is treated as a toy of circumstances—pulled tight by external restraint and never steadied by inner judgment—then of course it either must be ruled by authority or else brought under the guidance of reason.

Rousseau goes on: this habitual restraint produces a kind of tractability women will need all their lives, since they’re always under men or under “public opinion,” and never allowed to rise above it. Therefore, he says, the first and most important quality in a woman is sweetness of temper. Because she is formed to obey man—“so imperfect,” often vicious, always faulty—she must learn early to endure injustice and bear a husband’s insults without complaint. This mildness, he claims, benefits her, not him; and a woman’s ill nature only worsens her misery and encourages her husband’s misconduct. Besides, he says, harshness isn’t how women gain “superiority.”

If women are going to live with men who are imperfect, then yes—using your mind teaches you the value of patience. But demanding blind obedience violates the sacred rights of humanity, as if those rights belonged only to men.

Someone trained to swallow injustice and accept insults in silence will either become unjust herself or lose the ability to tell right from wrong. And I also challenge Rousseau’s claim that this is how you improve temper. As a sex, men generally have better tempers than women—not because men are born better, but because men are occupied with pursuits that engage the head as well as the heart. A steady mind steadies the emotions. People who are highly “sensitive” rarely have good tempers. A good temper is usually built by the calm labor of reason, which, as life goes on, learns to blend discordant elements with quiet skill.

I’ve never known a weak or ignorant person with a truly good temper—though a certain natural good humor, and the docility that fear stamps onto behavior, often gets mislabeled as one. I emphasize behavior, because genuine meekness doesn’t reach the heart or the mind unless reflection produces it. And many sensible men will admit that mere restraint breeds all sorts of unhealthy irritations at home; those “gentle” but touchy companions can be exhausting.

Rousseau argues further that each sex should keep its own tone. A meek husband, he says, may produce an impertinent wife; but a woman’s mildness will always bring a man back to reason—unless he’s an outright brute—and in the end will triumph over him.

Perhaps the mildness of reason can sometimes do that. But abject fear only invites contempt. And tears are treated as eloquent only when they happen to fall down a pretty face.

What kind of heart is moved by someone who, while being insulted, melts—who, instead of resisting injustice, kisses the rod? Is it unfair to suspect that a woman’s virtue is built on narrow, self-serving calculations if she can caress a man with “feminine softness” the very moment he treats her like a tyrant? Nature never required that kind of insincerity. If we decide that prudence rooted in performance and falsehood counts as “virtue,” then morality becomes foggy the instant we allow any part of it to rest on deception. These are only tricks for the moment—and tricks are useful only for the moment.

Let husbands not kid themselves into thinking this kind of “sweet” obedience is automatically a virtue. If a wife can soothe him with charming gentleness when he’s angry—and even when she should be angry, except that contempt has smothered her perfectly normal spark—then she can use that same performance elsewhere. Today it’s a tactic for keeping the peace at home; tomorrow it can be the same tactic after an affair. This whole training in pleasing, appeasing, and never openly resisting is basically a warm-up routine for adultery. And even if fear—of gossip, of punishment, of hell—keeps her from chasing other men once she can no longer hold her husband’s attention, what is she supposed to do instead? If society has shaped her for one job only—to please men—where does she go when that job disappears? What “new work” can she even imagine, let alone begin, when her habits are set and vanity has been running her mind for years like a sloppy, chaotic government?

And then comes the truly astonishing move: this so-called moral teacher calmly, even elegantly, recommends cunning—not as an unfortunate habit to correct, but as a strategy to cultivate.

He says daughters should always submit, though mothers shouldn’t be cruel about enforcing it. He insists you shouldn’t make a girl miserable just to make her “manageable,” and you shouldn’t make her stupid in the name of “modesty.” Fine. But then he pivots: he wouldn’t mind letting a girl use “a little art”—not to dodge punishment after disobeying, but to avoid having to obey in the first place. Don’t make dependence unbearable, he says; just make sure she feels dependent. And then he delivers the principle that gives the whole game away: subtlety is natural to women, and since “natural inclinations” are supposedly good, we should cultivate it—just try to prevent “abuse.”

That’s not morality. That’s training someone to navigate life by manipulation because you’ve denied her honest power.

He then triumphantly quotes the slogan, “Whatever is, is right.” Sure—if you mean it the way it applies to God, who sees the whole picture at once. But human beings don’t see the whole; we see fragments. Things look wrong because, from where we stand, they often are wrong. And it’s part of what’s “right” about the human role that we try to fix what seems wrong—while still respecting the limits of our knowledge and the larger order we can’t fully grasp.

From that “whatever is, is right” starting point, he builds the next claim: women’s “superior address”—their social smoothness, their ability to manage impressions—is a fair compensation for their lesser physical strength. Without it, he says, women couldn’t be men’s companions; they’d be their slaves. So, according to him, women preserve equality by governing men while pretending to obey. He paints women as having everything against them—men’s faults as well as women’s “timidity and weakness”—and having only two advantages: subtlety and beauty. Therefore, he concludes, it’s perfectly reasonable that women should train both.

But notice what this creates. If “address” and “cunning” are simply polished words for insincerity and deceit, then you’re teaching half the human race to live by rules that aren’t grounded in truth. And if a person must be educated by principles that can’t be honestly deduced from truth, then what you’re calling “virtue” isn’t virtue at all—it’s convention, a social costume.

How, after giving advice like this, could Rousseau still claim that the ultimate purpose of life is the same for both sexes? He knows perfectly well that the mind becomes the shape of its pursuits. When you train someone for large aims, the mind expands; it learns to swallow the small concerns that once dominated it. When you train someone for small aims, the mind shrinks to match. You don’t just limit what a person does—you manufacture a smaller person.

Yes, men tend to have greater physical strength. But if we weren’t trapped by warped ideas of beauty—ideas that keep women fragile on purpose—women would gain enough strength to earn their own living, which is the real definition of independence. They’d also be better able to endure the ordinary discomforts and effort that toughen the body and, through the body, strengthen the mind.

So let girls run, climb, play, and train the way boys do—not only as toddlers, but throughout youth—so we can finally see how far men’s “natural superiority” actually goes, once we stop sabotaging women at the starting line. Because what kind of reason or virtue can you expect from a human being when the seed-time of life—when habits, confidence, and capability are planted—is neglected? None. Unless, by sheer luck, life scatters a few useful seeds onto that neglected ground.

And the irony is sharp. Beauty isn’t something you can sew onto a body with clothes. And coquetry—the practiced art of flirting—isn’t something a child masters overnight. Yet from early on, girls are taught to study performance: graceful gestures, pleasing voice, an easy, flattering manner, the skill of arranging looks and posture to suit the moment. So their education shouldn’t be chained only to “industry” and the needle, because they’re plainly being prepared to display a different set of “talents” whose purpose is already obvious.

In fact, I’d have a young Englishwoman cultivate those pleasing skills to attract her future husband with the same intense discipline that a young Circassian was expected to cultivate hers to suit an Eastern pasha’s harem.

And to make women thoroughly insignificant, he adds another layer. Women, he says, talk more—earlier, faster, more pleasantly—and instead of treating that as a fault, he wants to turn it into a compliment. Their lips and eyes are lively for the same reason, he suggests. Men talk about what they know; women talk about what pleases. Men’s conversation should aim at what’s useful; women’s should aim at what’s agreeable. The only thing he allows them to share is truth.

So he advises: don’t hush little girls the way you hush little boys with, “Why are you talking?” Ask instead, “How will what you say be received?” And while they’re still too young to judge right from wrong, teach them a rule: never say anything that might displease the people they’re speaking to—while also insisting they must never lie.

Just sit with that for a moment. To speak in a way that never offends and never lies requires constant calculation—social gymnastics—a kind of “address” so demanding that it all but guarantees artificiality. And yes, men do it too. Very few people speak from the “abundance of the heart.” I love plainness enough that I’d trade a great deal of what passes for politeness for even a fraction of the virtue people have sacrificed to it—because at its best, “polish” should be only the finishing shine on virtue, not a substitute for it.

But to finish the portrait, he goes further.

He claims that if boys can’t yet form real ideas about religion, then those ideas must be even more beyond girls—so, for that very reason, he says you should start talking to girls about religion earlier. Otherwise, if you wait until they can discuss such deep questions methodically, you risk never speaking to them about it at all.

And then he lays down his theory in plain terms: women’s reason, he says, is practical—good at cleverly finding means to reach a known end, but incapable of discovering the end itself. The sexes, in his view, form a “moral person” together: woman is the eyes, man is the hand. But the dependence is lopsided—woman must learn from man what she is to see, and man must learn from woman what he ought to do. If woman could reason from first principles like man, and man could attend to details like woman, each independent of the other, he claims they’d live in constant conflict and society couldn’t hold together. In the “natural harmony,” he says, their different faculties aim at one shared goal; each moves the other, each obeys, and both somehow rule.

From there he draws the political conclusion: because a woman’s behavior is governed by public opinion, her religion should be governed by authority. Every daughter should have her mother’s religion; every wife her husband’s. Even if that religion is false, he says, the docility that makes women submit to “the order of nature” removes guilt in God’s eyes. Since women can’t judge for themselves, they should accept the decisions of fathers and husbands as confidently as they accept the church’s.

And because authority is supposed to regulate women’s religion, he argues it’s less important to explain reasons than to state precisely what they must believe. A creed that offers only obscure notions, he warns, breeds fanaticism; one that contains absurdities pushes people toward unbelief.

So we’re told that “absolute authority” must exist somewhere—and conveniently, it ends up as a direct, exclusive ownership of reason by men. That’s how “the rights of humanity” have been restricted to the male line for centuries. Rousseau even hints he wouldn’t blame people who want women kept in deep ignorance—if ignorance weren’t sometimes inconvenient. To protect chastity and make a man’s choice look respectable, he says women need just enough knowledge of men and of social customs shaped by passion. Otherwise, a woman might reproduce at home while still remaining, in his mind, voluptuous and “innocent,” because her understanding hadn’t been exercised—except, perhaps, during the first year of marriage, when she might use her mind to dress like Sophia.

And the description he celebrates is grotesque: Sophia’s clothing looks modest, he says, yet is secretly coquettish. She doesn’t openly display her charms; she hides them—but does it in a way that inflames the imagination. Everyone will call her modest and discreet, yet anyone close to her will feel their eyes and feelings roaming over her, unable to look away, as if every “simple” detail were arranged to be undressed by the imagination.

Is that modesty? Is that an education aimed at immortality?

Worse still, he praises a standard that makes the soul secondary: for his heroine, he says, doing things well is only a second concern; her main concern is doing them neatly. In truth, everything about her is treated as secondary. Even in religion, her parents effectively say: you’re trained to submit, so don’t worry—“your husband will teach you in good time.”

After cramping a woman’s mind—after keeping it “fair” by keeping it nearly blank—he advises her to “reflect,” so that a reflective man won’t yawn when he’s tired of kissing and cuddling her. But what is she supposed to reflect on if her role is obedience? And isn’t it an extra cruelty to open her mind just enough to let her clearly see the darkness and misery of her fate?

Still, these are his “sensible” remarks. The reader can judge how well they fit with the earlier claims I’ve had to quote simply to present the argument honestly.

He then makes an observation about laboring people: those who spend their whole lives earning daily bread often think only within their trade or interest; their understanding seems to live in their fingertips. And that kind of ignorance, he says, doesn’t necessarily harm their integrity or morals—sometimes it even helps them. Reflection can sometimes tempt us into bargaining with duty, swapping real moral action for a fog of fancy phrases. Conscience, he says, is the most enlightened philosopher. You don’t have to study Cicero to be an honest man, and perhaps the most virtuous woman may know least about the formal definition of virtue.

And yet, he admits, a society is only truly enjoyable when understanding is improved. It’s a sad thing, he notes, for a father who loves home to be forced to live locked inside his own head, with no one around him to share thoughts and feelings with.

Which raises the obvious question: how could a woman with no habit of reflection educate her children? How would she know what fits them, what they need, what kind of character to form? How could she guide them toward virtues she doesn’t understand, or toward merit she can’t even imagine? At best she can soothe or scold. She may raise them to be insolent or timid; she can turn them into polished little fools or ignorant brutes. But she will never make them genuinely sensible or truly lovable.

And how could she—if her husband isn’t always present to “lend her” his reason, since together they supposedly make one moral being? A blind will—“eyes without hands”—won’t get far. Meanwhile his “abstract reason,” which is supposed to focus and organize her scattered “practical reason,” may be busy judging wine, lecturing about sauces, or concentrating intensely at a card table—“generalizing” as he gambles away his fortune—while the minute-by-minute work of educating children is left to his wife, or to chance.

But even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that a woman must be beautiful, innocent, and foolish to be a more tempting, indulgent companion—what, then, is her understanding being sacrificed for? And why does Rousseau’s system, by his own account, make all this preparation necessary only to give her the upper hand over her husband’s desire for a short time? No one insists more than he does that love is temporary.

He says it outright: sensual pleasures fade. Habit dulls affection when you feed it without restraint. The imagination that dressed up the beloved object collapses in possession. Apart from the Supreme Being, nothing is beautiful except what is ideal.

And then he slides back into paradox, addressing Sophia like this: Emilius, as your husband, is your master and demands obedience—that’s “the order of nature.” But if he marries a woman like Sophia, he should be guided by her—that’s also “the order of nature.” So, he says, he has given her authority over his heart to balance the authority his sex gives him over her body, making her the manager of his pleasures. It may require self-denial, but she can keep her empire over him if she first keeps empire over herself. Want him always at your feet? Keep him at some distance. You can preserve power in love, he claims, if you make your favors rare and valuable. That way you can even enlist coquetry in the service of virtue, and use the arts of love in the service of reason.

He closes with what he calls a picture of a comfortable couple: even with careful management, passion dulls over time. When love lasts as long as it can, a pleasant habit replaces it, and mutual confidence takes the place of dramatic rapture. Children, he adds, often create a more durable bond between spouses than love itself. When you stop being Emilius’s mistress, you’ll still be his wife and friend—you’ll be the mother of his children.

Yes—children do create a more lasting connection than romance. And if beauty won’t even be noticed after six months, and artificial graces and coquetry quickly become boring, why insist that a girl must be educated for her husband with the same meticulous care as for a harem?

So I’m done with the fantasies and the polished, “refined” libertinism. I appeal to plain human sense: if the purpose of education is to prepare women to be chaste wives and sensible mothers, is this really the best method? Is the surest way to make a wife chaste to train her in the provocative arts of a mistress—rebranded as “virtuous coquetry” by a man who can no longer enjoy sincerity, or feel the quiet pleasure of a tender intimacy where trust isn’t throttled by suspicion and made meaningful by understanding?

Any man who can be satisfied with a pretty, useful companion who has no mind has dulled his taste with cheap pleasures; he’s never known the calm satisfaction that cools a scorched heart—like silent dew—of being loved by someone who can truly understand him. With such a wife, he is still alone—except in the moments when he stops being fully human and sinks into the brute.

“The charm of life,” as one sober-minded philosopher puts it, is sympathy—nothing delights us more than recognizing our own feelings reflected in someone else.

And yet, the kind of reasoning used to keep women away from the “tree of knowledge” demands a brutal trade: women’s most formative years, their usefulness in maturity, even their sane hopes for the future, all get offered up so they can stay desirable for a brief season. On that logic alone, Rousseau’s project collapses. How did he expect women to be virtuous and faithful if he wouldn’t let reason be the foundation of their virtue, or truth the goal of their inquiries?

At the same time, most of Rousseau’s mistakes came from a trait people found easy to forgive in him—his intense responsiveness to feeling. Women, especially, were quick to pardon “sensibility” when it was sensibility to their charm. But it muddled his thinking. Whenever he should have argued, he got swept up. Instead of using reflection to clarify his judgment, he used it like lighter fluid on his imagination.

Even his virtues helped push him off course. Rousseau was born with a hot temperament and a vivid fancy; nature pulled him hard toward women, and he quickly became sexually restless. If he’d simply indulged those urges, they might have burned themselves out in the ordinary way. But he paired moral restraint with a romantic delicacy, and practiced self-denial. The result was predictable: when fear, virtue, or “delicacy” blocked action, he fed the desire in his mind instead. He brooded on the sensations his imagination amplified, painted them in the brightest colors, and pressed them deep into his inner life.

So when Rousseau went looking for solitude, it wasn’t to nap like some rustic “man of nature,” or to do patient inquiry in the spirit of Newton under a shady tree. He went to feel. And because he described what he felt with such heat and skill, he pulled his readers along with him: he grips the heart and sets the imagination on fire. The stronger the reader’s fancy, the more they mistake sympathy for proof—as though they’ve been convinced, when really they’ve only been emotionally carried by a poetic writer who knows exactly how to display sensual objects—luxuriously softened, tastefully veiled. The danger is obvious: we feel while dreaming we’re reasoning, and the wrong conclusions settle into the mind.

Why was Rousseau’s life split between ecstasy and misery? Because the same boiling imagination produced both. If his fancy had been allowed to cool, he might have gained real steadiness of mind. Still, if life’s purpose is to educate the intellect, then in one sense everything about him was “right”—his struggles were a kind of training. But if death hadn’t opened, as the author hopes, a nobler stage of action, he probably would’ve had a calmer, more even happiness here on earth. Instead of tasting the quiet satisfactions of the “man of nature,” he prepared himself for another life by constantly feeding the passions that torment the civilized one.

But let his memory rest. I’m not fighting the man’s remains—I’m fighting his ideas. I’m fighting the sensibility that led him to degrade women by turning them into slaves of love.

Curs’d vassalage,
First idoliz’d till love’s hot fire be o’er,
Then slaves to those who courted us before.
—Dryden

The harmful effect of books that flatter women while quietly humiliating them—books that bow before their looks and, in the same breath, shrink their minds—can’t be exposed too often or too sharply.

So, friends and contemporaries: let’s climb out of these cramped prejudices. If wisdom matters for its own sake, and if virtue deserves the name only when it’s built on knowledge, then the task is clear. We should strengthen our minds through reflection until our heads can counterbalance our hearts. We shouldn’t spend all our attention on the tiny dramas of the day, or reduce our “knowledge” to reading the moods of lovers and husbands. Every duty matters, but it should serve the larger one: improving our minds, and preparing our affections for a higher, steadier state.

So be careful—don’t let your heart get yanked around by every trivial event. A reed trembles at the lightest breeze and dies each year. An oak stands its ground and faces storms for centuries.

And if we were truly made for nothing more than a brief fluttering life—if we’re here to sparkle for an hour and vanish—then sure: indulge sensibility and laugh at reason’s sternness. But even then, we’d still need strength of body and mind. Without it, life gets wasted either in feverish pleasures or in exhausted boredom.

The education system I want to see destroyed rests on a dangerous assumption: that virtue shields you from life’s random blows, and that fortune will finally pull off her blindfold, smile on the “properly educated” woman, and deliver her—like a prize—an Emilius or a Telemachus. In reality, the “reward” virtue promises is largely internal. It lives in your own conscience and self-respect. And even then, you’ll often have to wrestle with draining practical worries and endure the vices and moods of relatives you can’t possibly befriend.

Plenty of women have had to do exactly that. Instead of being supported by the reason and virtue of fathers or brothers, they’ve had to strengthen themselves by struggling against those men’s vices and foolishness. And still, they never “meet a hero” in the form of a husband who repays some imagined debt to womankind by returning them to a “natural” dependence and restoring to men the stolen right to rise above public opinion.

SECT. II

Dr. Fordyce’s sermons have been a staple in young women’s libraries for ages; schoolgirls are even allowed to read them. But if my goal were to strengthen a student’s understanding—help her build principles on a broad foundation—I’d remove them immediately. Even if I cared only about cultivating her taste, I still wouldn’t put those sermons in her hands, though I’ll admit they contain many sensible remarks.

Fordyce may have meant well. But he writes in such an affected, syrupy style that, even if that were my only objection, I wouldn’t let girls read him—unless my plan was to chase every spark of nature out of them, dissolving every human quality into “female meekness” and a polished, artificial grace. Artificial, because real grace grows out of some degree of independence of mind.

You can see something like grace in children, who aren’t trying to impress anyone and only want to enjoy themselves. And you can see an easy elegance in nobles who’ve long been surrounded by inferiors and have always had money at hand. But that’s really a practiced ease of body—habit, posture, social training—not the deeper grace that comes from the mind.

That mental grace—often invisible to ordinary eyes—can flash across a rough face. It can light up every feature and reveal simplicity and independence. In those moments, you read something enduring in a person’s gaze; you see a soul in every gesture. And yet, when the body is still, the face and limbs may have no special beauty at all, and the manners may have nothing unusual to catch public attention.

Most people prefer a more obvious, touchable kind of beauty. Still, they often admire simplicity without really noticing what they’re admiring. And can there be simplicity without sincerity?

But to leave these side-notes—natural as the subject makes them—let’s return. In his grand, declaiming periods, Fordyce stretches Rousseau’s eloquence into long ribbons. In full sentimental rant, he repeats Rousseau’s views about “female character” and the performance women must adopt to be considered lovable.

He can speak for himself. Here is how he makes “Nature” address men:

Behold these smiling innocents, whom I have graced with my fairest gifts, and committed to your protection; behold them with love and respect; treat them with tenderness and honour. They are timid and want to be defended. They are frail; O do not take advantage of their weakness! Let their fears and blushes endear them. Let their confidence in you never be abused. But is it possible, that any of you can be such barbarians, so supremely wicked, as to abuse it? Can you find in your hearts to despoil the gentle, trusting creatures of their treasure, or do anything to strip them of their native robe of virtue? Cursed be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of Chastity! Thou wretch! thou ruffian! forbear; nor venture to provoke heaven’s fiercest vengeance.

I don’t know what serious comment you can even make on a passage like that—and I could quote plenty of similar ones. Some are so drenched in sentimentality that I’ve heard sensible men call them indecent when they mention them, disgusted.

What runs through the whole work is a display of cold, manufactured feeling, along with a showy “sensibility” that boys and girls should be trained to despise as the sure mark of a small and vain mind. It’s all flowery appeals to heaven and to the “beauteous innocents,” the fairest images of heaven on earth—while plain sense is left far behind. This isn’t the language of the heart, and it will never reach the heart, even if it tickles the ear.

Someone will say, of course, that the public has liked these volumes. True. And Hervey’s Meditations are still read, though they offend sense and taste in exactly the same way.

My sharpest objection is to the lover-ish phrases of inflated passion scattered everywhere. If women are ever going to walk without leading-strings, why must they be coaxed into virtue with flirtatious flattery and sexual compliments? Speak to them in the language of truth and seriousness, and throw away these lullabies of condescending endearment. Teach women to respect themselves as rational creatures, not to become infatuated with their own bland “adorable” image.

It makes me sick to hear a preacher lecture women about dress and needlework—and even more sick to hear him address “the British fair, the fairest of the fair,” as if women were made of feelings and nothing else.

Even when he recommends piety, he uses this argument:

Never, perhaps, does a fine woman strike more deeply, than when, composed into pious recollection, and possessed with the noblest considerations, she assumes, without knowing it, superior dignity and new graces; so that the beauties of holiness seem to radiate about her, and the bystanders are almost induced to fancy her already worshipping amongst her kindred angels!

Why raise women to crave conquest? The very word, used this way, turns my stomach. Do religion and virtue offer no stronger reasons, no brighter reward? Must they always be cheapened by making women think first about the sex of the people around them? Must women always be trained to be pleasing?

And when they’re encouraged to aim their “small artillery” at men’s hearts, is it really necessary to tell them that a tiny amount of sense is enough to be “incredibly soothing”? He even says:

As a small degree of knowledge entertains in a woman, so from a woman, though for a different reason, a small expression of kindness delights, particularly if she have beauty!

I would’ve thought it was for the same reason.

And why tell girls they resemble angels—except to push them beneath women? They’re told a “gentle innocent female” comes closer to our idea of angels than anything else on earth. But they’re also told they’re only angel-like when they’re young and beautiful. So it’s not their virtues earning the homage; it’s their bodies.

Empty, idle words. What can that kind of flattering illusion produce except vanity and foolishness?

Yes, a lover has poetic license to elevate the woman he adores. Passion makes his reason bubbly and unreliable; and when he speaks in the language of worship, he doesn’t even feel he’s lying. His imagination can, without blame, lift the idol of his heart above humanity. And women would be far better off if they were only flattered by the men who loved them—meaning, men who love the individual, not the sex.

But should a grave preacher stitch that nonsense into sermons?

In sermons and in novels, though, sensuality is always consistent with itself. Moralists allow men to develop different qualities and take on different temperaments, as nature directs, because passions—modified endlessly—shape each individual differently. A virtuous man may be hot-tempered or easy-going; cheerful or solemn; firm to the point of being overbearing, or so submissive he has no will or opinion of his own—and no one scolds him for failing the “male model.”

But women? Women are flattened into a single approved personality: meek, docile, yielding—softness and gentle compliance as the only acceptable character.

Listen to the preacher again:

Let it be observed, that in your sex manly exercises are never graceful; that in them a tone and figure, as well as an air and deportment, of the masculine kind, are always forbidding; and that men of sensibility desire in every woman soft features, and a flowing voice, a form, not robust, and demeanour delicate and gentle.

And then comes this portrait. Isn’t it the portrait of a house slave?

I am astonished at the folly of many women, who are still reproaching their husbands for leaving them alone, for preferring this or that company to theirs, for treating them with this and the other mark of disregard or indifference; when, to speak the truth, they have themselves in a great measure to blame. Not that I would justify the men in anything wrong on their part. But had you behaved to them with more respectful observance, and a more equal tenderness; studying their humours, overlooking their mistakes, submitting to their opinions in matters indifferent, passing by little instances of unevenness, caprice, or passion, giving soft answers to hasty words, complaining as seldom as possible, and making it your daily care to relieve their anxieties and prevent their wishes, to enliven the hour of dullness, and call up the ideas of felicity: had you pursued this conduct, I doubt not but you would have maintained and even increased their esteem, so far as to have secured every degree of influence that could conduce to their virtue, or your mutual satisfaction; and your house might at this day have been the abode of domestic bliss.

A woman like that would have to be an angel—or else a fool. I see no trace of a human being in this domestic drudge: no reason, no passion, no selfhood at all. Her entire existence is absorbed into a tyrant’s.

And if Fordyce truly believed this behavior would bring back a wandering husband’s love, then he understands the human heart very poorly. No. Beauty, gentleness, and the rest may win someone’s attention at first. But esteem—the only affection that lasts—can be earned only by virtue supported by reason. It’s respect for a person’s understanding that keeps tenderness for their body alive.

These volumes are handed to young people so often that I’ve spent more time on them than they deserve. But they’ve helped corrupt taste and weaken understanding in many of my fellow creatures, so I can’t let them pass without notice.

SECT. III

Dr. Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters is so full of a father’s anxious care that I begin criticizing it with genuine, affectionate respect. And because this small book has so much to recommend it to the most respectable women, I can’t quietly ignore the arguments it offers—arguments that, under a polished surface, support opinions that have had, in my view, the most damaging effects on women’s morals and manners.

His easy, familiar tone fits his advice well, and the gentle melancholy that runs through the book—shaped by his love for a lost wife—makes it deeply moving. Still, now and then, a tight, elegant concision snaps that feeling. You bump into “the author” when you expected to find only “the father.”

There’s another problem. Because he’s trying to do two things at once, he rarely holds steady to either. He wants to make his daughters lovable. But he also fears that encouraging stronger sentiments might only make them unhappy—by drawing them out of the ordinary track of life without giving them the independence and dignity to live differently. So he interrupts his own thinking and ends up advising neither path with clarity.

In his preface he tells them a bleak truth: that at least once in their lives they will hear “the genuine sentiments of a man who has no interest in deceiving them.”

Unhappy woman—what can you be expected to become, if the very people you’re told you “naturally” depend on for reason and support all have an interest in deceiving you?

That’s the root of the evil. It’s what has laid a corrosive mildew over women’s virtues—blighting their abilities at the bud, and turning them into the weak thing they’re said to be. This separate interest—this quiet, ongoing warfare—undermines morality and splits humanity against itself.

If love has made some women miserable, how many more have been made vain and useless by the cold, empty theater of gallantry? That heartless attentiveness to “the sex” is praised as manly and polite, and until society is organized very differently, I’m afraid this leftover of gothic manners won’t be replaced by a more reasonable, affectionate way of living.

Besides—and this is important if we want to puncture its fake “nobility”—this kind of polite lip-service to women often thrives most in the rougher corners of Europe, right alongside shockingly loose morals. Take Portugal, the country I have in mind: there, this showy respect can outrank the most serious moral duties. A man, for example, is rarely murdered when he’s walking with a woman. The robber’s “heroic” impulse suddenly goes soft. And even when revenge can’t be stopped, the attacker will still beg the lady to forgive the discourtesy and let her leave in peace—sometimes literally spattered with her husband’s or brother’s blood.

I’ll skip the author’s jabs at religion, because I plan to deal with that in a separate chapter.

As for his advice on “good behavior”: plenty of it is sensible, but I reject the whole approach because it starts at the wrong end. If you build a well-trained mind and a warm, principled heart, you won’t need stiff, rehearsed etiquette rules. Something sturdier than “seemliness” will naturally show up in your conduct. Without understanding, the manners he recommends are just performance—a kind of polished fake.

And that, really, is the obsession: decorum as the one thing that matters. Decorum is supposed to replace nature, drive out simplicity, and iron every woman into the same approved shape. But what good can that kind of surface coaching actually do? It’s always easier to prescribe a pose—say this, don’t do that—than to teach someone to think. Yet once the mind is stocked with useful knowledge and strengthened by real work, you can safely let it govern behavior on its own.

So why, for example, give advice like this—when artifice of every kind corrodes the mind? Why tangle the deepest motives for action—those that reason and religion both support—with petty social tricks meant to impress an audience of gawking fools?

• “Be cautious in showing your good sense.”
• “People will think you’re acting superior.”
• “And if you have any learning, hide it—especially from men, who usually watch an intelligent woman with jealousy and spite.”

But if (as he later admits) men of genuine worth rise above that pettiness, why should all women be trained to please fools—or to cater to men who, lacking real individual merit, huddle together in a proud little formation and claim importance through the group? Men who insist on their “natural” superiority when their only claim is that they’re male are, in a bleak way, at least easy to explain.

If you make “fit the room” the rule for everything, you’ll never finish writing the rules. The moment you’re always adjusting your tone to match the company, a wrong note will start passing for the real melody.

Wouldn’t it be wiser to tell women to improve themselves until they rise above the fog of vanity—and then let public opinion catch up? Because where, exactly, do these “rules of accommodation” end? Truth and virtue don’t lean right or left; they go straight ahead. And someone genuinely walking that road can clear a lot of “proper” prejudices in a single bound without losing modesty. Clean up the heart, give the mind real work, and I’ll wager there’s nothing offensive left in the behavior.

That glossy “air of fashion” that so many young people chase always reminds me of modern paintings that copy antique poses with dutiful bad taste: you get the posture, but you lose the soul. Nothing holds the parts together into what you could honestly call character. Fashion’s varnish rarely sticks tightly to good sense. It may sparkle to the weak, but if you let nature breathe, it won’t disgust the person who actually has to live with you. And if a woman has enough sense not to pretend she understands what she doesn’t, then there’s no need for her to hide her abilities like contraband. Let things develop naturally, and they usually settle where they should.

What I can’t stand—because it runs through the whole book—is this worship of dissimulation. Women are always instructed to seem this, appear that. But virtue could say to them, with Hamlet’s disgust: “Seems! I know not seems!—Have that within which passes show!”

The same note returns again and again. In one place, after advising women to keep a careful kind of “delicacy” (without really explaining what that means), he adds, in effect:

Men will complain that you’re too reserved. They’ll say you’d be more lovable if you were franker. Don’t believe them—they’re not sincere. Yes, on some occasions frankness might make you more enjoyable as a companion, but it would make you less lovable as a woman—a crucial difference many women don’t recognize.

This demand that women must always be, above all else, women—as a role, a posture, a constant self-awareness—is exactly what drags them down. Outside of romance (and I’ll repeat this deliberately), it would be far better if women were simply pleasant, rational companions. And in this respect, his advice even clashes with a passage of his that I plan to quote with real approval.

He warns that the idea “a woman may allow any innocent familiarity, as long as her virtue is safe” is grossly improper and dangerous—and has ruined many women. On that point, I agree completely. Anyone with real feeling—man or woman—wants the person they love to know this: it’s not “the sex” they respond to, but the individual. It’s the heart that answers, not the senses alone. Without that natural delicacy, love collapses into selfish gratification, and it quickly degrades character.

In fact, I’d take the point even further. When romantic love isn’t involved, simple affection can justify many small endearments—gestures that flow naturally from an innocent heart and give warmth to behavior. But the kind of intimate contact driven by appetite, flirtation-as-sport, or vanity is contemptible. If a man squeezes the hand of a pretty woman while helping her into a carriage—someone he’s never even met—any woman with real delicacy will read that “freedom” as an insult, not a compliment. Those familiar privileges belong to friendship, or to the brief, spontaneous reverence the heart sometimes pays to virtue when it suddenly shines into view. Raw animal spirits have no right to the tenderness of affection.

I want the affections to be fed with better food than vanity. And I’d love to persuade my sex to act from simpler principles: deserve love, and you’ll get it—even if no one flatters you with lines like, “A beautiful woman has more power over the hearts of men, even the finest men, than she can imagine.”

I’ve already pointed out his cramped warnings about duplicity, “female softness,” and fragile constitutions—those notes he plays on repeat. He’s more polite about it than Rousseau, sure. But the melody is the same, and anyone who bothers to analyze it will find the foundation far less “delicate” than the refined language built on top.

He treats the topic of amusements too quickly, but with the same spirit.

When I eventually talk about friendship, love, and marriage, it will be clear we disagree in major ways. I won’t steal my own thunder here. For now, I’m only marking the general tone: that anxious, cautious “family prudence”; that cramped, half-lit version of affection that tries to block out pain and mistake so completely it also blocks out joy and growth—and, in guarding the heart and mind, drains them of energy. It’s better to be fooled sometimes than never to trust; better to be disappointed in love than never to love; better to lose a husband’s infatuation than to lose his respect.

Imagine how much better off the world—and individual people—would be if all this futile worry about squeezing “happiness” out of a narrow plan were redirected into a determined effort to strengthen the mind. “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding.” And again: “How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity, and hate knowledge?” That is what Wisdom says to the daughters of men.

SECT. IV

I’m not going to march through every writer who has preached at women about “manners.” That would just be re-plowing the same field, because most of them sing the same tune. But since I’m challenging the loudly advertised prerogative of man—the prerogative that deserves to be called the iron scepter of tyranny, the original sin of tyrants—I’m declaring war on every form of power built on prejudice, no matter how ancient it looks.

If the submission being demanded rests on justice, there’s nowhere higher to appeal—because God is Justice itself. So then, as children of the same parent (unless we’re treated like illegitimate offspring just for being born later), let’s reason together and learn to submit to the authority of reason, whenever her voice is clearly heard. But if it’s proven that this “throne of prerogative” sits only on a chaotic heap of prejudices—held together by no real principle of order, or propped up by some absurd myth like an elephant on a tortoise, or the giant shoulders of a son of the earth—then anyone brave enough to face the consequences may step away without betraying duty or sinning against the true order of things.

Reason lifts human beings above the brute herd, and death itself carries promises. Only those who don’t trust their own strength remain subject to blind authority. They are free—who will be free.

A person who can govern themselves has nothing to fear in life. But if anything matters more to them than their own self-respect, they will end up paying for it—down to the last penny. Virtue, like anything truly valuable, has to be loved for her own sake. Otherwise she won’t live with us. She won’t give that peace “which passeth understanding” when we use her as a set of stilts for reputation—when we “respect” her with Pharisaical precision only because we’ve decided “honesty is the best policy.”

No one can deny that the kind of life that carries knowledge and virtue into another world is also the best for producing contentment in this one. And yet almost no one lives by that principle, even though everyone admits it’s true. Today’s pleasure, today’s power—those sweep aside our sober convictions. We bargain with happiness for the day, not for life. How few—how very few—have the foresight or the resolve to endure a small hardship now to avoid a greater one later.

Women in particular, whose “virtue” is too often built on shifting prejudices, rarely reach this strength of mind. So they become slaves to their own feelings—and easy targets for the feelings of others. And once degraded, their reason—hazy, fogged-over reason—is used not to break the chain, but to polish it.

I’ve heard women, with indignation, argue exactly like men—adopting the very opinions that degrade them, with all the stubbornness that ignorance can muster.

Let me make the point with a few examples. Mrs. Piozzi, who often recited what she didn’t actually understand, marches forward in long, Johnson-style sentences:

“Don’t seek happiness by being singular; and fear a refined wisdom, because it can slide into folly.”

That’s how she lectures a newly married man. And to “explain” this grand opening, she adds:

She told him his wife would not grow more pleasing over time—but she begged him never to let his wife suspect she was becoming less pleasing. A woman, she claims, will forgive an insult to her intelligence sooner than an insult to her looks. And she says all women will agree. All our accomplishments, all our “arts,” she insists, are aimed at winning and keeping a man’s heart. And what humiliation could be worse than failing at that? There is no scolding sharp enough, no punishment severe enough, that a spirited woman wouldn’t prefer to being neglected. And if she endures neglect without complaint, it only proves she plans to compensate herself by seeking attention elsewhere—because of her husband’s slights.

Those are, frankly, masculine sentiments in the worst sense. “All our arts are employed to gain and keep the heart of man”—and what follows from that? If her looks are neglected (and has there ever been a person—no matter how perfectly formed—who was never neglected?), she’ll “make amends” by trying to please other men. What a noble moral lesson.

This is how the understanding of an entire sex gets insulted, and how “virtue” is stripped of the common foundation that makes virtue real. A woman has to know that her appearance cannot be as exciting to her husband as it was to her lover. If she’s offended because he’s human, she might as well whine about losing his heart as about any other foolish loss. And that very lack of judgment—this unreasonable anger—shows that he couldn’t transform physical fascination into affection for her virtues or respect for her mind.

As long as women openly accept and live by these ideas, their minds at least deserve the contempt and ridicule that men—men who carefully avoid insulting women’s looks—aim at the female intellect. And it’s exactly the opinions of these “polite” men, who don’t want to be burdened by a woman’s mind, that vain women absorb without thinking. Yet they should understand this: only respected reason can create that sacred reserve around the body that keeps affection honorable. Human love always has some base mixture in it; the best we can do is make it as lasting as it can be, consistent with the greatest purpose of life—the pursuit of virtue.

The Baroness de Staël says essentially the same thing as Mrs. Piozzi, only with more passion. By chance, her praise of Rousseau came into my hands, and since her feelings—sadly—echo those of far too many women, I’ll use them as a text for a few remarks. She argues that although Rousseau tried to keep women from public life and political brilliance, he still spoke of women in a way that delighted them: if he took away certain rights “unsuited” to their sex, he supposedly restored the ones they truly deserved; if he tried to reduce their influence in men’s public deliberations, he supposedly established their “empire” over men’s happiness; if he helped them step down from a stolen throne, he seated them firmly on the throne nature meant for them; and though he scolds women for trying to resemble men, he nearly adores them when they appear before him with the charms, weaknesses, virtues, and errors of their sex.

True—if by “respect” you mean the worship of a sensualist at the altar of beauty. No sensualist ever offered more fervent devotion. His “respect” for women’s bodies was so intense that—aside from insisting on chastity for obvious reasons—he mainly wanted those bodies decorated with charm, weakness, and error. He feared that the sharpness of reason would interrupt love’s soft playfulness. What he wanted was a flattering slave: dependent on his judgment and generosity. He did not want a companion he’d have to esteem, or a friend he could trust with the education of his children if death took him before he could complete that sacred duty. He denies women reason, bars them from knowledge, steers them away from truth—yet he’s excused because “he admits love.”

It takes real mental gymnastics to see why women should feel indebted to him for “admitting” love, when it’s clear he admits it as men’s relaxation and as a means of reproduction. But he spoke with passion, and that spell worked on a young admirer’s sensibility. “What does it matter,” she continues, “if his reason disputes their empire, when his heart is devotedly theirs?” But women should not be fighting for empire. They should be fighting for equality. And even if they did want to stretch out their reign, they shouldn’t stake everything on looks. Beauty can win a heart, but it can’t hold it—not even at its peak—unless the mind contributes at least some grace of its own.

Once women become enlightened enough to see their real interest on a larger scale, I’m convinced they’ll gladly give up every so-called “prerogative of love” that isn’t mutual—at least as a permanent privilege—in exchange for the calm satisfaction of friendship and the tender trust of habitual respect. Before marriage they won’t put on arrogant airs; after marriage they won’t submit like servants. Acting like reasonable beings in both situations, they won’t be tossed from a throne to a footstool.

Madame Genlis has written several genuinely entertaining books for children, and her Letters on Education contain many useful hints that sensible parents will certainly use. But her outlook is narrow, and her prejudices are as strong as they are unreasonable.

I’m going to skip her heated defense of eternal punishment. The fact that anyone can argue passionately for endless suffering is, frankly, embarrassing to contemplate. What I do want to flag is something else she does over and over: she tries to replace reason with parental authority—and then doubles down by demanding submission not just to parents, but to whatever “the world” happens to think.

She even offers a little morality tale to prove her point. A father pressures his son into an engagement with a wealthy young woman. Before they can marry, the woman loses her fortune and is left alone in the world. The father then uses every dirty trick he can think of to break them apart. When the son discovers the scheme and—guided by plain honor—marries her anyway, the story supposedly ends in nothing but misery, because he married without his father’s consent. Think about what that implies. If “right” and “wrong” turn on whether a parent approved, then what foundation is left for religion or morality once justice is treated as optional?

She pushes the same message with a different example: an “accomplished” young woman who’s ready to marry anyone her mother recommends—and who can even marry the man she personally chooses without feeling any real passion, because a properly educated girl supposedly “doesn’t have time” to fall in love. How can anyone respect an educational system that insults both human nature and common sense so openly?

To be fair, her books aren’t all bad. Mixed in with the nonsense are thoughts that genuinely honor her intelligence and her character. But her religion is tangled up with superstition, and her morality is laced with social calculation. I wouldn’t put her work in the hands of a young reader unless I could talk it through with them afterward—slow down, examine the claims, and point out the contradictions.

A Word of Respect Where It’s Earned

Mrs. Chapone’s Letters are different. They’re sensible, modest without being performative, and packed with practical observations. I don’t agree with her on every point, but I can’t help respecting her—and I mention her mainly to pay that respect.

And speaking of respect: the word inevitably brings Mrs. Macaulay to mind—without question, the most intellectually gifted woman this country has produced. Yet she was allowed to die with nowhere near the regard her life and work deserved.

Posterity will be fairer. People will remember Catharine Macaulay as living proof that the kind of intellectual achievement society likes to call “unfeminine” has nothing to do with sex at all. Her writing doesn’t “sound” male or female; it sounds like what it is: strong, lucid thought.

I won’t insult her by calling her mind “masculine,” as though reason belongs to men by default. Her understanding was simply sound. Her judgment—hardened and ripened by deep thinking—showed that a woman can possess judgment in the fullest sense of the word. She had more penetration than cautious shrewdness, more understanding than decorative imagination. She wrote with controlled force and tight argument. And yet there’s sympathy in her work, a real benevolence that gives warmth to her reasoning and makes you feel, as you read, that you have to take her arguments seriously.

When I first planned to write these critiques, I imagined earning Mrs. Macaulay’s approval—with a little of that hopeful intensity I’ve spent much of my life trying to temper. Then I heard she was gone, and the news hit with the sick drop of disappointed hope, followed by a quieter, steadier sorrow.

The Trap of “Knowing the World” Too Soon

Looking across the books that claim to teach “education,” I can’t pass over Lord Chesterfield’s Letters in silence. I’m not going to dissect his petty, immoral system, or even cherry-pick the clever little observations scattered through his pages. My point is simpler: to reflect on their openly stated goal—training young people in the art of acquiring an early “knowledge of the world.”

That “art,” I’m willing to argue, works like a worm inside a bud. It quietly eats away at developing powers and turns what should become generous feeling and bold resolve into something sour.

Yes, someone will say, “Everything has its season—why look for autumn fruit in spring?” Fine. But that’s just rhetoric. Let’s reason it out. These worldly-wise instructors don’t cultivate judgment; they plant prejudices. They don’t prepare the heart; they harden it—long before ordinary experience would have cooled it naturally.

In my view, an early introduction to human weakness—what people proudly call “knowing the world”—is the surest way to shrink the heart and smother the natural fire of youth. And that fire doesn’t only produce talent; it produces virtue. Trying to squeeze “experience” out of a person before their mind has even leafed out is like forcing fruit from a sapling: you exhaust the plant and keep it from growing into its natural shape. It’s also like disturbing a metal while it’s still settling; you ruin the structure by interfering with the forces that give it strength.

Tell me—if you’ve actually studied the human mind—what a strange way this is to “fix principles”: teaching young people, from the start, that principles are rarely stable. How are habits supposed to strengthen character when every example you offer is designed to prove that habits are unreliable? This dry caution might shield someone from a few worldly mishaps, but it will also shut the door on excellence in knowledge and virtue alike. When suspicion becomes the obstacle thrown across every path, it blocks vigorous effort, whether the effort comes from genius or from kindness. Life loses its most compelling charm long before its calm evening—long before a person should be retiring into reflection for comfort and support.

A young man raised among domestic friends—fed by books, yes, but also by the natural thoughts and feelings that come with youthful energy—will enter the wider world with warm, mistaken expectations. But that’s nature’s course. In morals and in matters of taste, we should pay attention to nature’s signals, not assume we’re wise enough to lead when we ought to follow.

Here’s what happens if you do the opposite. In the world, most people don’t act from principle; they act from immediate feelings and early habits. But imagine how quickly those feelings would be dulled—and those habits turned into rusty, corroding chains—if you showed the world to young people “exactly as it is” before they had slowly gained knowledge of others (and of themselves) through experience. Instead of seeing their fellow creatures as fragile beings like themselves—struggling, inconsistent, sometimes admirable, sometimes disappointing—they would treat people as predators to be guarded against. And in the process, every broad social feeling—everything we call humanity—would be cut out by the root.

Real life works differently. As we gradually learn what’s imperfect in human nature, we also discover virtues. We become attached to people through shared circumstances—through living alongside them, seeing the same objects, enduring the same days. That kind of bond never forms when you pursue a hurried, artificial “knowledge of the world.” With time, we watch a small folly slowly swell into a vice. We blame, but we also pity. If, instead, the “monster” of vice is shoved suddenly into a young person’s face in its most hideous form, fear and disgust can make them harsher than any human being ought to be. They may even slide into a kind of righteous frenzy—acting as though they can read hearts, pronouncing damnation on others, and forgetting that the seeds of the same vices lie hidden in themselves.

That’s the core problem with so much “instruction”: we expect it to do what instruction alone can’t do. Instead of preparing young people to meet life’s difficulties with dignity—and to build wisdom and virtue by exercising their own minds—we bury them in rule after rule and demand blind obedience, precisely where conviction should be made to take root in reason.

Why Disappointed Hope Can Be a Gift

Take a simple case. Suppose a young person, in the first blaze of friendship, practically worships the friend they love. What real harm comes from that kind of mistaken enthusiasm? It may even be necessary. Perhaps, at first, virtue has to appear in a human face to make any impression on a young heart; the more abstract ideal that a mature mind can imagine and pursue would simply be invisible to them. After all: if you can’t love the person you’ve actually seen, how will you love the God you haven’t?

It’s natural for youth to decorate the first object of affection with every imagined excellence. And the striving that comes from inexperience brings the mind forward—it calls out the ability to love in that way. Later, when time teaches that perfection isn’t available to mortals, virtue itself—virtue in the abstract—starts to look beautiful, and wisdom starts to look sublime. Admiration then settles into real friendship, the kind bonded by esteem. The person can stand more alone—depending on heaven for that restless, honorable hunger for perfection that glows in a noble mind.

But that shift can’t be handed down like a rule. A person has to earn it by using their own faculties. And this, surely, is the blessed harvest of disappointed hope. The God who loves to spread happiness and show mercy to weak creatures learning to know Him didn’t plant good impulses in us just to torment us like a cruel will-o’-the-wisp.

We’ve learned to let trees spread with wild, natural fullness. We don’t try to force them to look ancient and stately while they’re still young; we wait until their roots run deep and they’ve endured storms. Should the mind—which moves more slowly toward perfection precisely because it’s more dignified—be treated with less patience and respect?

Look around: everything develops progressively. When a hard knowledge of life produces something close to boredom with life—when, by the natural course of things, we come to see how much human striving is vanity—we’re already nearing the last act of the drama. The days of hopeful exertion are fading, and the first-stage opportunities to rise in intelligence are almost over. Knowledge of life at that point—if it comes naturally through experience—can be useful. But when a fragile being is shown human folly and vice early, not to deepen understanding but to teach “prudence” by forcing them to sacrifice their heart, that deserves its proper name: the so-called wisdom of this world, set against the far nobler fruits of piety and lived experience.

If We Were Only Mortal…

Let me risk a paradox and speak plainly. If human beings were born only to make a neat circle from life to death—if that were the whole story—then it would be rational to use every ounce of foresight to make life comfortable. Moderation would be the highest wisdom. A cautious pleasure-seeker could secure a kind of contentment without ever training the mind or purifying the heart. In that purely mortal scenario, prudence really would be wisdom: it would maximize happiness across the span of life. And knowledge beyond what makes life convenient might even feel like a curse.

Why ruin your health with intense study? The elevated pleasure of intellectual pursuits might not repay the sluggish hours that follow—especially if you add in the doubts and disappointments that often darken inquiry. So many investigations end in vanity and irritation. The answer you want most keeps retreating, like the horizon: the farther you walk, the farther it moves. The ignorant, by contrast, are like children who think that if they just keep going straight, they’ll eventually reach the place where the clouds touch the earth.

And yet—even when our research disappoints us—the mind gains strength from the effort. Perhaps it gains enough strength to comprehend answers it may receive in some later stage of existence: answers to the questions it asked when its understanding, with weak wings, fluttered around visible effects, trying to dive down to the hidden cause.

The same goes for the passions—the winds that drive life. If our “thinking substance,” after all our vain thought, only became compost for plant life—if it simply ended up feeding a cabbage or tinting a rose—then the passions would be pointless, even harmful. Simple appetites would do the job. They could supply every earthly purpose and probably deliver a steadier, calmer happiness.

But the very fact that we possess powers of soul that seem underused here—and that sometimes disrupt our animal pleasures even as our sense of dignity makes us proud of them—suggests that life is an education, a kind of infancy. And that means the only hopes worth cherishing shouldn’t be traded away for comfort.

So we ought to be precise about what we want education to accomplish. Many people loudly profess belief in the soul’s immortality, yet live in ways that contradict it.

If your real aim is ease and prosperity in this world, and you want the future to fend for itself, then yes—you will act “prudently” by giving your child an early, unsparing look at the weaknesses of human nature. You may not turn him into a cold-hearted exploiter, but don’t expect someone who learned, very early, to think poorly of humanity to cling to more than the bare letter of the law. He won’t feel any need to rise far above the common standard. He may avoid obvious vices because “honesty pays,” but he won’t stretch toward great virtues. You can see the same pattern in writers and artists: early cynicism rarely produces grandeur.

That’s why I doubt a popular “moral axiom”—the claim, handed down dogmatically by people who have studied humankind too calmly through books—that controlling the passions is always wisdom. I’ll say the opposite: one reason men often show more judgment and fortitude than women is that they’ve been allowed a freer range for the major passions. They go wrong more often—and by going wrong, they enlarge their minds. If, later, they use their own reason to settle on a stable principle, they may owe that steadiness to the very force of passions that were once fed by false views of life and allowed to leap beyond the boundary of comfortable contentment. But if, at the dawn of life, we could see everything in perfect perspective—everything in its true colors—how would the passions ever grow strong enough to unfold our faculties?

A Cold, Clear Look at the World

Let me, then, step back—as if from a height—and look at the world stripped of its glittering illusions. The air is clear; my heart is still. I’m calm, like a landscape at dawn when the mist slowly lifts and reveals the refreshed beauty of nature.

And now—what does the world look like?

I rub my eyes, half-convinced I’m waking from a vivid dream. I see men and women chasing shadows, anxiously wasting their strength to feed passions that have no adequate object. And yet, if the very excess of these blind impulses—pampered by that lying but constantly trusted guide, the imagination—didn’t prepare them for some other state, short-sighted mortals might never become wiser at all, even while they’re convinced they’re pursuing some immediate good.

Seen this way, it’s not too fanciful to imagine the world as a stage where a daily pantomime is performed for the amusement of higher beings. What a show it would be: the ambitious man burning himself out in pursuit of a phantom, running after the bubble called fame even into the mouth of danger—only to be blown into nothing. And once consciousness ends, what difference does it make whether we rise in a whirlwind or fall in rain? If those spectators kindly sharpened his vision and showed him the thorny path to “eminence”—a path that turns out to be like quicksand, sinking under his feet as he climbs, disappointing him just when he thinks he’s about to grasp his prize—wouldn’t he step aside and let others entertain them, choosing instead to secure the present moment? And yet, given how we’re built, how hard it is to catch that running stream. We’re such slaves to hope and fear.

Still, empty as ambition often is, it isn’t always chasing mere fame—and fame really is the thinnest of meteors, the wildest false light a person could follow to ruin. What—give up even the smallest pleasure today just to be applauded when you’re no longer alive? Why struggle at all, whether we’re mortal or immortal, if that powerful passion didn’t genuinely lift a person above the crowd?

And then love. What scenes it would produce—no stage clown could compete. To watch a human being paint an ordinary person with imaginary charms, then bow down and worship the idol they themselves constructed—how ridiculous!

Wouldn’t life’s goals be met far better if a man felt what people call physical love—plain attraction—rather than the inflated, romantic fever he’s been “indubitably promised”? And wouldn’t the mere sight of the beloved, seen without imagination’s soft-focus filter, quickly shrink that so-called passion down to appetite—unless reflection, that distinctly human power, stepped in to give it weight? Reflection can turn desire into something larger: a force that lifts us above the mud of mere craving by teaching us to love what the author calls the center of perfection. As our reason brightens through contemplation, we read wisdom more clearly in nature itself, and we start to feel a love of order—an inner steadiness that often gets forged in the very struggle with our passions.

Here’s the surprising point: even when the object of a passion turns out to be mistaken or illusory, the habit of reflecting that passion provokes—and the knowledge gained while pursuing it—can still be genuinely valuable. In a sense, our passions aren’t just accidents. They’re magnified in our minds by a governing drive planted in us (the author credits the “Author of all good”) to awaken and strengthen our faculties. We learn the way infants learn: by doing, again and again, without being able to explain why. The lesson comes through action and effort, not through neat explanations.

And yet—come down from lofty philosophy into ordinary life, and you feel how little purely rational clarity controls the current. Mix with other people and you’re swept into the common stream where ambition, love, hope, and fear do what they always do, even when reason tells us their most dazzling promises are often just flattering dreams. But imagine if “cold circumspection” smothered every generous feeling before it could leave a mark—before it could harden into a habit or shape a character. What would you get? Not wisdom. You’d get selfish prudence—a kind of calculating caution that barely rises above instinct.

Anyone who reads Swift’s grotesque portrait of the Yahoos and his bland, chilly ideal of the Houyhnhnms with a truly philosophical eye can see the problem: when you degrade the passions—or treat contentment as the goal—you drain life of what makes human excellence possible.

That’s why the young should act. If a teenager had the experience of an old person, he’d be better prepared for death than for life. His “virtues” would sit in his head more than his heart, and he wouldn’t produce anything great. Worse, his understanding—trained only to manage this world—would never launch those bold flights that hint we’re made for something better.

There’s another hard truth: you can’t hand a young person a fully accurate view of life. They have to wrestle with their own desires before they can measure the pull of a temptation that dragged someone else into vice. People entering life and people leaving it stand on opposite hillsides; they see the same world from different angles. They rarely agree—unless the young person’s reason never even tries a first solo flight.

Think about how we react to crime. When we hear about a daring, shocking wrongdoing, it hits us in the darkest light and sparks outrage. But someone who watched the darkness thicken step by step—who saw the slow drift into it—often looks on with more compassionate restraint. You can’t understand the world as an untouched spectator. You have to move through the crowd, feel what people feel, and only then can you judge their feelings fairly.

If our goal is to live in the world in order to grow wiser and better—not just to enjoy its comforts—then we have to learn about others while we’re learning about ourselves. Knowledge gathered any other way tends to do two ugly things at once: it hardens the heart and confuses the mind.

Of course someone will object: this kind of knowledge is sometimes bought at too high a price. The author’s reply is blunt: he doubts any real knowledge comes without labor and sorrow. Parents who try to spare their children both can’t complain if their children end up neither wise nor virtuous. What those parents really aimed for was “prudence”—and early-life prudence is often nothing more than the cautious cleverness of ignorant self-love.

He adds an observation from experience: young people whose education has received intense, special attention often turn out superficial and conceited, and not especially pleasant. They’ve lost the open warmth of youth, but they haven’t gained the cool depth of age. The likely culprit is premature instruction—the kind that pushes them to repeat half-digested ideas they accepted on authority. That “careful education” can make them lifelong slaves to prejudice.

Why does that happen so easily? Because mental exertion—like physical exertion—feels unpleasant at first. Most people would rather let others do the thinking and working for them. You can see it in social life. In a group of strangers or acquaintances, when someone with only moderate ability insists on an opinion with heated certainty, the author is willing to bet it’s a prejudice. These people are echoes. They admire the intellect of a friend or relative, and without fully understanding what they’re repeating, they defend it with a stubbornness that would surprise even the person who originally cooked up the idea.

There’s even a fashionable habit, he says, of treating prejudices as respectable. Challenge them—out of humanity and armed with reason—and you get sneered at: Were your ancestors fools? His answer would be: no. Most opinions, when they first appeared, were probably considered and grounded in some reason. But often they were local fixes rather than timeless principles. Over time, these “moss-covered” opinions swell into oversized prejudices when people adopt them lazily just because age makes them look venerable, even though the original reason has vanished or can’t be traced.

So why love prejudices just because they’re old? A prejudice is a stubborn conviction we can’t justify. The moment you can give a reason for an opinion, it stops being a prejudice—though it might still be an error. Are we really being told to cherish beliefs precisely so we can defy reason? This style of “argument,” he says sharply, resembles what people mock as a “woman’s reason”: sometimes women say they love or believe something simply because they love or believe it—no further explanation allowed.

Try having a serious conversation with people who only trade in yeses and nos. You can’t get anywhere until you rewind to the simpler principles that existed before power promoted certain prejudices. And even then, you’re likely to be blocked by a slippery claim: that some principles are “abstractly true” but “practically false.” In fact, the author suggests, their reason has probably started whispering doubts. That’s why people often argue hottest when they’re beginning to wobble. They try to shout down their own uncertainty by “winning” the argument—and they get angry when you toss their doubts back at them, where they can’t ignore them.

All of this leads to a bigger conclusion: people expect education to deliver what it simply can’t. A wise parent or tutor can strengthen the body and sharpen the tools the child will use to gather knowledge. But the honey—the real understanding—has to be earned by the person’s own effort. Trying to make a young person wise by someone else’s experience is about as absurd as expecting a body to grow strong from workouts that are only discussed or watched.

That’s why many tightly supervised children become weak adults. Their instructors “instill” notions with no foundation except authority. If the authority figure is loved or respected, the child’s mind becomes cramped—hesitant in its efforts, timid in its progress. Education, in that case, should be more like guiding a vine toward a support: you don’t force the growth; you direct it. But when parents pile rule on rule without letting a child develop judgment, they still expect the child to act in life as if those borrowed lessons were self-made illumination—and to be, at the beginning of adulthood, what the parents are at the end of theirs. They forget something basic: a tree, and even the human body, doesn’t strengthen its fibers until it reaches full growth.

The mind has an analogous development. In childhood and youth, the senses and the imagination shape the character’s first form. As life goes on, the understanding firms up those early, bright aims of sensibility—until virtue, grounded more in the clear convictions of reason than in the heart’s impulses, rests on rock. Then the storms of passion can beat against it without knocking it down.

He’s careful about religion here, too. Don’t misunderstand him, he says: religion won’t have this “condensing” power—this ability to solidify character—unless it’s founded on reason. If religion is only a refuge for weakness or a burst of fanatic emotion, and not a governing principle drawn from self-knowledge and a rational view of God’s attributes, what can it produce? Religion that merely warms the feelings and inflames the imagination is the poetic side of religion. It may give private pleasure without making a person more moral. It can even replace worldly pursuits—yet still narrow the heart instead of enlarging it.

If you want real excellence, you have to love virtue as something inherently sublime and worthy, not because of the benefits it brings or the disasters it helps you avoid. People don’t become moral by building airy castles in a future world to make up for disappointments in this one, especially if religious daydreaming distracts them from their real, everyday duties.

Finally, he turns to the practical “wisdom” that ruins so many lives: the shuffling attempt to serve two masters at once. Men forget they can’t serve God and money, and they try to blend contradictions. If you want to make your son rich, follow one path. If you truly want to make him virtuous, you have to take another. But don’t pretend you can hop from one road to the other without losing your way.

6

How Early Associations Shape Character

Women are raised in the softening, “don’t-strain-yourself” style of education I’ve been criticizing. And because their lower position in society rarely gives them a later chance to catch up, people then look around and conclude: women must be some kind of natural mistake. But why would that be surprising? If you take seriously how powerfully early associations shape a person’s character, it makes perfect sense that many women end up neglecting their minds and pouring their attention into their appearance—because that’s what their world has trained them to do.

To see why education matters so much, start with how the mind connects ideas. Those connections happen in two main ways:

• Habitual association: the long-term linking of ideas that becomes automatic through repetition and upbringing.
• Instantaneous association: the sudden spark—one idea lighting up another in a flash.

That second kind often has less to do with willpower than with a person’s native mental “temperature”—their natural quickness, intensity, and style of thought. Once you’ve absorbed facts and ideas, they don’t vanish. They sit in the mind like stored tools until some random event triggers them, and suddenly a piece of information from years ago shoots forward with surprising force and explains what you’re seeing now. Many memories arrive like lightning: one thought snaps into place, clarifies another, and the whole picture lights up at once.

I’m not talking about that mysterious, almost uncanny “instant” grasp of truth that feels so intuitive you can’t tell whether it came from careful reasoning or from something half-remembered. It moves too fast to track. The mind cuts through the darkness, and afterward you can’t reconstruct the steps.

And here’s the catch: we have limited control over these sudden associations. Once a mind has been stretched by wide-ranging exploration or deep reflection, its raw materials begin to organize themselves to some extent. Understanding can keep our thinking from going completely off the rails—it can help us compose our thoughts with some discipline, or keep our imagination from turning a lively sketch into nonsense. But temperament—your “animal spirits,” your individual character—supplies the color. That subtle inner electricity is hard to command, and reason has only so much power over it.

In fact, those untamable energies often are what we call genius. In a great mind, they produce that exhilarating ability to connect ideas in ways that surprise, delight, and teach. The gifted writer doesn’t just think vividly; they project vividness outward. They concentrate images for the rest of us, forcing us to notice—with real interest—things we normally pass by without seeing, because their imagination reflects the world back to us with heat and intensity.

Let me be clear about what I mean. Most people don’t see the world “poetically.” They don’t have much fancy, so they run from solitude and chase outward stimulation instead—noise, company, novelty—anything tangible to occupy them. But when an author lends them his eyes, they can suddenly see what he saw. They can enjoy images they never would’ve chosen on their own, even when those images were sitting in plain view the whole time.

Education, then, doesn’t create genius. At best, it supplies a gifted person with knowledge—more material, more contrast, more variety—to enrich the associations their mind already knows how to make.

But there’s another kind of association that matters even more for most of us: the habitual association of ideas that grows with us as we grow. This is the slow-built network of assumptions and emotional reflexes that forms early and quietly shapes a person’s moral character. It gives the mind a “set”—a tilt—that usually lasts for life.

The understanding is strangely both flexible and stubborn. During the years when the body is maturing, the mind is especially impressionable; yet the associations formed then—often by accident, by surroundings, by what’s praised and punished—are incredibly hard to untangle later by pure reasoning. One idea calls up its old partner, and memory, loyal to first impressions, repeats them with almost mechanical precision—especially when the intellect isn’t being used to cool and examine our feelings.

This bondage to first impressions harms women more than men. Why? Because men’s business and practical work—those dry demands on the mind—tend to blunt excessive feeling and, over time, break associations that clash with reason. But girls are pushed into “womanhood” while they’re still children, and then, when they should be leaving childishness behind forever, society drags them back into it. They don’t get the mental strength needed to scrape away the artificial layers that have smothered their natural development.

In that environment, everything they see or hear strengthens a particular kind of training: impressions that call up emotions and link ideas in a way that stamps the mind with a narrowly sexual character. False ideals of beauty and “delicacy” don’t just shape taste; they shape bodies—stunting healthy growth and producing sickliness, not genuine refinement. And once a person is weakened like that—trained to endlessly unfold and indulge feelings rather than examine them—how are they supposed to develop the vigor needed to throw off this manufactured identity? Where do they find the strength to return to reason, and rise above a system of oppression that ruins the bright promises of youth?

Worse, the training reinforces itself the moment young women begin to act with even a little independence. They quickly notice that, in the world as it is, pleasure and power are most easily gained by skillfully stirring emotion in men. And the books written “for their instruction”—the very texts that make the earliest, deepest impressions—teach the same lesson over and over. So after raising women in a bondage worse than Egypt’s, it’s both cruel and irrational to scold them for faults that are nearly unavoidable—unless you assume an extraordinary natural strength that only a few human beings, of any sex, ever receive.

Take a common complaint: people mock women for repeating “phrases learned by rote.” But what could be more predictable, given an education where their highest praised virtue is unthinking obedience to men? If women aren’t allowed enough reason to govern their own conduct, then of course what they learn will be memorized, not understood. And if all their ingenuity is called out to perfect dress and appearance, then a “passion for a scarlet coat”—for the flashy uniform, the glittering symbol—shouldn’t surprise anyone. Even if you accept the cynical claim that “every woman is at heart a rake,” why condemn women for seeking a spirit that matches their own experience, and for preferring a rake to a sensible man?

Rakes know how to play directly on cultivated sensibility. The quieter worth of a reasonable man often moves them less, because he appeals through understanding—and women have been trained to share so little common ground with him in that realm.

It’s absurd to demand that women be more rational than men in their attractions while denying them the free use of reason. When do men fall in love with sense? When do they, with all their advantages, turn from the body to the mind? And how can they expect women—trained to watch behavior, polish manners, and collect social graces rather than develop morals—to suddenly despise the very traits they’ve spent their whole lives trying to perfect?

Where, overnight, are women supposed to find the judgment to patiently value the solid worth of an awkward but virtuous man—especially when his manners are rough (the very area they’ve been taught to judge sharply) and his conversation feels cold because it lacks the sparkling compliments and polished banter they’ve been trained to enjoy? To admire anything for long, curiosity has to be engaged. We have to understand, at least in part, what we admire. We can’t truly value virtues that lie beyond our comprehension.

A certain kind of reverent respect can be lofty, and humility can make a dependent person seem interesting in some lights. But human love is not made of pure air. It needs more ordinary ingredients. And the body—naturally—claims a large share.

Love is, to a great extent, arbitrary. It often rules by its own authority and doesn’t bother to consult reason. You can also tell love from esteem (the basis of friendship) because love can be sparked by fleeting beauty and grace. Still, if love is going to have real force, something firmer has to deepen the impression and set the imagination to work—turning “the most pleasing” into “the best.”

Ordinary passions are stirred by ordinary qualities. Men often look for beauty and a docile, smiling good humor. Women are often captivated by ease—smooth manners, the air of a gentleman. Politeness whispers “insinuating nothings,” and many women—trained for exactly this—drink them in, while turning away from the harsher, less musical voice of reason, no matter how wisely it speaks.

When it comes to superficial accomplishments, the rake has the edge. And women can judge those accomplishments because society has made that their territory. Raised to be lively and light-minded by the whole drift of their lives, they naturally experience wisdom’s severe face, and virtue’s stern grace, as gloomy and restrictive. So they recoil—and so does love, that playful child, which hates restraint.

Without real taste (and true taste grows out of judgment), how could they recognize that genuine beauty and grace come from the movement of the mind? And how can they be expected to relish in a lover what they don’t possess themselves, or possess only faintly? The sympathy that draws hearts into confidence is so weak in such circumstances that it doesn’t catch fire and rise into passion. No—love in minds shaped this way must feed on coarser fuel.

So the conclusion is straightforward: until women are encouraged to use their minds, they shouldn’t be mocked for being drawn to rakes—or even for having “rake-like” impulses—when that attraction is the predictable outcome of their education. Those who are trained to live for pleasing will naturally seek happiness in pleasure. And the old, simple truth still holds: we rarely do anything well unless we love it for its own sake.

Now imagine—just for a moment—that in some future social change women became what I earnestly wish them to be. Love itself would gain a more serious dignity. It would be purified by its own fire. With virtue giving real delicacy to their affections, women would turn away from the rake with disgust.

Reasoning as well as feeling (since feeling has been made almost their only permitted realm), they could more easily guard themselves against mere outward charm. They would learn to despise the kind of overworked, worn-out “sensibility” that is trained and traded among women whose profession is vice—along with its practiced allurements and calculated airs. They would remember, too, that the passion they hoped to awaken in such men had often been burned down by lust; and that once an appetite is sated, it loses any taste for simple pleasures and can only be stirred again by new varieties or more shameless tricks. What deep satisfaction could a woman of genuine delicacy promise herself in a bond with a man like that, when her very artlessness might seem dull to him?

As a poet put it:

Where love is duty, on the female side,
On theirs mere sensual gust, and sought with surly pride.

But there’s a larger truth women still need to learn—and it matters enough that their lives should follow it. When choosing a husband, they shouldn’t be led astray by the glittering traits of a lover—because even a wise and virtuous husband cannot remain “the lover” for long.

If women were educated more rationally—if they could take a wider view—they might be content to love deeply once, and after marriage let passion settle into friendship: a tender intimacy that shelters life from its burdens, built on quiet, pure affection, where idle jealousy doesn’t interrupt the steady duties of ordinary living or consume the mind.

Many men live this way. Very few women do. And you don’t need to invoke any mysterious “sexual nature” to explain the difference. Women have been taught that men—the beings they’re told they were made for—should occupy their thoughts. That training tangles love into nearly every motive they have. And because women have been employed almost entirely in preparing to inspire love—or in actively practicing how to do it—they feel they can’t live without it.

So when duty or fear of shame forces them to restrain this pampered desire to please (too far for delicacy, perhaps, but not into real crime), they stubbornly decide to keep up the passion—yes, the theatrical passion—for their husbands forever. Then, by insisting on playing the part they foolishly demanded from their lovers, they sink into abject courting and servile dependence.

Men of wit and fancy are often rakes, and fancy is love’s fuel. These men ignite passion. Half the women in their current childish condition would pine for a Lovelace: witty, graceful, brave. And can you blame them for acting on principles that society drills into them every day? They want a lover and protector—and there he is, kneeling: courage laid at the feet of beauty.

Meanwhile, the steady virtues of a husband fade into the background. Bright hopes and lively emotions chase away reflection until the reckoning arrives—and it will arrive. The sprightly lover turns into the surly, suspicious tyrant who later insults the weakness he himself encouraged. Or, even if the rake reforms, he can’t quickly shed old habits. When a man of talent first gives himself up to passion, sentiment and taste often paint over vice’s ugliness, giving brutal indulgence a seductive shine. But when novelty wears off and pleasure grows stale, lust becomes blunt and shameless, and “enjoyment” turns into a desperate attempt to escape reflection—as if reflection were a swarm of demons.

Virtue is not an empty word. It gives everything life can truly give.

And if you can’t expect much comfort from the friendship of a reformed rake with real ability, what happens when the rake has neither sense nor principle? Misery, in its ugliest form. When weak people’s habits harden with time, real change is barely possible. And even when it happens, it often makes them miserable, because they don’t have enough mind to be satisfied by innocent pleasures. Like a tradesman who retires from the rush of business, they look around and find only a blank world. Their restless thoughts gnaw at their dulled spirits. Reform, like retirement, becomes wretched—not because virtue harms, but because it extinguishes the hopes and fears that used to keep their sluggish minds moving.

If habit is that strong—if folly binds that tightly—then we should guard the mind carefully against storing up corrupt associations. And we should be just as careful to cultivate the understanding, so that no one is left in the weak, dependent state of even “harmless” ignorance. Because only the right use of reason makes us independent of everything—except that clear, unclouded Reason “whose service is perfect freedom.”

7

Modesty, properly understood (not a “sexual virtue”)

Modesty—the real kind—is one of those qualities people praise without ever stopping to define. It’s the gentle blend of feeling and reason that rounds off sharp edges in a personality. It softens wisdom so it doesn’t turn into cold superiority. It gives the highest virtues a human warmth. And it puts a light veil around love—not to hide it, but to make it more tender and more meaningful.

That’s the modesty I want to talk about, because if we can describe it clearly, maybe I can help wake women from the decorative, half-asleep life they’ve been trained to accept.

Two different things we call “modesty”

When you pay attention to how ideas get linked in the mind, you notice that one word can end up doing two jobs. Modesty is one of those words. It’s especially important to separate:

• Purity of mind—the inward delicacy that supports chastity.
• Self-knowledge with dignity—a steady, honest sense of your own worth, without vanity and without arrogant overreach.

In this second sense, modesty isn’t about thinking poorly of yourself. It’s about thinking accurately about yourself. It teaches a person not to inflate their importance—but it doesn’t require them to deny their strength or their dignity.

That’s why modesty is not the same thing as humility. Humility often slides into self-abasement—a habit of shrinking. Modesty doesn’t shrink; it stays grounded.

Modesty isn’t timidity—and it can coexist with greatness

A modest person can form a large plan and pursue it stubbornly, because they understand their own abilities and won’t be shaken by other people’s doubts. Only after success does the world decide to call that steadiness “character.”

This is why it’s nonsense to treat modesty as the opposite of confidence. Milton wasn’t “arrogant” when he let slip a judgment that later proved prophetic. Washington wasn’t immodest when he accepted command of the American forces. People call him modest—and rightly. But if he’d merely been humble in the sense of self-distrusting, he might have stepped back, uncertain and afraid to carry a responsibility on which so much depended.

From watching many temperaments, I’ve come to this rough rule:

• A modest person is steady.
• A humble person is often timid.
• A vain person is presumptuous.

In that spirit: Christ was modest, Moses was humble, and Peter vain.

Modesty vs. bashfulness: don’t confuse them

Just as modesty isn’t humility, it also isn’t bashfulness. Bashfulness is so different from modesty that the most shy girl—or the most awkward country boy—can, with a little time and habit, become shockingly bold. Why? Because bashfulness is often just the instinctive fear that comes from ignorance. Once the person learns the social script, that fear can flip into brazen confidence.

Look at the prostitutes who fill the streets of a great city. They don’t merely ignore the bashfulness we associate with virginity—they stomp on it with a kind of swagger, and some even seem to take pride in their own shame. They can become more aggressively obscene than many depraved men, who were never granted the “female virtue” people love to talk about.

But here’s the point that matters: these women didn’t lose modesty when they fell into infamy, because modesty isn’t a built-in “sexual quality.” Modesty is a virtue, not a reflex. What they had was often only bashful innocence—a shamefacedness that disappears once innocence is gone. If a true virtue had been sacrificed to passion, it would have left traces in the mind—something that made the ruin itself command a tragic respect.

Purity of mind is a cultivated virtue, not ignorance in a pretty dress

The purity of mind that genuinely supports chastity is closely related to a refined humanity—and you rarely find it except in cultivated minds. It’s something higher than innocence. It’s delicacy born of reflection, not the coyness of someone who simply doesn’t know very much yet.

You can tell the difference between:

• the reserve of reason (like habitual cleanliness of the soul), and
• rustic shyness, or flirtatious skittishness.

And far from being threatened by knowledge, this rational reserve is one of knowledge’s finest results.

Which makes a certain kind of “female delicacy” argument look absurd. Consider the remark about whether women can study modern botany without damaging their modesty—and the smug conclusion: They cannot. As if the book of knowledge should be shut forever in a woman’s face.

Reading things like that, I can’t help but ask: has God—by the very design of a woman’s nature—forbidden His child to seek Him through truth? Can her soul really be stained by the kind of knowledge that lifts her attention to the divine?

Following this line of thought, I’ve come to believe that the women who most improve their reason will also have the most modesty, even if a dignified calm later replaces the playful, charming bashfulness of youth.

How to make chastity a virtue (instead of a performance)

If we want chastity to be a real virtue—so that honest, unforced modesty grows naturally from it—then we have to stop training women’s attention on occupations that merely excite sensibility. The goal is to tune the heart to humanity, not to keep it vibrating mainly for romance.

A woman who spends serious time on intellectual pursuits, and whose affections are exercised through plans of usefulness, will—almost inevitably—develop more purity of mind than someone whose days are filled with entertainments and strategies for “winning hearts.”

That’s why rule-following behavior isn’t modesty, even though society loves to label women “modest” when they obey a code of decorum. If you want modesty, you don’t start by choreographing manners. You start by cleansing the inner life:

• Make the heart generous—able to feel for all that is human, not narrowed by selfish passions.
• Give the mind subjects that strengthen understanding without overheating imagination.

Then artless modesty will add the final, graceful touch.

Modesty, love, and the sacredness of the person

A person who can glimpse immortality—the first streaks of light cutting through ignorance—will naturally treat the body as something like a sacred temple, because it houses a soul capable of endless improvement.

Love can create the same kind of reverence. True love often makes a lover most modest in the beloved’s presence. Affection is so reserved, so protective of what is tender, that it wants privacy even from ordinary human eyes. It would rather wrap itself in a soft obscurity than let bright, careless daylight turn intimacy into a spectacle.

And affection doesn’t deserve to be called chaste unless it carries a certain elevated shade of tenderness—a quiet seriousness that lets the mind pause and feel the present joy alongside a sense of the divine. That kind of consciousness is what gives joy its deepest nourishment.

Where “relics” come from: a natural affection, later exploited

Whenever I see a widespread custom, I like to look for its root in human nature. I’ve often thought the reverence for relics began with something simple: the tenderness we feel for objects touched by someone we’ve lost.

Self-serving priests may have abused this sentiment, but the sentiment itself makes sense. Love can sanctify clothing as well as the person who wore it. A lover with any imagination feels a kind of sacred respect for a glove or slipper of the beloved; it isn’t interchangeable with an ordinary object of the same kind.

You could dissect that feeling with cold “experimental” analysis, of course—but then you’d destroy the very thing you were trying to understand. Human rapture is made of this material: a phantom moves before us and blots out the rest of the world; when we reach to grasp it, it dissolves into plain air, leaving either an emptiness—or a sweetness, like perfume borrowed from a violet, that memory holds onto for years.

I’ve wandered, without meaning to, into fairyland—feeling spring breezes even while November scowls.

Are women “more modest” than men? Only with a big asterisk

As a class, women are often more chaste than men. And if modesty truly grows from chastity, then perhaps people have some reason to attribute modesty to women in a special way.

But I have to add a hesitant if.

Because chastity doesn’t automatically produce modesty. Sometimes it produces only correct behavior—a careful self-management motivated by public opinion—especially when a woman’s imagination is constantly fed by coquetry and sentimental novels.

In fact, experience and reasoning might make you expect more modesty among men than among women—not because men are better, but because men are trained to exercise their understanding more.

Still, when it comes to plain propriety of behavior—with the exception of one group of women—women clearly have the advantage. What’s more disgusting than that cheap “gallantry” many men treat as masculine: the habit of staring at every woman they pass as if she were public property? That isn’t respect. It’s evidence of a settled depravity and a weak, undisciplined mind.

It’s foolish to expect much public or private virtue until both sexes become more modest—until men rein in either their sensual obsession with women or, more accurately, their performance of “manly assurance,” which is really just impudence. And until men learn to treat one another with respect, unless appetite or passion is openly dictating the tone.

I mean personal respect: the modest respect of humanity and fellow-feeling—not the lusty mockery of flirtation, and not the insulting “protective” condescension that pretends to honor women while quietly degrading them.

Obscenity is the opposite of modesty—especially among men

Take the point further: true modesty should refuse to live with the kind of mental debauchery that lets a man coolly toss out indecent jokes and obscene hints in company without blushing. In front of women, that’s not merely indecent—it’s brutality.

Respect for human beings, simply as human beings, is the foundation of every noble feeling. And strange as it may sound, a libertine who follows appetite is often more modest than the man who prides himself on making the whole table roar with filth.

This is one of many ways the habit of treating modesty as a “female” matter has wrecked virtue and happiness.

The cruelty of demanding “female modesty” while training women to be vulnerable

The damage goes deeper. Woman—made weak by an education that turns her into a slave of feeling—is then expected, at the most difficult moments, to resist that very sensibility.

Knox asks the obvious question: what could be more absurd than keeping women ignorant and then insisting they must fiercely resist temptation?

So when virtue or honor requires a passion to be checked, the burden gets tossed onto the weaker shoulders. That isn’t reason. It isn’t true modesty either, which should at least make self-denial mutual—without even mentioning the bravery men like to claim as their special virtue.

In the same spirit, Rousseau and Dr. Gregory give advice about “modesty” that deserves another name. They both want a wife to leave her husband uncertain whether she surrendered out of feeling or out of weakness. But a woman who allows that doubt to linger—even for a moment—shows real immodesty. Why would she want her husband to imagine his triumph might have been over weakness instead of won by love?

The “war” between the sexes: a counterfeit modesty that poisons morality

Here’s the central problem I’m grieving over: the lack of modesty that undermines morality doesn’t come mainly from women being too bold. It comes from a state of warfare between the sexes—a posture voluptuous men defend as the essence of modesty, though it actually destroys it.

This “war” is a refinement of lust—an elaborate game for men who don’t have enough virtue to enjoy the innocent pleasures of love. A man with genuine delicacy won’t be satisfied with weakness or mere sensibility. He looks for affection.

And yet men brag about their “conquests.” What exactly are they boasting of? That they surprised a creature trained to live by feeling—caught her through feeling into folly, even into vice.

Then the full account is charged to her when reason returns. Where is she to find comfort, abandoned and heartbroken? The very man who should have strengthened her reason and supported her weakness has betrayed her. In the dream of passion, she wandered into flowered fields—and stepped, without seeing it, over a precipice her guide should have guarded, but instead led her toward. She wakes to a sneering, judgmental world, alone in a wasteland, while the man who celebrated her weakness chases new prey. And for her—society offers no redemption in this life.

And what strength can she draw from a mind that’s been softened and enervated by the very education that made her so vulnerable?

If the sexes must be “at war,” let the contest be worthy

But if people insist the sexes must live in this warfare—if they claim nature demands it—then at least let them act nobly. Let pride whisper that a victory is contemptible when it’s won by merely defeating sensibility.

The only conquest that deserves the name is one over affection that isn’t taken by surprise—when, like Heloise, a woman deliberately gives up the world for love. I’m not judging the wisdom or virtue of her choice here. I’m only saying it was a sacrifice to affection, not merely a stumble caused by heightened feeling. And on that basis, I can call her a modest woman.

Before leaving this part of the subject, I’ll say it plainly: until men are more chaste, women will be immodest. Where could modest women even find husbands they wouldn’t often turn from in disgust?

Modesty has to be cultivated equally in both sexes, or it will remain a sickly hothouse plant—while its imitation, the fig leaf borrowed by wantonness, will keep giving an extra edge to sensual pleasure.

Why some men fight this argument so hard

Men will probably continue to insist that women “ought” to have more modesty than men. But the loudest opposition won’t come from calm, rational thinkers. It will come from men of fancy—the charming favorites—who publicly flatter women while privately despising the “weak creatures” they play with.

They won’t give up their most intense sensual gratifications. They won’t even accept the richer pleasure that virtue offers: self-denial.

Back to women: the early training that inflames imagination

Now, taking a different angle and speaking only about women:

The ridiculous lies adults tell children, supposedly out of modesty, often have the opposite effect. They inflame imagination early and push young minds to start working on subjects nature never meant them to brood over until the body reaches some maturity. Then, as development proceeds, passions naturally begin to replace the senses as tools for unfolding understanding and forming moral character.

I’m afraid girls are often spoiled first in nurseries and especially in boarding schools. Many girls sleep in the same room and wash together. I wouldn’t want to poison an innocent mind with false “delicacy,” or with the indecent prudishness that early warnings about the other sex can produce. But I would be very eager to keep girls from picking up nasty or immodest habits. Since many learn filthy tricks from ignorant servants, mixing them together so indiscriminately is deeply improper.

Familiarity without respect: a quiet cause of unhappy marriages

To speak plainly, women are often too familiar with one another—and that familiarity can become so coarse that it later poisons marriage.

Why, in the name of decency, should sisters, close female friends, or a lady and her attendant become so grossly familiar that they forget the basic respect one human being owes another? A squeamish delicacy that refuses the most unpleasant duties—when affection or humanity has you sitting at a sickbed—is contemptible. But it’s equally strange that women in health are often more physically familiar with one another than men are, all while boasting of superior delicacy. It’s a contradiction in manners I’ve never been able to explain.

Decency, not performative “modesty”

For health and beauty, I strongly recommend frequent washing—and I’ll put it plainly, even if delicate ears dislike the sound. Girls should be taught by example to wash and dress alone, regardless of rank. If custom makes a little assistance necessary, let it not be required until the part of the task is finished that should never be done before another person—because it insults the dignity of human nature.

And notice: this isn’t even a matter of modesty so much as decency. Some women make a show of their “care” not to be seen—making a theatrical fuss to keep even a glimpse of their legs hidden. That kind of display is as childish as it is immodest.

Still worse habits—and why they matter later

I could go further and criticize even nastier customs—ones men rarely fall into. People share “secrets” where silence ought to rule. And cleanliness, which some religious groups may have exaggerated (the Essenes among the Jews, for example) by treating what insults humanity as if it insulted God, is violated in a shockingly beastly way.

How can anyone who calls herself delicate force public notice onto the most disgusting parts of animal life? And isn’t it reasonable to suspect that women who haven’t been taught to respect the humanity of their own sex in these matters won’t long respect the mere difference of sex in their husbands?

Once a woman’s maiden bashfulness is gone, I’ve generally observed that she slips back into old habits—and treats her husband as she treated her sisters and female acquaintances.

Besides, women often fall back on what I half-jokingly call “bodily wit”—because they’ve never been encouraged to develop their minds. Their friendships end up running on the same fuel. In other words, when it comes to both mind and body, they’re too familiar with each other.

What’s missing is decent personal reserve—the everyday sense of boundaries and self-respect that quietly supports dignity. Women need to practice that reserve with other women, too. Without it, their minds won’t grow stronger, and their sense of modesty won’t deepen.

Why I’m wary of packing girls together That’s one reason I object to shutting large groups of girls together in nurseries, schools, or convents. I still remember—angrily—the jokes and rough “tomboy” pranks young women got up to when chance, in my youth, threw me (an awkward country girl) in their path. The humor was often nearly as coarse as the double entendres that take over a dinner table once the wine has been flowing.

Trying to keep the heart “pure” without educating the mind is a losing strategy. The head needs ideas. It needs practice comparing them—learning to judge by moving from simple examples to general principles. That’s how you build judgment. And that’s also how you build modesty: not by inflaming feeling, but by letting understanding steady it, cooling raw sensibility into something disciplined and humane.

Personal reserve: not sexual, but essential You may think I’m putting too much weight on personal reserve. I’m not. Reserve is the handmaid of modesty; it supports it the way a good frame supports a picture.

If you asked me to name the “graces” that should accompany beauty, I’d say, immediately:

• Cleanliness
• Neatness
• Personal reserve

And to be clear: the reserve I mean has nothing inherently sexual about it. I think it matters just as much for men as for women.

In fact, reserve and cleanliness are so important—and so often neglected by idle women—that I’ll go further: when two or three women live in the same household, the men in the family (love aside) will usually respect most the woman who maintains this steady, habitual respect for her own person.

The moral power of a well-kept morning When family and close friends meet in the morning, there’s naturally a kind of affectionate seriousness—especially if everyone is facing the day’s duties. You can call this fanciful if you like, but I’ve felt it again and again. After breathing that crisp, bracing morning air, I’ve loved seeing the same freshness on the faces I care about—seeing them look, as it were, tightened and ready for the day, prepared to “run their course” alongside the sun.

When people keep themselves in that state, morning greetings carry more respect than the overly familiar tenderness that can stretch late into the evening.

And I’ll admit it: I’ve sometimes felt hurt—almost disgusted—when a friend I parted from the night before, fully dressed, appeared in the morning with her clothes thrown on in a heap because she stayed in bed until the last possible moment.

These small attentions, so often ignored, are what keep domestic affection alive. If men and women put even half as much effort into habitual neatness as they pour into decorating—or, frankly, disfiguring—themselves with showy extras, they’d be doing real work toward a purer mind.

But women, as things stand, often dress mainly to please men who pride themselves on gallantry. And oddly enough, the lover is usually most taken by simple clothing that sits close and natural on the body. Excessive ornament carries a kind of impertinence that pushes affection away—because love clings to the idea of home, not display.

Indolence, “sensibility,” and real strength As a sex, women are trained into indolence, and nearly everything around them reinforces it. I haven’t forgotten the bursts of energy that strong feeling can produce. But those emotional “spurts” often make the underlying problem worse, and they shouldn’t be confused with the slow, steady walk of reason.

The truth is, women’s mental and physical inactivity runs so deep that until the body is strengthened and the mind enlarged through active effort, there’s little reason to expect modesty to replace mere bashfulness. They may find it convenient to put on modesty’s appearance—but that pretty veil will be saved for special occasions.

What modesty is—and why it matters There may be no virtue that blends so naturally with every other as modesty does. It’s like a pale moonbeam: it softens everything it touches and makes each virtue more interesting, giving a gentle grandeur even to a narrow horizon.

No image captures this better than the poetic myth that makes Diana, crowned with a silver crescent, the goddess of chastity. I’ve sometimes imagined a dignified woman of antiquity walking slowly in some quiet retreat, feeling a conscious strength of self-respect as she looks over a soft, shadowed landscape—and then, with calm devotion, welcoming the moon’s mild light as if it were meant to settle on her chaste breast.

A Christian motive: chastity rooted in the heart For Christians, there are still nobler motives for preserving chastity and learning modesty. A woman’s body has been called the temple of the living God—and that God asks for more than a modest posture or a careful appearance. His eye searches the heart.

So let her remember: if she hopes to find favor in the sight of purity itself, her chastity must rest on modesty—not on worldly calculation. Otherwise, “a good reputation” will be the only reward she earns. The deeper, awe-inspiring communion that virtue creates between a human being and their Maker is what should kindle the desire to be pure as God is pure.

The problem with performative “feminine” behavior Given all this, it’s almost unnecessary to add that I consider many of the so-called “feminine airs” that replace youthful bashfulness to be immodest—especially when they require sacrificing truth in order to secure a husband’s heart, or, more precisely, to keep him acting like a lover when nature would normally let romantic heat settle into friendship.

A man’s tenderness for the mother of his children is an excellent substitute for the fever of unsatisfied passion. But trying to keep that fever burning is, at best, indecorous—and often plainly immodest—when women do it by pretending to have an unnatural coldness of temperament.

Women, like men, ought to have the ordinary appetites and passions of human nature. Those passions become brutal only when reason doesn’t govern them. And the obligation to govern them is a human duty, not something that falls on one sex alone.

In these matters, nature can largely be trusted—if women will only gain knowledge and humanity. Love itself will then teach them modesty. There’s no need for calculated falsehoods—disgusting and useless. Carefully staged “rules of behavior” may fool shallow observers, but any sensible man sees through the performance and despises the affectation.

Education should build character, not social choreography The behavior of young people toward each other as “men and women” should be the last thing education fixates on. Right now, we obsess over “behavior” so much that real simplicity of character is hard to find.

But if people were truly intent on cultivating each virtue—letting it take firm root in the mind—then the grace that naturally grows from it (its outward mark) would quickly strip affectation of its gaudy feathers. Because conduct that isn’t grounded in truth is, by its nature, deceptive and unstable.

A direct appeal: modesty can’t live with ignorance and vanity Would you, my sisters, truly possess modesty? Then remember this: virtue of any kind cannot live alongside ignorance and vanity.

You must gain that sober steadiness of mind that only comes from the daily practice of duties and the pursuit of knowledge. Otherwise, you’ll remain in a precarious, dependent state—loved only while you are beautiful.

The lowered eye, the blush, the retiring grace—these have their proper season. But modesty, as the child of reason, can’t survive for long alongside a sensibility that reflection hasn’t tempered.

And there’s another danger: when love—even innocent love—becomes the main occupation of your life, your heart grows too soft to give modesty the calm shelter she needs. Modesty delights to live there, in close union with humanity.

8

Morality, Hollowed Out by Sexual “Reputation”

I’ve been thinking for a long time that the advice women constantly get about “proper behavior” and “protecting your good name” often works like a pretty poison. It coats itself in the language of morality while quietly eating morality away. It trains you to measure shadows instead of substance—and shadows are unreliable. Their size changes with the angle of the sun, with timing, with luck, with whatever people feel like believing that day.

Look at the classic courtier: smooth, charming, and impossible to pin down. Where does that slippery, flattering dishonesty come from? From his position. He needs supporters, so he learns how to refuse people without making enemies—how to deny while sounding gracious, how to keep hope alive without ever delivering anything real. His politeness becomes a game played with truth, and over time it grinds down the sincerity and basic fellow-feeling that should come naturally to human beings, until what’s left is the polished “fine gentleman.”

Women learn an equally artificial style for the same reason: they’re told they have to. But you can’t toy with truth forever and escape the cost. The practiced dissembler eventually becomes the victim of her own tricks. She loses what people rightly call common sense—that quick, clean recognition of ordinary truths that an uncorrupted mind accepts immediately, even if it didn’t have the energy to discover those truths on its own when prejudice and local custom were blurring everything.

Most people, after all, borrow their opinions to save themselves the work of thinking. And lazy minds cling to the letter of a rule—human or divine—rather than its spirit.

Someone once said (I can’t recall who), “Women don’t care about what only heaven sees.” Why would they? They’ve been trained to fear men’s eyes, not God’s. If they can lull their Argus to sleep—if they can quiet the watchers—they rarely think of heaven or of their own conscience, because their reputation feels secure. And reputation, not real chastity with its whole train of virtues, is what they’re taught to keep spotless—not as goodness, but as a way to hold their place in society.

You can see it in the romantic intrigues of married women, especially among the upper classes, and especially where parents “match” daughters by rank. If an unmarried girl falls in love and becomes “a prey” to it, she’s disgraced forever—even if her mind is untouched by the manipulations that married women often practice under the convenient shelter of marriage, and even if she hasn’t violated any duty except the duty of respecting herself.

Meanwhile, the married woman who cheats doesn’t just slip; she breaks a sacred promise. She becomes a cruel mother by becoming a false wife. If her husband still loves her, the ongoing deceit she must perform makes her contemptible. And even if he doesn’t, the sheer machinery required to keep up appearances keeps her mind trapped in a childish—or corrupt—storm that drains it of all strength. In time, she becomes like a person who constantly takes stimulants to feel alive: she needs an intrigue to spark her thoughts, because ordinary pleasures have lost their flavor unless they’re highly seasoned with hope and fear.

Sometimes it gets even uglier. I’ll give you one example.

A titled woman, notorious for her affairs, still lived with her husband. Because she was “respectable” on paper, society avoided placing her where she belonged. And this same woman made a point of treating—openly, insultingly—a timid, embarrassed creature with contempt: a woman who had once been seduced by a nearby gentleman and later married by him. The titled woman had genuinely confused virtue with reputation. I believe she even congratulated herself on having behaved “properly” before marriage, though once her family’s ambitions were satisfied and she was settled, she and her husband were equally unfaithful—so that the half-alive heir to a vast estate seemed to have arrived from nobody knows where.

Now look at the subject from another angle.

I’ve known plenty of women who didn’t love their husbands and didn’t love anyone else either. They gave themselves completely to vanity and distraction, neglected every domestic obligation, even squandered the money that ought to have been saved for their younger children—yet they still preened over their “untarnished” reputation, as if a wife and mother’s entire duty were simply to preserve it. And I’ve known other lazy women who neglected every personal duty but still believed they deserved their husbands’ affection because, in this one area, they behaved “properly.”

Weak minds love ceremony. They want duty to be a list of outward performances. But real morality rests on simpler, sturdier motives. I wish shallow moralists had talked less about “behavior” and external observances, because unless any kind of virtue is built on knowledge, it collapses into nothing more than a bland decency—a nice surface with no depth.

And yet, in explicit terms, “respect for the world’s opinion” has been called a woman’s chief duty. Rousseau even declares that “reputation is no less indispensable than chastity.” He adds that a man, confident in his own conduct, can stand on his own and defy public opinion; but a woman, even if she behaves well, has only done half her duty, because what people think of her matters as much as what she is. From that, he concludes that women’s education should be the opposite of men’s: opinion is the grave of virtue for men, but the throne of virtue for women.

It follows—very logically—that a “virtue” built on opinion is merely worldly, the virtue of someone denied the use of reason. But even on its own terms, I’m convinced these thinkers are wrong about reputation itself.

This obsession with reputation—beyond the fact that a good name is often a natural reward of real virtue—grew out of a deeper injustice I’ve already lamented: a woman cannot regain respectability by returning to virtue, while men often keep theirs while indulging vice. Under those rules, it’s not surprising that women struggle desperately to preserve what, once lost, is lost forever. And when that one fear swallows every other concern, reputation for chastity becomes the single “necessary” thing.

But the scruples of ignorance are useless. Neither religion nor virtue, when they truly live in the heart, require this childish fixation on ceremony. If the motive is pure, the conduct, taken as a whole, will be proper.

If you want an authority more respectable than my own conviction, listen to Dr. Smith on the general laws of morality. He notes that a good person may, by a rare and unlucky accident, be suspected of a crime he could never commit and, as a result, be unjustly hated for life—ruined as if by an earthquake or a flood. But such cases are rarer, and more contrary to the ordinary course of things, than natural disasters themselves. In general, practicing truth, justice, and humanity is the surest—almost infallible—way to win what those virtues chiefly aim at: the confidence and love of the people around us. A person may be misrepresented about a single act, but it’s scarcely possible to misrepresent the overall tenor of a life. An innocent person may sometimes be believed guilty; but more often, the settled belief in someone’s decency leads us to excuse them even when they really are at fault.

I agree entirely. I truly believe that very few people of either sex have been despised for certain vices without, in some real sense, earning that contempt. I’m not talking about a momentary burst of slander—a fog that hovers over a person’s name for a while, like one of those thick November mornings over a great city, and then gradually melts in daylight. I mean that the daily conduct of most people eventually stamps their character with something close to the truth. Day after day, clear light refutes the ignorant suspicion or the malicious tale that tries to dirty a clean reputation. A false light may distort the “shadow” of someone’s character for a time, but once the cloud that caused the mistake disperses, reputation tends to right itself.

Yes, many people do end up with a better reputation than they strictly deserve. Relentless effort often wins prizes in any contest. Those who chase only this petty reward—like the Pharisees who prayed on street corners to be seen—usually get what they’re after, because no human being can read another’s heart. Still, the good name that naturally reflects good actions—when a person is simply trying to walk rightly, without performing for an audience—is, in general, not only truer but more secure.

Of course, there are trials when a good person must appeal to God against the injustice of humanity—when, amid whining “candor” or the hissing of envy, he has to build a private refuge in his own mind until the rumor passes. The darts of undeserved blame can pierce an innocent and tender heart and leave real sorrow behind. But these are exceptions, not the rule. And it’s by general laws, not rare anomalies, that we should regulate human conduct—just as the strange path of a comet doesn’t change the calculations astronomers make about the steady order of the planets.

So I’ll go further: once someone reaches maturity, the broad outline of his character in the world is usually fair, allowing for those exceptions. I’m not saying a cautious, worldly person—armed only with negative virtues, never openly wrong but never richly good—can’t sometimes glide through life with a smoother reputation than someone wiser or better. In fact, I’ve often concluded from experience that when two people are nearly equal in virtue, the more “neutral” character will be liked best by the public, while the other may have more true friends in private. But the hills and valleys—the clouds and sunshine—visible in the virtues of great people sharpen each other. They give envy a clearer target, yes, yet the real character still works its way into the light, even when splashed by weak affection or clever malice.

As for that anxious, half-earned reputation—the kind people clutch so tightly that they dissect it in fear—I won’t spell out the obvious. But I am afraid morality is quietly, dangerously undermined among women when attention is fixed on appearance instead of reality. Something simple is made bizarrely complicated. Sometimes virtue and its shadow are even made enemies.

We might never have heard the name Lucretia if she had died to preserve her chastity rather than her reputation.

If we genuinely deserve our own good opinion, we’re usually respected in the world. But if we hunger for higher growth and deeper excellence, it isn’t enough to see ourselves only as we imagine other people see us—even though some have ingeniously argued that this is the foundation of our moral sentiments. Every observer brings personal prejudices, plus the prejudices of their country and their time. We should instead try to see ourselves as we imagine we are seen by that Being who watches every thought ripen into action, whose judgment never swerves from the eternal rule of right—just in judgment, and just as merciful.

A humble mind that seeks to find favor in that sight, and calmly examines itself when only that presence is felt, will rarely form a wildly mistaken picture of its own virtues. In the still hour of self-collection, it will tremble at offended justice—or it will recognize the tie that binds humanity to the divine in a pure reverence that fills the heart without whipping it into frenzy.

In those solemn moments, a person discovers the seeds of vice in himself—seeds that, like a poisonous tree, can spread death in their shade—and he sees them without self-disgust, because he also feels pulled by love toward his fellow creatures. He searches for every excuse for their follies in human nature, because he finds the same nature in himself. If I, he may reason—I, who have tried to think for myself, and have been refined by suffering—still find the serpent’s egg hidden in my own heart and crush it only with effort, how can I not pity those who have been less strengthened, or who have foolishly nurtured the reptile until it poisoned the very life it fed on? Can I, aware of my secret sins, cast off my fellow beings and watch them fall into ruin? No. The heart, wrung with anguish, cries out: I, too, am human. I have vices, perhaps hidden from every human eye, that bend me low before God and remind me—when all is quiet—that we are made of the same earth and breathe the same air. Out of humility, humanity rises naturally, and love winds its cords around the heart.

And the sympathy can widen still further. A person, quietly satisfied, may even notice strength in arguments that don’t convince him; he chooses to interpret others as charitably as he can, pleased to find some reason behind human error, while still convinced that the ruler of the day makes the sun shine on everyone. Yet, in shaking hands with corruption—one foot on earth—he lifts the other boldly toward heaven and claims kinship with higher natures. Unseen virtues release their fragrance in that cool hour. The dry ground, refreshed by sudden streams of comfort, greens and smiles; and that living green is what a purity too clean to look on evil can gaze on with calm approval.

But my spirits are flagging, and I must give myself quietly to the reverie these reflections bring. I can’t fully describe the feelings that have soothed my soul—like the time I watched the sun rise while a soft shower drifted through the leaves of nearby trees, seeming to fall on my weary yet peaceful spirit, cooling a heart that passion had heated and reason had labored to tame.

Given the principles running through all my arguments, I wouldn’t need to linger here—except that women are so often told that their entire duty is to keep the varnish of their “character” fresh and shining, as if maintaining appearances were everything. Rules for managing behavior and preserving reputation too often crowd out real moral obligations.

And when people talk about “reputation,” it’s usually narrowed to one thing: chastity. If a woman’s “honor,” as it’s absurdly called, is considered safe, she may neglect every social duty. She may even ruin her family through gambling and extravagance, yet still present a bold, shameless face—because, truly, she is an “honorable woman.”

Mrs. Macaulay rightly observed that there is only one fault a woman of honor cannot commit without punishment. She adds, wisely and humanely, that this has produced the tired, foolish claim that a first lapse against chastity has some special power to corrupt a woman’s whole character. Nature doesn’t produce minds that fragile. The human mind is made of nobler material than that; and even with all the disadvantages women face in situation and education, they seldom become entirely abandoned unless they’re driven into desperation by the venomous rancor of their own sex.

But here’s the bitter twist: the more women prize this reputation for chastity, the more men tend to despise it. And both extremes corrode morality.

Men are certainly more driven by appetite than women, and their appetites are made worse—more twisted—by unchecked indulgence and the fussy inventions of satiety. Luxury has refined eating into a kind of self-destruction: it undermines health, and it encourages a level of gluttony so gross that a basic sense of decency must be worn down before someone could eat immoderately in front of another person and then complain about the heaviness that such excess naturally brings. Some women, especially French women, have also lost a sense of decency in this respect; they will speak quite calmly about an indigestion.

If we didn’t let idleness breed so easily in the hot, over-fertilized soil of wealth—like swarms of summer insects living off rot—we wouldn’t have to stomach the spectacle of such coarse excess.

There’s one rule of conduct that should sit above the rest: train yourself to feel a steady, everyday respect for other people, so you won’t make another human being repulsive to you—or to themselves—just to grab some passing pleasure. When that respect is missing, “delicacy” gets trampled. You can see it in the shameless laziness of many married women (and others a bit older), who, simply because they can’t be bothered—or because they want some small indulgence—end up behaving in ways that disgust. They know the body is the bond that unites the sexes, yet how often do they, out of sheer sloth, turn what should be human and tender into something degrading?

But the deeper damage comes from a corrupted appetite—a sexuality stripped of its natural purpose and turned into a kind of consumption. Nature should be the standard of taste, the measure of appetite. Yet the voluptuary treats nature with contempt. Put romantic “refinement” aside; nature made sexual desire, like hunger and thirst, a powerful law because the species has to continue. And nature doesn’t leave it as a brute impulse: she lifts it by weaving in mind and affection. When the feelings of a parent mingle with what would otherwise be mere animal instinct, the act gains dignity. A man and woman may first meet for pleasure, but once a child is in view—or present—the shared concern can kindle real interest and warmth through a common sympathy.

If women had—and were expected to have—some necessary duty higher than decorating themselves, they wouldn’t settle into being the compliant servants of casual lust. Yet for a great number, that is effectively their position: treated like standing dishes laid out for any glutton who wants to take his fill.

Someone will object: as monstrous as that is, it harms only a “set-apart” portion of women—sacrificed, supposedly, to protect the rest. But that kind of logic is always false: you don’t secure a greater good by authorizing a smaller evil. And in reality, the damage spreads. The moral character and peace of mind of the “chaste” women are undermined by the very women society refuses to rescue from guilt—women society coldly condemns to survive by the arts that:

• entice husbands away,
• corrupt sons,
• and push even “modest” women (yes, them too) to imitate the same style and posture in some degree.

Here’s the root of it, I’ll say plainly: the causes of women’s weakness and depravity that I’ve already described branch from one great trunk—men’s lack of chastity.

This widespread intemperance twists desire until ordinary affection no longer satisfies. A sharper, more provocative stimulus is needed just to rouse it. The parental design of nature disappears from view; the mind fixates on the body alone, and only for the moment. Lust grows so restless that it starts “refining” on female softness—seeking something even softer than woman—until, in places like Italy and Portugal, men flock to the gatherings of ambiguous beings, sighing for sensations beyond even “female languor.”

To gratify this class of men, women are deliberately trained into systematic voluptuousness. Not all will sink to the same extreme, but the pattern is heartless all the same. And it ruins everyone: men’s taste becomes spoiled, and women—across ranks—naturally shape their behavior to match the taste that offers them pleasure and power.

The result is predictable. Women, made weaker in mind and body than they ought to be, often don’t have the strength for the first, most basic work nature asks of them: bearing and nursing children. And when lust crowds out the parental affection that ennobles instinct, they either destroy the embryo in the womb or reject the child after birth. Nature demands respect in everything, and those who break her laws rarely escape the consequences. The pale, enervated women who most catch a libertine’s eye may conceive, but they’re unfit to be mothers. So the rich sensualist who has “rioted” among women—spreading misery and corruption—eventually decides he wants an heir to carry his name, and receives from his wife a half-formed being, inheriting weakness from both father and mother.

People love to congratulate the modern age for being more humane than antiquity, and they often point to the “barbarous” practice of abandoning children a parent couldn’t support. Meanwhile, the very man of “sensibility” who condemns that cruelty may, through promiscuous affairs, produce something just as destructive: widespread barrenness and a contagious corruption of manners. Surely nature never meant that, by satisfying an appetite, women should defeat the very purpose for which that appetite was implanted.

I’ve said before that men ought to support the women they seduce. That alone would help reform women’s behavior, and it would curb an abuse that damages both population and morals. Another obvious remedy is to turn women’s attention to the real virtue of chastity. A woman has little claim to respect on the score of modesty—even if her reputation is “white as snow”—if she smiles on the libertine while spurning the victims of his lawless appetite and their own folly.

And there’s another stain that clings, even to the “pure” woman: when she studies only to adorn herself so men will look, so she can collect admiring sighs and the idle homage of what people call “innocent gallantry.” If women truly respected virtue for its own sake, they wouldn’t need to buy themselves compensation in vanity for the self-denial required to protect their reputation. And they wouldn’t keep company with men who openly set reputation at defiance.

The truth is, the sexes corrupt and improve each other. That’s not a controversial claim; it reaches to every virtue. Chastity, modesty, public spirit, and the whole noble family of virtues that social happiness rests on must be understood and cultivated by everyone—or they’ll be cultivated weakly, as if they were decorative. Instead of giving the vicious and idle an excuse by labeling some sacred duty a “sexual” duty, it would be wiser to say plainly: nature hasn’t made two moral codes. The unchaste man defeats nature twice over—by making women barren and by ruining his own constitution—even as he dodges the shame that hounds the same vice in women. These are the physical consequences. The moral ones are worse.

Because once virtue becomes only a word, the duties of citizens, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and the heads of households shrink into nothing more than selfish bargains—ties of convenience.

So why do philosophers keep searching for public spirit as if it were a thing you can summon in the abstract? Public spirit has to grow out of private virtue, or it turns into a manufactured feeling—like the counterfeit “reputation” women anxiously guard and the “honor” men boast about. A sentiment that often survives without virtue, without the higher morality that recognizes a hard truth: when you make a habit of breaking one duty, you’re breaking the whole moral law.

9

Of the Pernicious Effects that Come from Society’s Unnatural Distinctions

When a society teaches people to respect property above everything else, it’s like drinking from a poisoned spring. A huge share of the world’s misery and corruption flows from that single mistake. In the most “refined” communities, you’ll often find the ugliest moral life hiding in plain sight—like venomous creatures tucked under lush, decorative weeds. Comfort turns humid and heavy, indulgence becomes the norm, and people’s better instincts get softened and spoiled before they have a chance to harden into real virtue.

Once wealth becomes the main ticket to respect, the social machine does something perverse: property starts buying the honor that should belong to talent and character. Everyone strains to climb over someone else, because everyone is chasing the status that money can purchase. People neglect the basic duties they owe each other as human beings—and still get treated like minor gods. Religion drifts away from morality behind a curtain of ceremony, and then we act surprised that public life starts to resemble a marketplace of cheats and bullies.

There’s an old proverb that gets at the point bluntly: if the devil finds you idle, he’ll put you to work. And what produces more deep, habitual idleness than inherited wealth and inherited titles? Human beings develop their abilities only by using them. We don’t strengthen our minds or characters by wishing—we strengthen them by effort, by practice, by necessity. Without some real pressure to act, the “wheels” don’t turn. The same is true of virtue: you don’t acquire it by admiring it. You acquire it by doing the duties that connect you to other people—the ordinary, daily obligations that train the heart and discipline the will. But if someone is constantly flattered and pampered, surrounded by sycophants who treat them as superior simply for being rich or well-born, that person is easily coaxed out of their own humanity. They stop feeling those duties as sacred because they stop feeling them as necessary.

That’s why a society needs far more equality than we like to admit, or morality will never really take root. And even if we build a “virtuous equality” on something solid, it won’t stand if half the human race is chained down at its base. If women are kept ignorant and dependent—pushed into pride on the one hand or ignorance on the other—they’ll end up undermining the very moral foundation society pretends to prize, not because they’re bad by nature, but because they’ve been denied the tools to be fully human.

That brings me to women. It’s pointless to expect genuine virtue from women while they remain, even partly, dependent on men. It’s not just virtue we lose; we also lose the strong, steady natural affection that would make women good partners and good mothers. When a woman’s survival depends entirely on pleasing her husband, the incentives are ugly. She learns to be crafty, small, and self-protective, because she has to be. And a man who can be satisfied with a love that looks like a spaniel’s devotion—fawning, anxious, purchased by comfort—doesn’t have much delicacy of feeling. Love isn’t a commodity. The moment you try to buy it, even subtly, its “silken wings” crumple. Real affection can’t survive when it’s demanded as payment rather than returned freely.

Meanwhile, wealth weakens men, too. And if women are trained to “live,” as it were, by their looks—if personal charm becomes their primary currency—how can we expect either sex to carry out the duties that make a human life dignified? Those duties require effort and self-denial. Inherited property, in particular, distorts the mind. People born into it are, in a sense, swaddled from the cradle. They rarely learn to move—physically or mentally—with purpose. They see the world through one lens, and it’s a warped one, so they can’t recognize where real merit or happiness actually lies. When social “drapery” hides the person underneath, you get a kind of masquerade: someone dragging themselves from one empty pleasure to another, limbs slack with boredom, eyes vacant in a way that practically announces there’s no mind at home.

So here’s the conclusion I’m aiming at: a society is badly designed if it doesn’t push both men and women to do their duties by making duty the only reliable path to social respect. Every human being wants the good opinion of others in some form. If we attach that approval to wealth or to surface charm, we create a moral climate like a harsh winter wind—something that blights the early growth of affection and virtue. Nature, more wisely, ties affection to duty. It sweetens work with love, and it gives reason the energy that only the heart can supply. But the “affection” people perform as a badge—like a uniform worn for show—when the actual obligations are ignored, is just one more empty compliment that vice and folly feel forced to pay to virtue.

You don’t need a complicated example to see this. Suppose a woman is praised endlessly for her beauty, and she gets so intoxicated by the applause that she neglects the indispensable work of being a mother. She doesn’t just fail her child; she harms herself. She fails to grow the kind of affection that would have made her both useful and happy. In this imperfect world, the happiness worth having—real contentment, the sort that carries moral satisfaction—comes from well-governed affections. And an affection isn’t just a feeling; it carries a duty inside it. Men often don’t realize the damage they do by urging women to focus only on being pleasing. They cultivate weakness and dependence, and then complain about the results. Worse, they force a collision between what’s natural and what’s artificial: they sacrifice a woman’s comfort and dignity to a sensual ideal of beauty, even though, in nature, the duties of life are meant to harmonize.

A husband would have to have an unnaturally cold heart—one deadened early by debauchery—not to feel more delight in seeing his child nursed by its mother than in any of the clever performances of a flirt. Breastfeeding, in other words, isn’t just feeding; it’s a natural way of strengthening the marital bond, threading respect and tenderness into shared memory. Yet wealth often tempts women to reject this. They fear it will cost them their beauty. They want to keep wearing the “flower crown” of youth—the brief social reign that comes with being admired—so they skip the very acts that would stamp themselves on their husbands’ hearts in a deeper way, the way that lasts when youth fades and age brings its chill.

There’s something genuinely moving about a reasonable, affectionate mother. There’s dignity in the way she returns the father’s affection—affection that comes from a man doing the serious work of his place in life. It’s not only respectable; it’s beautiful. And I’ll admit something personal: I’ve tried hard not to catch the fake feelings society sells us. After being exhausted by tasteless grandeur and the slavish rituals that, with heavy pomp, replace real home life, I’ve often turned away and found relief in ordinary scenes—nature’s “green,” scattered everywhere. I’ve watched a woman nursing her children, doing the real work of her station, perhaps with only a servant to take the drudgery off her hands. I’ve seen her and the children made ready—clean, not extravagant—to welcome her husband home. He arrives tired, and finds smiling babies and a neat hearth. My heart has lingered on that group, and I’ve felt it throb with sympathy when the familiar sound of his step at the door kicks up a happy commotion.

While that simple scene has warmed my sense of human kindness, I’ve often thought that a couple like this—each needed by the other, and each independent because both are doing their part—has about as much as life can truly offer. They’re far enough above desperate poverty that they don’t have to calculate every penny, but they have enough restraint not to become trapped in that icy system of constant economy that shrinks the heart and narrows the mind. And yes, my tastes may be “vulgar,” but I honestly don’t know what else you’d need to make this both the happiest and most respectable condition in the world, besides:

• a taste for reading, to add variety and depth to conversation
• a little extra money, not for luxury, but to help people in need and to buy books

Because it’s miserable when compassion opens your heart and your mind is busy planning something useful, only to have some prim little internal accountant—like a nagging child tugging your elbow—snatch your hand back from a nearly empty purse while whispering some cold maxim about “prudence” and the priority of “justice.”

Inherited riches and honors are destructive to human character in general, but they warp women even more than men—if that’s possible—because men can still, to some extent, stretch their faculties by becoming soldiers or statesmen.

Even then, look at what those roles often mean now. As soldiers, I’ll admit, many mainly gather flashy, vain glory while leaders fiddle obsessively with Europe’s balance of power, adjusting it like a scale that must not tilt even slightly toward some bleak northern corner of the map. The age of true heroism—when a citizen fought for the public good, like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to ordinary labor so his virtue could keep flowing in a steadier channel—that age is mostly gone. In Britain, our “heroes” are more often recruited from the gaming table than from the plough. Their passions are trained by the suspense of a dice roll, not refined by the strenuous pursuit of virtue in history’s pages.

As for the statesman: if anything, it makes more sense for him to step from the Faro Bank or card table to the helm of government, because he already knows the basic skills—shuffling, tricking, and playing for advantage. British politics, if we’re polite enough to call it a system, often comes down to manufacturing dependents and inventing taxes that crush the poor so the rich can be further indulged. A war—or any absurd “wild goose chase”—becomes, in common language, a lucky windfall of patronage for the minister, whose chief talent is keeping his own seat secure. He doesn’t need real compassion for the poor, so long as he can secure his family’s gain. And if he decides it’s useful to flatter what people loudly call an Englishman’s “birthright,” he can stage a safe little performance: cast one vote, let his followers drift to the other side, and call it principle. When a question of humanity comes up, he can offer a sentimental phrase or two—dip a sop in “human kindness” to quiet the watchdog—talk about ending bloodshed and making the earth stop crying out for vengeance, while his hand, in the same moment, tightens chains by approving some vile trade. A minister remains a minister only as long as he can force through what he has decided to force through. And when a bold move might shake his position, he isn’t required—apparently—to feel like a human being at all.

But enough of these side remarks. Let’s return to the more polished form of slavery—the one that clamps down on women’s very souls by keeping them permanently bound to ignorance.

The absurd distinctions of rank turn civilization into a curse by splitting society into two ugly extremes: pampered tyrants and scheming, resentful dependents. And these distinctions poison nearly everyone, because “respectability” gets attached to status instead of to the daily duties of human life. When duties aren’t done, affection can’t grow strong enough to reinforce virtue, even though virtue is the natural reward of fulfilled responsibility. Men, at least, sometimes find loopholes—small escape hatches that let them think and act for themselves. For women, it’s an almost Herculean labor, because they face obstacles specific to their sex that demand something close to superhuman effort to overcome.

A genuinely benevolent legislator tries to make virtue each person’s interest. That’s how private virtue becomes the mortar of public happiness: the whole society holds together because all its parts naturally pull toward a common good. But when it comes to women, both private and public virtue are treated as uncertain—because Rousseau, along with a long list of male writers, insists that a woman must live under strict restraint, the restraint of “propriety,” for her entire life.

Why? Why bind her to propriety—blind propriety—if she’s capable of acting from a nobler source? If she has an immortal soul, if she can live by principle rather than by fear of appearances, why chain her to the shallowest motive? Must goodness always be extracted through pain, like sugar squeezed from blood? Is half the human species—like enslaved Africans—meant to be governed by brutalizing prejudices, when clear principles would guard them better, all so life can be made sweeter for men? Isn’t that, in effect, denying women reason? A “gift” is an insult if you’re never allowed to use it.

Women, like men, are softened and weakened by the easy pleasures wealth buys. But on top of that, women are made slaves to their bodies. They’re expected to stay alluring so that men will “lend” them judgment, as though a woman must borrow reason to steady her steps. And if a woman is ambitious, she’s pushed into a different kind of corruption: she must manage her “tyrants” through indirect tricks, because without rights there can be no real duties. The laws governing women—which I’ll discuss later—first pretend that a husband and wife are one person, and then, by treating only the husband as responsible, reduce the wife to a cipher.

Here is a simpler rule: the person who does the duties of their position is, by that very fact, independent. For women in general, the first duty is to themselves as rational beings. The next major duty, as citizens, is the one that contains so many others: the duty of a mother. Any social rank that “excuses” a woman from this work doesn’t elevate her—it degrades her by turning her into a doll. And if she tries to reach for something more serious than decorating herself like fabric on a mannequin, her mind is often still trapped in trivial channels: a soft, dreamy attachment, or the management of some intrigue, may keep her thoughts busy. Because when she neglects home duties, she can’t easily substitute the kinds of public exertion men use to keep themselves from rusting. She can’t march like a soldier or spar in parliament.

Rousseau even gloats over this as proof of women’s inferiority: “How can they leave the nursery for the camp!” Some moralists have called the camp a school of heroic virtue—though a sharp-minded casuist would struggle to prove that most wars deserve to mint “heroes” at all. I’m not going to pick that debate apart here. I’ve often thought that, early in human history, these bouts of ambition were a rough, natural stage of civilization—land cleared by fire and sword, fields opened by force—so I won’t simply call them plagues. But today’s system of war has little to do with virtue of any kind. It’s much more a school of craft and softness than of courage.

Still, if we limited ourselves to defensive war—the only war that can be justified in a mature society—then perhaps the real heroism of ancient times could return, even in women. But easy now, gentle reader, man or woman: don’t panic. Even if I’ve compared the modern soldier to the “civilized” woman, I’m not urging anyone to turn a spinning tool into a musket. I do sincerely wish we’d turn bayonets into pruning hooks.

What I was really doing was giving my imagination a moment’s relief—tired as it is of the vices and follies that rise from the filthy stream of wealth that muddies the clear springs of natural affection. I imagined a society organized so that a man must do the duties of a citizen or be despised—and that while he served in some civil role, his wife, also an active citizen, would be equally committed to managing the household, educating the children, and helping neighbors.

But for a woman to be genuinely virtuous and useful, she cannot do her civil duties while lacking, personally, the protection of civil law. She cannot be forced to depend on her husband’s generosity for her daily support while he lives, or for survival after he dies. How can anyone be generous with nothing of their own? How can anyone be virtuous without freedom? In the current setup, a wife who is “faithful” yet neither nurses nor educates her children barely deserves the name of wife, and has no claim to the name of citizen. Strip away natural rights, and duties collapse into emptiness.

So yes: women become little more than men’s playthings when they’re made so weak in mind and body that they can’t exert themselves except to chase airy pleasures or invent the next pointless fashion. What sight is sadder to a thinking person than watching the morning carriages racing around a city full of pale faces—people fleeing from themselves? I’ve often wished, with Dr. Johnson, that we could put some of these women into a small shop with half a dozen children looking up to them for support. I strongly suspect that dormant strength would wake up quickly: their eyes would gain health and spirit, and the exercise of reason would draw new lines on cheeks once shaped only by dimples. That change might restore dignity—or, more accurately, allow them to reach the true dignity human nature is meant to have. You don’t gain virtue by theorizing about it. You certainly don’t gain it through the lazy, negative inertia that wealth so naturally breeds.

And there’s one more sting at the end: when poverty is treated as more shameful than even vice, doesn’t that cut morality straight to the bone?

Even at the risk of being misunderstood, I want to be clear: I’m not denying that, for most women, everyday life will revolve around being wives and mothers. Religion and plain reason both point that way. What I am saying is that it’s painful—and frankly wasteful—that women with bigger talents and ambitions are offered so few legitimate paths to live usefully and independently.

Here’s an idea that will probably get me laughed at, but I mean it and I plan to return to it: women ought to have representatives. They shouldn’t be ruled by laws they have no direct voice in shaping.

That said, the current system of representation in this country isn’t exactly a model of fairness. It’s often just a convenient disguise for power. So women can’t be told they’re uniquely wronged by it; in practice, they’re “represented” about as well as the huge class of working mechanics who sweat to fund the crown while barely keeping bread in their children’s mouths. Who, exactly, represents the people whose labor pays for the heir’s glittering stable of horses—or polishes the carriage of a royal favorite who looks down on everyone else? Taxes on the bare necessities of life keep an endless parade of idle princes and princesses moving through the streets in dull, expensive splendor, while a stunned crowd nearly worships the very pageantry they’ve been forced to buy. It’s medieval theater dressed up as national pride—like the pointless spectacle of mounted sentinels at Whitehall, which I’ve never watched without feeling both contempt and anger.

What does it do to a mind when it’s trained to be impressed by this? It has to twist something inside you. And until virtue knocks down these monuments to vanity, the same rotten taste will keep spreading through society. The character of a nation isn’t one thing at the top and another at the bottom; the attitudes of the powerful seep outward. Luxury polishes vice into something fashionable, while poverty—made resentful and envious—develops its own poisonous habits. Either way, virtue gets pushed out, or survives only as a decorative stripe in the costume of “civilized” life.

Look at the upper classes. In the highest ranks, people outsource every duty to deputies, as if responsibility could be handed off like a parcel. Meanwhile, the rich—made idle—have to invent pleasures to fill the hours, and those pleasures look so dazzling to the rank beneath them that crowds of people scramble for wealth and sacrifice everything just to run behind the carriage. Sacred trusts become sinecures, because they’re won through influence and valued mainly as tickets into “good company.”

And women, especially, are trained to want one thing: to be “ladies.” Which usually means having nothing serious to do—drifting from place to place with an air of elegance, without even knowing what you’re going for.

At this point someone will ask, “Fine—so what should women do? Just stroll around gracefully? Surely you don’t want to condemn them to nursing idiots and gossiping over trivialities.” Of course not.

Women could do far more—if they were allowed and prepared to do it.

• They could study medicine and practice as physicians, not only as nurses.
• Midwifery, out of simple decency, seems naturally suited to them—though I suspect even the word midwife will soon be pushed aside by the fashionable French term, and one small sign of our former modesty will be erased from the language.
• They could study politics and aim their goodwill where it matters most.

And they should read history properly. If you treat history as nothing but a parade of famous individuals—like reading a string of biographies—then it’s barely more useful than a shelf of romances. To learn from it, you have to notice the character of the times: the political shifts, the improvements, the arts, the forces that shape ordinary life. In other words, history should be read as the story of humanity, not as the highlight reel of a few men who stood in a niche for a moment and then disappeared into the dark current of time.

Women could also pursue all kinds of practical work—real business, real management—if they were educated in a more disciplined, sensible way. That alone would save many from the grim options society quietly pushes them toward, including the “respectable” versions of exploitation that sit uncomfortably close to outright prostitution. As things stand, women are driven to marry for support the way men accept government posts: as a paid arrangement, with the duties treated as optional. And if a woman tries to earn her own living—an admirable effort—she’s often judged as if she’d dropped to the level of those desperate women who survive by selling themselves. Isn’t it telling that milliners and dressmakers are treated as the “next class” down?

The truth is, the jobs open to women aren’t liberal or dignifying; they’re mostly menial. Even when a woman’s education qualifies her to become a governess—trusted with children’s minds—she’s not treated like the tutor of a son. And tutors themselves are often handled in ways that undermine their authority and comfort, so it’s not hard to imagine how much worse it gets for women.

Worse still, women raised as “gentlewomen” aren’t prepared for the humiliating roles that necessity sometimes forces on them. So when they fall into those positions, society treats it as a disgrace. And anyone who needs to be told this doesn’t understand human nature: nothing cuts more sharply than being forced downward into a life the world tells you is shameful.

Some women might avoid marriage out of genuine self-respect. Others may have no real way to escape servitude except through a miserable bargain called “marrying for protection.” If that’s the situation, doesn’t it expose a glaring failure of government—and a shocking indifference to the happiness of half its people? A decent society would make room for honest, independent women by encouraging them into respectable work and giving them a recognized place.

Because to turn private virtue into public good, women must have a civil existence in the state—whether married or single. Without that, we’ll keep seeing capable women, made painfully sensitive by undeserved contempt, droop and break under it like a flower crushed by a plow.

It’s a bleak fact, and yet it’s presented to us as the “blessed” result of civilization: the most respectable women are often the most oppressed. And unless they have unusually strong minds—stronger than average in either sex—constant treatment as inferior will eventually make them become what they’re called. Not by nature, but by pressure.

How many women waste their lives in quiet misery who could have:

• practiced medicine,
• managed a farm,
• run a shop,
• stood upright on their own work,

instead of bowing under a heavy, showy “sensibility” that first adds a kind of fragile shine—and then consumes the very beauty it brightened? And I’ll say something that sounds cynical but fits what I’ve seen: poets like to pair pity and love as close relatives, but helplessness rarely inspires much compassion unless the helpless person is also beautiful. In that case, pity often serves as love’s soft assistant—or, more bluntly, as lust’s messenger.

How much more worthy is the woman who earns her own bread by doing any honest duty than the most polished beauty. Beauty? The word feels cheap beside what I truly admire: moral beauty—the harmony of a well-ordered mind, the quiet fitness that keeps the passions in tune. I almost blush to compare the two. And yet I can’t help grieving that so few women aim for this kind of respectability. Too many are pulled into the dizzy whirl of pleasure, or sink into the lazy calm that dulls even the “good” women it absorbs.

They’re taught to take pride in being weak. They must be protected, shielded from care, spared the rough work that actually strengthens the mind. If that’s the decree—if women insist on making themselves insignificant, choosing to “sweetly” waste life away—then they shouldn’t expect to be valued after their beauty fades. The prettiest flowers are admired, plucked, and torn apart by the same careless hand that wanted them.

I want, out of genuine goodwill, to press this truth on my own sex in a hundred ways. But I worry they won’t listen—not to a truth that hard experience has already driven into many troubled hearts. They won’t willingly trade the privileges of rank and gender for the privileges of being fully human, privileges no one can claim without shouldering human duties.

For my part, I value most the writers who make one person feel for another, regardless of social position or the theatrical “drapery” of manufactured sentiment. And I want to persuade reasonable men—men who can think without defensiveness—to consider my argument as a whole. I’m appealing to their understanding, and as a fellow human being I claim, in the name of my sex, some place in their hearts. Help emancipate your companion. Help make her a true partner.

If men would only break our chains with generosity—and accept rational companionship instead of demanding submissive obedience—they’d discover something simple: we would become better daughters, better sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers—in short, better citizens. We would love with real affection because we would have learned to respect ourselves. And a good man’s peace of mind wouldn’t be poisoned by his wife’s idle vanity, nor would babies be sent off to rest against a stranger’s breast because they never truly found a home in their mother’s.

10

Parental Affection

Parental affection might be the most blinding version of self-love there is. We talk about “loving your children” as if it’s automatically noble and sensible—but often it’s not. Parents can “love” in ways that are downright brutal, steamrolling every other obligation just to push their children higher in the world. And in a bitter twist, they claim they’re securing the child’s future happiness while making the child’s present life miserable through sheer, despotic control.

That’s how power behaves. Whatever mask it wears, power wants to rule—without limits, without questions. It builds its authority over a kind of darkness, because it knows what would happen if people started looking closely: the whole structure might wobble. So tyrants of every kind chant the same slogan: unconditional obedience. To “make assurance doubly sure,” one kind of tyranny props up another. And tyrants have every reason to panic if reason ever becomes the standard for duty in everyday relationships—because once the light turns on in one corner, it tends to spread. If full daylight ever arrived, people would laugh at the ridiculous “monsters” that terrified them in the long night of ignorance, or even in the gray half-light of timid questioning.

In a lot of minds, “parental affection” is simply a convenient cover for domination—especially when someone can tyrannize without consequences. Only genuinely good and wise people are satisfied with the kind of respect that can survive discussion. If you truly believe you’re right, you don’t fear honest questions. You don’t dread careful scrutiny grounded in basic justice, because you trust that the more educated people become, the deeper simple, fair principles will take root. You don’t cling to quick fixes. You don’t pretend that something can be “true in theory” but “false in practice.” Instead of scrambling to protect today’s advantage, you can afford to wait—confident that, over time, even innovation becomes normal, and the hissing of selfishness and envy dies down.

Now, if the ability to reflect on the past and look sharply into the future is one of humanity’s great privileges, we have to admit that some people barely use it. To them, anything new feels automatically wrong. They can’t tell the difference between what’s merely possible and what’s truly monstrous, so they panic where there’s no real danger—running from reason as if it were a torch meant to burn them. But here’s the thing: nobody has ever clearly mapped the boundaries of what’s possible, and so the determined reformer keeps moving forward anyway.

Women, however—kept in chains by prejudice in almost every situation—rarely get to practice enlightened maternal affection. Instead, many are pushed into extremes: they neglect their children, or they spoil them through misguided indulgence. And some mothers’ affection, as I’ve called it before, is painfully coarse—so consuming that it wipes out basic humanity. Justice, truth, everything gets sacrificed by these “Rebekahs,” and for the sake of their own children they trample sacred duties, forgetting the shared bond that ties the entire human family together. But reason points to a hard truth: when one duty or affection swallows all the rest, it’s a sign of a mind and heart too small to carry even that one duty conscientiously. The moment it stops being guided by principle, it loses the dignity of duty and turns into something else entirely—a whim wearing a holy costume.

And that matters, because caring for children in infancy is one of the major responsibilities nature attaches to women. If we thought clearly about what that work actually requires, we’d have some of the strongest arguments imaginable for strengthening women’s minds.

A child’s mind has to be shaped early, and temperament especially needs careful, skillful attention. But how can a woman give that kind of steady, wise guidance if she loves her children only because they’re hers, and never asks what her duty is grounded on beyond whatever she happens to feel in the moment? When affection isn’t guided by reason, it swings wildly. That’s why women so often get pushed into opposite extremes—either excessively doting or coldly negligent and unnatural.

To be a good mother, a woman needs sound judgment—and she needs independence of mind, something few women are allowed to develop when they’re trained to depend completely on their husbands. “Meek” wives usually become foolish mothers. They want their children to love them most, and they quietly recruit them as allies against the father, who gets set up as a household scarecrow. If punishment is needed—even when the child wronged the mother—the father must deliver it. He must be the judge in every dispute. I’ll return to this in more depth when I discuss private education. For now, the point is simple: unless women’s understanding is widened, and their character strengthened by the freedom to govern their own conduct, they won’t have the judgment or self-control needed to manage children well.

In fact, what many people call a mother’s “parental affection” barely deserves the name if it doesn’t lead her to nurse her own child. Nursing isn’t just a bodily task; it’s a practice that naturally builds affection on both sides—maternal and filial. And it’s an indispensable duty for men and women to perform the kinds of duties that generate the affections that best protect us against vice. What gets labeled “natural affection” is, I suspect, a weak thread on its own. Real affection grows out of repeated, lived mutual sympathy. And what sympathy can a mother be practicing if she sends her baby to a nurse, then takes the child back only to hand them off again to a school?

Providence, in a way, has given women a natural bridge when romantic love cools into friendship—when mutual trust replaces overheated admiration. A child can gently tighten that loosening bond: shared care creates a new, shared sympathy. But even a child—though a “pledge” of affection—won’t revive it if both parents are content to outsource the work to paid helpers. If you do your duty by proxy, don’t complain when you miss duty’s reward. Parental affection is what grows filial duty.

11

Duty to Parents

People have a lazy habit of treating tradition as if it were proof. We let “this is how it’s always been” stand in for actual reasons, and then we park our duties on whatever story sounds oldest and most unchallengeable. Kings, we’re told, get their authority in a straight line from the “King of kings.” Parents, likewise, supposedly inherit their rights from the first parent of humankind.

But why do we keep running backward to ancient origins for principles that ought to rest on the same foundation in every era—and carry exactly the same weight today as they did a thousand years ago, not one ounce more?

Here’s the real logic. When parents do their job well, they earn something powerful: a deep, almost sacred claim on their children’s gratitude. Yet many parents don’t want affection on those terms. They demand blind obedience precisely because they haven’t earned reasonable loyalty. And to make their shaky demands feel unavoidable, they wrap them in a fog of “mystery” and “sanctity.” What else can you call it when someone insists you must obey weak or vicious people simply because those people once obeyed an instinct to reproduce?

The basic deal (and where it ends)

The reciprocal duty between parent and child is simple:

• If a parent carefully tends a child through helpless infancy, that parent has a right to expect comparable care when age makes them fragile.
• But once a child is grown—old enough to answer to society for their own actions—forcing them under another person’s will is an abusive overreach.

Trying to rule an adult child by command isn’t just cruel; it warps morality itself. It’s disturbingly similar to religious systems that claim nothing is right or wrong on its own—only whatever God happens to will. In both cases, the idea of moral reason gets erased.

Earned influence vs. automatic obedience

In my experience, parents who put in more than ordinary effort rarely end up neglected. Quite the opposite: if a child grows up trusting the judgment of a truly respected parent, that habit is hard to shake—even later, when the child’s mature reasoning sees that their father isn’t the wisest man alive.

Still, that lingering deference is a weakness (an “amiable” weakness, people might say, but a weakness all the same). Any reasonable adult has to guard against it. Because the commonly preached rule—obey your parent simply because they are your parent—does real damage. It chains the mind and trains a person for servile submission to any authority except reason.

So I separate what we owe parents into two kinds: natural duty and accidental duty.

Natural duty: what parents truly have a right to

A parent who works diligently to shape a child’s character and expand their understanding elevates a task shared by all animals into something only reason can make noble. This is parental affection at its most human: not mere instinct, but a conscious commitment to another person’s growth.

A parent like that earns the rights of the most serious friendship. Their advice deserves real attention even when their child is fully grown.

Accidental duty: what society pressures us into calling “respect”

Now consider marriage. After twenty-one, a parent doesn’t truly have the right to forbid a marriage on any grounds. And yet, two decades of care and anxiety do create a claim—not to command, but to be taken seriously. At minimum, if your chosen partner does not win the approval of your “first friend” (your parent in the best sense), you should be willing to wait a short time—two or three years—rather than rush headlong and treat that concern as nothing.

But what passes for “respect for parents” is often something far uglier. It’s usually a debasing principle: a selfish respect for property. The father who is “blindly obeyed” is obeyed either because the child is too weak to resist, or because the child is motivated by reasons that degrade human character.

Bad parenting, big misery—and the audacity that follows

A huge share of the misery roaming the world in grotesque shapes grows out of parental negligence. And yet negligent parents are often the most possessive of what they call their “natural rights”—even when those supposed rights undermine the real birthright of every human being: the right to act under the guidance of one’s own reason.

This pattern isn’t accidental. Vicious and lazy people love arbitrary privileges. They push hardest for “rights” precisely in proportion to how much they refuse the duties that alone could justify those rights. It’s common sense—or, if you like, the self-defense instinct of ignorant weakness. It reminds me of a fish that muddies the water to escape its enemy instead of facing it in a clear stream.

Why “prescription” hates daylight

Supporters of prescription—rule by precedent, by “it’s always been so”—run from clear argument. They retreat into darkness and then borrow the language reserved for God’s unknowable majesty, demanding the sort of unquestioning reverence that belongs only to what is truly beyond human understanding.

But there’s an important distinction. The “darkness” that hides God from us, if it exists at all, concerns speculative truths—the mysteries of metaphysics. It does not cover moral truths. Moral truths are meant to be bright. God is light, and our nature is not built to require duties whose reasonableness can’t be seen when we open our eyes.

The cost of family tyranny, especially for women

Yes, an indolent parent of high rank can force a performance of respect. And on the European continent, women in particular are often treated as extensions of family strategy. Their families rarely ask what they want or how they might live comfortably; they simply arrange lives for them as trophies of pride.

The outcome is well known. These “dutiful” daughters become adulteresses, and then—bitterly, predictably—they neglect their own children’s education while demanding from them the same kind of obedience they were forced to practice.

In truth, in every country women are kept too much under parental rule. How few parents ever speak to their children in the only rational way—apparently the way Heaven intends for the entire human race:

It’s in your interest to obey me until you can judge for yourself. God has planted affection in me to protect you while your reason is unfolding. But when your mind is mature, you should follow me only so far as my views match the light you now see with your own.

What blind submission does to a mind

Servile bondage to parents cripples every faculty. Locke put it plainly: if children’s minds are curbed too much—if their spirits are broken by an overly strict hand—they lose vigor and industry.

That harshness helps explain the weakness often seen in women, because girls, for many reasons, are more thoroughly “kept down” than boys. The obedience demanded from them, like so many duties imposed on women, is driven less by reason than by “propriety,” by decorum, by appearances. Trained early to submit without thinking, they are prepared—almost rehearsed—for the slavery of marriage.

Someone will object: plenty of women are not slaves within marriage. True. But then they become tyrants. What they gain is not rational freedom, but a lawless kind of power—like the influence of favorites under absolute monarchs—won through debasing means.

To be clear, I’m not claiming all boys or girls live as slaves. I’m insisting on this: whenever children are forced into blind obedience, their abilities shrink, and their temper becomes either overbearing or abject.

And I grieve that parents, lazily leaning on a supposed privilege, snuff out the first faint glow of reason. They make “duty” an empty word because they refuse to place it on the only foundation that can hold: knowledge. A duty not grounded in understanding cannot stand firm against sudden passion or the quiet undermining of self-love.

Notice, too, who shouts loudest for obedience “because I said so.” It is rarely the parent who has proven affection by faithfully doing their duty—who has allowed genuine parental love to take root through sympathy and reason, not through swollen pride. Those parents don’t need to demand. They set a good example and let the example do its work. And it almost always produces its natural effect: filial reverence.

Teach children to submit to reason

Children cannot be taught too early to submit to reason—the real meaning of the “necessity” Rousseau talked about without properly defining. To submit to reason is to submit to the nature of things, and to the God who formed that nature for our true good.

So why twist children’s minds just as they begin to open—simply to indulge the laziness of parents who want the privilege of rule without paying nature’s price? A right always includes a duty. And it follows just as fairly that those who refuse the duty forfeit the right.

Why reasoning works (and commanding doesn’t)

Yes, it’s easier to command than to explain. But it does not follow that children are incapable of understanding why they must do certain things regularly. A steady adherence to a few simple principles is exactly how a wise parent gradually gains real influence over a child’s mind.

That influence becomes genuinely strong when it’s tempered by consistent, lived affection—affection that reaches the child’s heart, not just their fear. In fact, as a general rule, the affection we inspire tends to resemble the affection we cultivate. Even “natural” feelings, often treated as separate from reason, are more connected to judgment than people admit. And as one more reason women’s understanding must be cultivated: when affections live only in the heart, they take on an animal kind of caprice.

Irregular authority breeds manipulation—and girls get hit first

Nothing injures a mind sooner than the erratic exercise of parental power—and girls suffer these irregularities more than boys. When people never allow their will to be questioned, except when they happen to be in a pleasant mood (and then they “relax” dramatically), their rule is almost always unreasonable.

To dodge that arbitrariness, girls learn early the very tactics they later use on husbands. I’ve often watched a sharp-faced little girl govern an entire household—until, now and then, her mother’s anger erupts out of nowhere. And why? Some “moral” accident: her hair wasn’t dressed well, or she lost more money at cards than she wants to admit, or something equally petty.

A grim dilemma for anyone trying to teach girls virtue

Watching scenes like this leads to a bleak conclusion. If a girl’s first affections must either mislead her or make her duties collide until everything rests on whims and customs, what can we expect as she grows older?

And how can a teacher fix the problem? To teach virtue on solid principle is, in a sense, to teach her to despise her parents.

Children cannot—and should not—be trained to “make allowances” for their parents’ faults. Every such allowance weakens the force of reason in their minds and makes them more forgiving of their own faults. The mature virtue that makes us strict with ourselves and gentle with others is noble—but it belongs to maturity. Children should be taught the simple virtues. If they start too early excusing passions and manners, they blunt the sharp edge of the standard by which they should govern themselves, and they grow unjust in the same measure that they grow indulgent.

Why morality trips at the doorstep

The affections of children—and of weak people—are always selfish. They love their relatives because those relatives love them, not because they admire their virtues. Until esteem and love are blended in that first affection, and until reason is made the foundation of the first duty, morality stumbles right at the threshold.

And until society is built very differently, parents will, I fear, keep insisting on obedience simply because they can get it. They will keep trying to anchor that power in “Divine right”—a claim that collapses the moment it is examined by reason.

12

On National Education

The benefits of even the most attentive private education will always be limited until education becomes a true national project. No parent can simply withdraw from society with a child—and even if you could, you can’t rewind your own life and become the kind of genuine friend and playmate a young child needs. And when children grow up mostly around adults, they quickly pick up a kind of forced, premature “grown-up” behavior that can stunt the development of both mind and body.

If you want to truly open a child’s abilities, you have to encourage them to think for themselves. The most reliable way to do that is to put many children together and have them pursue shared goals side by side—learning, arguing, experimenting, and correcting one another.

A child’s mind can become lazy with alarming speed when their habit is simply to ask a question, accept the answer, and move on. Later in life, many never recover the energy to shake off that mental numbness. Among peers, though, this dynamic changes. Kids still influence each other, of course, but the direction of their curiosity isn’t entirely controlled by adults—adults who too often dampen, or even ruin, ability by pushing it forward too fast. And if a child is confined to one adult’s company—even a very wise adult—that premature “bringing forward” is almost guaranteed.

There’s another reason peers matter: childhood is when you plant the seeds of affection that will later make life worth living. The respect we feel toward a parent is not the same thing as the social affections that eventually shape our happiness. Those social affections rest on equality—on an exchange of feelings that isn’t weighed down by that watchful seriousness that may not demand obedience, but still makes open disagreement feel risky.

Even a child who deeply loves a parent will still ache to play and chatter with other children. And the respect tied up with being a child—because filial esteem nearly always contains a trace of fear—will, if it doesn’t teach slyness, at least keep the child from pouring out the little secrets that first open the heart to friendship and trust, and that gradually widen into real benevolence. Add to that: the child won’t develop that frank, straightforward way of being that young people only learn by often spending time in groups where they dare to say what they think—without fearing a scolding for “presumption” or mockery for “stupidity.”

I’ll admit: when I first reflected on what I saw in schools as they are currently run, I argued strongly for private education. But experience has changed my view. I still believe that today’s schools are often hotbeds of vice and foolishness, and that what passes there as “knowledge of human nature” is frequently just cunning selfishness.

At school, boys often become:

• gluttonous and careless in their habits
• strangers to domestic affection
• drawn early into libertinism that ruins the body before it has even matured, hardening the heart while weakening the mind

And I dislike boarding schools for an additional reason: the entire year is distorted by the looming promise of vacations. For at least half the time, children’s minds are fixed on the next break, burning with anticipation. Then, when the holiday finally arrives, it’s often spent in total dissipation and coarse indulgence.

So you might think: fine—raise them at home. Home education does avoid the chaos of a school calendar where nearly a quarter of the year is spent in idleness, and nearly as much again in regret and anticipation. But home has its own trap. Boys raised entirely at home can develop an inflated sense of their own importance: they’re allowed to boss servants around, and many mothers—anxious about “manners,” eager to produce a polished gentleman—smother, at birth, the sturdier virtues of a good man. Taken into company when they should be seriously working, treated like little adults while they are still boys, they often become vain and soft.

The real solution is to avoid two extremes that both damage morality by combining public and private education. If you want to make people into citizens, two natural steps lead you there:

• cultivate domestic affections first—the feelings that open the heart to the many forms of humanity
• still allow children to spend a large share of their time, as equals, with other children

I still remember, with real pleasure, the country day school—the boy walking out each morning in any weather with his books and his dinner, if the walk was long. No servant led “young master” by the hand. Once he wore coat and breeches, he was expected to manage for himself, and he came home alone at night to recount the day’s adventures at a parent’s knee. His father’s house remained his home, and he remembered it fondly ever after. I’d even ask men of real ability who were educated this way: hasn’t the memory of some shady lane where you studied a lesson, or a stile where you sat making a kite or mending a bat, made your countryside dear to you?

But what boy looks back with pleasure on years spent shut up in a cramped academy near London—unless he happens to remember tormenting some poor, scarecrow-like assistant teacher, or snatching a tart from a vendor and devouring it with that catlike, selfish hunger boarding schools teach so well? In boarding schools of every kind, the leisure of the younger boys becomes mischief, and the leisure of the older boys becomes vice.

Worse still, in large schools the entire moral atmosphere is poisoned by a system of tyranny and servility among the boys—without even mentioning the slavery to empty forms that can make religion feel like a bad play. What good can you expect from a youth who takes communion simply to avoid losing half a guinea, which he then likely spends on some sensual indulgence? Half their effort goes into dodging public worship. And honestly, you can see why: the constant repetition of the same ceremony becomes an exhausting restraint on their natural liveliness.

These ceremonies do real damage to character. And since our church no longer treats lip-service—performed while heart and mind are elsewhere—as some spiritual “deposit” to be cashed out later, why not abolish these hollow performances?

Because in this country, fear of change spreads to everything. And that fear is often just cowardly laziness in disguise—the anxious timidity of people who want to keep their comfortable spot by coating it over, like a slug leaving slime on the path, then eating, drinking, and enjoying themselves instead of doing the work their position demands (apart from a few empty rituals). These are the people who shout loudest about obeying a founder’s will, condemning any reform as though it were injustice itself.

Here I’m thinking especially of the leftover traces of Catholic custom preserved in our colleges—oddly guarded by Protestant members who claim to champion the established church, yet never lose sight of the benefits that ignorance has historically provided. They reverence old “rights of possession” like a fortress, and they keep the sluggish bell tinkling people to prayers, as in the days when elevating the host was imagined to wipe away the sins of the people—because they dread that one reform might lead to another, and that the spirit might finally overrule the dead letter.

These old practices are poison to the morals of the clergy. Men who two or three times a day perform a service sloppily—believing it useless, yet calling it their duty—soon lose any real sense of duty at all. At college, forced either to attend or to scheme their way out of worship, they develop a habitual contempt for the very service by which they later earn an idle living. It’s mumbled like office work, the way a bored schoolboy rattles off a memorized lesson. And the petty college jargon often spills from the preacher’s mouth the moment he steps down from the pulpit—even while he eats the dinner he “earned” in such a dishonest way.

Nothing is more irreverent than the cathedral service as it’s now performed here, and you won’t find many weaker men than those enslaved by this childish routine. What remains is a disgusting skeleton of an older faith: the solemnity that once gripped the imagination—even if it didn’t purify the heart—has been stripped away. Anyone with even a spark of imagination can feel how a continental high mass can impress the mind with an awful melancholy and a sublime tenderness that sits close to devotion. I’m not claiming these feelings have more moral value than other refined emotions. I’m saying something simpler: if you’re going to use ceremony at all, the theatrical grandeur that genuinely moves the senses is better than the cold parade that insults the intellect without touching the heart.

In a discussion of national education, these points matter—especially because the defenders of these institutions, degraded into childishness, love to pose as religion’s champions. Religion—pure comfort in a world of sorrow—how your clear stream has been muddied by people who try to dam the living waters into one narrow canal, even though they naturally flow toward God, the vast ocean of existence. What would life be without the peace that only love of God—grounded in humanity—can give? Earthly affections, again and again, turn back to feed on the heart that nourishes them. And the purest acts of kindness, so often chilled by people, must rise as a free offering to the One who gave them birth, whose bright image they faintly reflect.

But in public schools, religion—mixed up with tedious ceremonies and unreasonable restraints—takes on the worst possible appearance. Not the sober, austere face that commands respect even while it inspires fear, but a ridiculous one that becomes the setup for a joke. In fact, many of the “clever stories” and sharp quips that entertain people at their card tables are manufactured from school religious incidents—often by the very men who keep the abuse going so they can live off its spoils.

You won’t find a more dogmatic or luxurious class of men than the pedantic tyrants who live in colleges and preside over public schools. Vacations corrupt both masters and pupils. And the time the masters spend cultivating the nobility brings the same vanity and extravagance into their own households, pushing out domestic duties and comforts—while they awkwardly imitate the grandeur of aristocratic homes.

Meanwhile the boys—who live expensively with masters and assistants—are never truly “domesticated,” though that’s the excuse for placing them there. Dinner is silent; they swallow a quick glass of wine and retreat to plan some prank, or to mock the person and manners of the very people they were just fawning over—people they ought to regard as stand-ins for their parents.

Is it surprising, then, that boys become selfish and vicious when they’re shut out from genuine social life? Or that, after this training, a bishop’s mitre sometimes ends up on the head of one of these “diligent pastors”?

The desire to live like the class just above you infects every level of society. Meanness—smallness of spirit—walks hand in hand with that ignoble ambition. And no careers are more degrading than those climbed by patronage—yet from those careers the tutors of youth are commonly chosen. So how can we expect them to inspire independence of mind, when their own conduct must be guided by the cautious prudence of people always watching for promotion?

And remarkably, I’ve heard schoolmasters argue as though boys’ morals were none of their concern. They claim they only promise Latin and Greek—and that they’ve done their duty if they send a few good scholars on to college.

Yes, a few strong scholars may be produced by competition and discipline. But to bring those clever boys forward, the health and morals of many others have been sacrificed. The sons of the gentry and wealthy commoners are mostly educated at these institutions; and is anyone prepared to claim that the majority—even allowing for every advantage—come out as even passable scholars?

Society doesn’t benefit when a handful of brilliant men are manufactured at the expense of the crowd. It’s true that great men sometimes appear at intervals, often around great revolutions, to restore order and blow away the clouds that gather over truth. But if society had more reason and virtue to begin with, we wouldn’t need those strong, stormy winds.

Every kind of public education should aim to form citizens. But if you want good citizens, you first have to exercise the affections of a son and a brother. That’s how the heart expands. Public affection and public virtue must grow out of private character—or they’re just meteors: bright streaks across a dark sky that vanish as quickly as we admire them.

Few people truly love humanity who did not first love their parents, their siblings, and even the household animals they played with as children. Practicing sympathy young sets the moral climate of the whole person. And the memory of those first loves and pursuits gives life to later attachments, which are more guided by reason. In youth, the warmest friendships form. The heart, prepared for friendship, learns to seek pleasure in something nobler than the crude satisfaction of appetite.

So if you want children to love home and the steady pleasures of domestic life, they should be educated at home—because riotous holidays only make them love home for selfish reasons, as a break from excess. Still, vacations that don’t strengthen family affection continually interrupt study and sabotage any plan of improvement that includes temperance and self-control. Yet if you abolished vacations altogether, children would be cut off from their parents entirely, and I doubt they’d become better citizens by sacrificing the very affections that prepare them for social duty—by weakening the bonds that make marriage both necessary and respectable. But if private education merely produces self-importance or isolates a person inside family pride, then the problem hasn’t been cured—only relocated.

That line of reasoning brings me back to what I want to emphasize: the need to establish proper day schools.

And these should be national institutions. As long as schoolmasters depend on the whims of parents, you can’t expect much effort beyond what’s needed to satisfy the ignorance of those paying them. In fact, the pressure to give parents a “sample” of a boy’s abilities—something trotted out during vacations for every visitor to admire—causes more harm than you’d guess. The performance is rarely, to put it mildly, entirely the child’s own. The master either quietly encourages deceit or cranks the poor machine up to an unnatural effort that damages the gears and halts steady progress.

So the child’s memory gets stuffed with meaningless words, meant only for display, while the understanding gains no clear ideas at all. Real education—education that deserves to be called cultivation of mind—teaches young people how to begin thinking. The imagination shouldn’t be allowed to corrupt the understanding before it has gained strength, or vanity will march ahead as the scout of vice. In truth, almost every way adults use to “show off” a child’s learning harms the child’s moral character.

How much time is wasted teaching children to recite what they don’t understand—seated on benches, dressed in their finest, while mothers listen in amazement to parrot-like chatter delivered in solemn rhythms, with all the pomp of ignorance and foolishness. Those exhibitions do one thing extremely well: they spread vanity through the whole mind. And they don’t even achieve what they promise—children don’t learn to speak naturally, and they don’t learn to behave with real grace.

So far from being harmless, these silly accomplishments could almost be called a course of study in performing affection. You can see the shift in the boys we raise. We rarely meet the simple, shy kid anymore—even though most people with any taste aren’t actually repelled by that clumsy, awkward bashfulness that naturally belongs to childhood. What disgusts us is what often replaces it: the swagger and performative faces that come from schooling and being shoved too early into adult social life.

But how are we supposed to fix this while the whole school system is built on pleasing parents? A schoolmaster’s livelihood depends on mothers and fathers paying the bills. And when a dozen competing schools are dangling their bait, it’s the vain parents who bite—because “love” makes them want their child to outshine the neighbors’ children.

Without an unusual stroke of luck, a thoughtful, principled teacher will go hungry before he can build a school, if he refuses to hustle weak-minded parents with the usual “trade secrets.” Even in the best-run schools—where you don’t cram children in by the dozen—kids still pick up bad habits. In ordinary schools, it’s worse: body, heart, and mind all get stunted.

Here’s the ugly math:

• Many parents shop mostly for the cheapest option.
• The master can’t survive unless he takes more children than he can responsibly manage.
• The tiny fee per child doesn’t let him hire enough competent help, so education turns into mechanical supervision, not real teaching.

And even when the building and garden look impressive, the children barely get to enjoy them. They’re constantly reminded—through petty restrictions—that this isn’t home. The “best” rooms and the nice grounds are kept polished for the parents’ weekend visits. On Sundays, the parents show up, admire the parade, and go away impressed by the very display that makes their children’s daily lives cramped and joyless.

I can’t count how often I’ve heard sensible women—girls are policed and intimidated even more than boys—describe the exhaustion of school confinement. Imagine being surrounded by a beautiful garden and not being allowed to step off one wide, straight path. Imagine being forced to march back and forth, head up, toes turned out, shoulders pinned back, performing “good posture” like a drill. Meanwhile nature is basically begging children to run, leap, twist, sprawl—to move in the varied ways that build health.

Those bright, clean animal spirits—the energy that helps both mind and body grow—get soured. They spill out as pointless yearning or sharp little complaints that shrink the mind and spoil the temper. Or they rush upward and, instead of strengthening the whole person, they sharpen the intellect too early and out of proportion. The result is that pitiful kind of “cleverness” that looks like intelligence but is really just cunning—and I’m afraid it will keep staining women’s character as long as women remain slaves to power.

Then there’s the broader moral damage. The casual disrespect for chastity in men, I’m convinced, sits at the root of many physical and moral miseries—misery for humanity as a whole, and also the vices and humiliations that degrade and ruin women. School is often where boys lose the decent shyness that, at home, might have matured into genuine modesty.

And what do boys learn from each other when they’re packed together, sleeping in the same rooms, breathing the same stale air of constant exposure? I won’t catalog the filthy tricks, but anyone who has lived near a boys’ school knows they happen. Add to that the habits that weaken the body and, just as dangerously, block the growth of a refined, respectful mind.

When modesty isn’t deliberately cultivated in men, every relationship in society rots. It isn’t only that love—love that should purify the heart and awaken youthful strength for generous living—gets thrown away for premature lust. It’s that all the social affections get dulled. Early selfish gratification pollutes the mind and dries up the generous “juices” of the heart. Innocence is violated in ways that feel unnatural even as you describe them, and private vice doesn’t stay private; it becomes a public disease.

There’s another piece people underestimate: personal order—habits of cleanliness, privacy, and self-respect—shapes moral character far more than most admit. And those habits are learned best at home, where a healthy reserve naturally checks the kind of overfamiliarity that slides into crudeness and ends up insulting the affection it claims to enjoy.

I’ve already criticized the bad habits girls pick up when they’re shut up together. The same logic applies to boys. And it leads to the conclusion I’ve been pressing all along: if we want to improve both sexes, they should be educated together, not only in private families but in public schools too.

If marriage is the cement of society, then people should be educated on the same model. Otherwise the relationship between the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship. And women will never be able to carry out the particular duties associated with their sex—duties everyone insists they have—until they become enlightened citizens. That means they must be free in a practical sense: able to earn their own living independently of men, in the same plain way that one man is independent of another.

In fact, marriage won’t be held truly sacred until women, raised alongside men, are prepared to be companions rather than rulers-by-charm. Cunning always makes a person contemptible; oppression makes them timid. I’m convinced enough to predict this: virtue will never truly take hold in society until the virtues of both sexes rest on reason, and until the shared human affections are allowed to gain strength through the steady practice of mutual duties.

If boys and girls studied together, we could teach what I’d call graceful decencies early—habits that produce modesty without stuffing the mind full of poisonous sexual double-standards. All those “lessons” in politeness, all that rigid handbook decorum that so often walks right beside falsehood, would become unnecessary. Real propriety would grow from daily practice—not performed for visitors like a fancy costume, but as the quiet result of a clean mind.

Wouldn’t that kind of sincere, simple elegance be a far more chaste tribute to family affection than the flashy, paid-for compliments of fashionable, empty social life? Yet as long as society prizes cleverness over understanding, we’ll keep seeing a shortage of heart and taste. The harlot’s rouge will keep substituting for the natural glow that only virtuous feeling can put on a face.

Gallantry—and what people casually call “love”—can survive without an honest character. But friendship’s main pillars are respect and confidence. And esteem can’t be built on… nothing in particular.

People like to treat “taste” as some mysterious gift. But a taste for the fine arts takes cultivation—no more, really, than a taste for the virtuous affections. Both require an expanded mind, because an expanded mind opens up countless sources of real pleasure. So why do people sprint toward noise, crowds, and constant stimulation? Because their minds are restless and underused. Because they haven’t nourished the virtues of the heart. When that inner life is thin, people can only see and feel in the gross—in blunt, loud impressions—and they end up craving endless variety, because anything simple tastes dull.

This point goes farther than many philosophers realize. If nature did, in fact, shape women especially for domestic duties, then she also made them strongly capable of attached affections. Yet women are famously hungry for pleasure. And by my definition, that’s exactly what we should expect—because they can’t enter into the fine details of domestic taste when they lack judgment, which is the foundation of all true taste. The mind, despite what sensual critics argue, has its own privilege: it can carry a pure kind of joy straight into the heart.

I’ve watched a magnificent poem get tossed aside with a bored yawn—while a man of genuine taste returns to it again and again, transported. I’ve had music nearly stop my breathing, only for a lady to break the spell by asking where I bought my dress. I’ve seen a truly exquisite painting receive a cold glance, while a crude caricature earned sparkling delight. And in the presence of some terrifying feature of nature that filled me with sublime stillness, I’ve been urged to admire the cute tricks of a lapdog I was forced to travel with. Is it any wonder that a person with that kind of tastelessness might prefer petting the dog to tending her children? Or that she’d choose the loud rant of flattery over the plain voice of sincerity?

To make the point clearer, notice something: the greatest geniuses and the most cultivated minds often show the deepest love for the simple beauties of nature. They feel—powerfully—what they later describe so well: the charm that natural affection and unsophisticated feeling spread around a human life. That ability to look into the heart and resonate with its emotions is what lets a poet give passions a living voice, and what lets a painter draw with a kind of fire.

True taste is the work of understanding as it observes natural causes and effects. And until women have more understanding, it’s pointless to expect them to possess genuine domestic taste. Their quick, lively senses will keep busy hardening their hearts, and their feelings will stay intense but short-lived unless education stocks the mind with knowledge.

It isn’t knowledge that pulls women away from their families. It’s the lack of domestic taste. That is what tears the smiling baby from the breast that should be feeding it. Women have been kept ignorant and forced into slavish dependence for many, many years—and yet what do we still hear? That they love pleasure and power; that they prefer rakes and soldiers; that they cling to toys; that vanity makes them value “accomplishments” more than virtues.

History, too, offers a grim list of crimes produced by cunning—crimes committed when the weak, enslaved person becomes crafty enough to outwit the master. In France, and in how many other places, men have played the role of luxurious tyrants while women became the sly administrators of their rule. Does that prove ignorance and dependence make women domesticated? Or does it show the opposite—that the system breeds a kind of warped strategy for survival?

Their folly becomes a joke among libertines who lounge in their company. And thoughtful men routinely complain that an obsessive love of dress and dissipation keeps the mother of a household away from home. Their hearts haven’t been corrupted by learning. Their minds haven’t been “led astray” by science. Yet they still don’t do the very domestic duties that everyone claims nature assigned them. Instead, the ongoing state of low-grade war between the sexes pushes women toward tricks and maneuvers that often defeat the more straightforward bluntness of force.

So when I call women slaves, I mean it in a political and civil sense. Indirectly, women sometimes gain too much influence—but they’re degraded by the very exertions required to gain that illicit power.

Let an enlightened nation, then, try a rational experiment. Give women a real share in the advantages of education and government. See whether, as they grow wiser and freer, they also become better—more natural, more dutiful in the best sense. The experiment can’t harm them, because men don’t have the power to make women more insignificant than they already are.

To make this practical, government should establish day schools for specific ages, where boys and girls are educated together. The school for young children—ages five to nine—should be completely free and open to every class. Each parish should have a select committee to appoint a sufficient number of qualified teachers, and parents should be able to file complaints of negligence or misconduct if six of them sign together.

In that setup, ushers—those subordinate underlings—would be unnecessary. And experience will always prove, I think, that this kind of petty authority is especially damaging to youth. What corrupts character more than outward submission paired with inward contempt? How can boys be expected to respect an usher when the master treats him like a servant—and even seems to encourage the mockery that becomes the boys’ favorite sport during playtime?

None of that would arise in an elementary day school where boys and girls, rich and poor, learn side by side. To block the usual vanity-based distinctions, they should dress alike, and everyone should be bound by the same rules—either submit to the discipline or leave.

The schoolroom should be surrounded by a large piece of land where children can move and exercise usefully. At that age, they shouldn’t be forced into sitting work for more than an hour at a time. And these breaks can be part of education, too, because children learn through vivid experiences that feel like a show—things they would ignore if we presented them as dry principles.

For example:

• botany
• mechanics
• astronomy

Alongside those, the day can include reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history, and a few simple experiments in natural philosophy. But none of this should steal time from active outdoor play.

Religion, history, the history of humanity, and politics could be taught through conversation—using the Socratic method of guided questions.

After nine, boys and girls headed for domestic work or trades should move to other schools and receive instruction shaped to their likely occupations. The sexes should still be together in the morning. In the afternoon, girls could attend a school focused on practical skills like plain sewing, dressmaking, and millinery.

Students with greater ability or wealth could attend another school where they learn ancient and modern languages, the elements of science, and a deeper course in history and politics—without cutting them off from literature.

“Boys and girls together?” I can already hear the objections. Yes—together. The worst consequence I can imagine is that some early attachment might form. And while that might offend a parent’s plans, it would likely strengthen the moral character of the young people. For I fear it will be a long time before the world is enlightened enough that parents—truly concerned only with their children’s virtue—will let them choose their own partners for life.

This arrangement would also encourage early marriages, and early marriages naturally bring some of the healthiest physical and moral effects. Notice how different a married citizen often becomes compared with the selfish peacock who lives only for himself and avoids marriage because he’s afraid he couldn’t maintain a certain “style.” Except in rare emergencies—which would be rarer still in a society founded on equality—a man learns to serve the public by first practicing the daily, smaller duties that make him fully human.

Under this plan, boys wouldn’t have their bodies and characters wrecked by early sexual corruption that breeds selfish men. And girls wouldn’t be made weak and vain by idleness and trivial pursuits. Of course, this assumes a real degree of equality between the sexes—enough to shut out flirtation-as-a-system (gallantry and coquetry) while still allowing friendship and love to soften the heart and prepare it for higher duties.

These would be genuine schools of morality. And if human happiness were allowed to flow from the clean springs of duty and affection, what progress might the mind make? Society can only be happy and free to the extent that it is virtuous. But today’s social distinctions eat away at private virtue and poison public virtue.

I’ve already attacked the custom of chaining girls to the needle and excluding them from political and civil work. Narrow their minds like that, and you make them unfit for the very “female duties” people claim nature assigned them.

If women are only employed with the tiny incidents of the day, they almost can’t help becoming sly. I’ve felt my stomach turn watching the sneaky maneuvers some women use to get whatever petty object their foolish hearts fix on. If a woman isn’t allowed to handle money or own anything outright, she learns to manipulate the household coins. If a husband offends her—stays out late, stirs jealousy—a new dress or shiny trinket becomes the peace-offering that smooths the household goddess’s fury.

But these small degradations wouldn’t stain women’s character if women were taught to respect themselves—if political and moral subjects were opened to them. And I’ll say it plainly: that’s the only way to make them properly attentive to domestic life. An active mind can hold the whole circle of duties at once—and still find time enough for all.

It isn’t women reaching for “masculine” virtues that pulls them off course. It isn’t reading books, thinking hard, or digging into science that makes them neglect what they owe to themselves or others. The real trouble is much duller—and much more damaging: laziness and vanity. When a mind has nothing solid to do, the love of comfort and the love of control take over fast.

And yes, I mean “empty” quite literally. The education most girls are given barely deserves the name. During the years when their brains should be getting stretched and strengthened, they’re mostly steered toward “accomplishments”—the polished skills meant to decorate a person rather than develop one. But accomplishments without understanding are hollow. If you don’t train the mind, every grace turns shallow and repetitive.

It’s like makeup at a crowded party: it catches the eye in a flash. But at home—where there’s no crowd to perform for—there’s nothing to sustain interest. Without real mental life, there’s no variety. So the pattern becomes predictable. In loud, glittery scenes of constant entertainment, you’ll often find the carefully constructed persona and the carefully constructed face. People who can’t bear being alone usually dread, almost as much, the ordinary family circle—because they don’t know how to contribute to it, and they don’t know how to enjoy it. They feel insignificant, or they’re simply bored by everything, including themselves.

The “coming out” ritual in fashionable society is a perfect example of this whole ugly setup. What could be more indecent than parading a girl through public spaces as a “marriageable young woman,” dressed up like a prize to be admired and evaluated? She’s taken from venue to venue, richly decorated, while being told to behave under strict rules. Small wonder that, inside that restraint, she starts to itch for freedom. She’s been trained, with relentless attention, to focus first on one thing: her own appearance. Her “first love,” so to speak, becomes her own person—because everyone has made her fate depend on it.

There’s a better way. Instead of this empty routine—sighing for show that has no real taste, and status that has no heart—imagine young people of both sexes forming friendships and attachments in real schools: places built to educate minds and shape character. As they grew up, dancing, music, and drawing could still be part of life, but as relaxation, not as the main event. And for families with money, young people should generally stay in those schools, in some form, until adulthood. Those preparing for specific professions could attend specialized instruction a few mornings a week.

I’m only sketching an outline here, not presenting a finished blueprint. Still, there’s one rule from a pamphlet I mentioned earlier that I strongly endorse: students shouldn’t be dependent on teachers when it comes to punishment. Let them be judged by their peers. That kind of system would plant deep principles of justice early, and it could do real good for temperament—because children’s spirits are often soured young by petty tyranny, until they grow either sneaky and resentful or harsh and domineering.

I can already hear the sneer: romantic. Cold-hearted people love that word, as if it ends the conversation. But I’ll blunt it with a thought from a moral writer worth listening to: a truly humane heart, fired by zeal, often clears obstacles that a rough, repelling “reason” will use as excuses to do nothing. That hard kind of reasoning always discovers, first, why the public good is inconvenient—and then treats that inconvenience as a reason to give up.

Of course, the libertines will protest too. They’ll say women would be “unsexed” if they gained strength in body and mind, and that beauty—soft, enchanting beauty—would disappear. I think the opposite is true. What we’d see is dignified beauty and real grace, shaped by powerful physical and moral forces working together. Not the weak “beauty” of helplessness, not the pose of fragility, but the kind that makes you respect the human body the way you respect a great building—fit to house a noble mind—like the finest remains of antiquity.

That brings me to a common claim about Greek statues: that they weren’t modeled “from nature.” If people mean they weren’t copied from the proportions of one specific man, that may be partly right. Sculptors likely selected the best limbs and features from different bodies to form a harmonious whole. Even so, it wasn’t a mere mechanical collage. A great work of art comes from the heat of imagination—an artist’s sharpened senses and enlarged understanding pulling real material into a single, glowing focus. The result is a whole: a model of grand simplicity, of energies that work together and command our attention. A slavish copy of even beautiful nature produces only insipid, lifeless beauty.

And beyond art, I suspect the human form itself used to be more beautiful than it often is now. Why? Because many modern forces deform it: extreme inactivity, harsh bindings and constrictions, and other pressures created by a luxurious society. Those things stunt growth and warp the body.

If we look only at the physical side, exercise and cleanliness are among the surest ways to preserve health and encourage beauty. But that’s not enough. Moral causes must join in, or beauty becomes merely rustic—fresh-faced, perhaps, like some healthy country people, but without the refinement that comes from a mind put to work.

To make a person truly complete, physical and moral beauty must be developed together, each strengthening the other. You should see judgment in the brow; affection and imagination shining in the eye; humanity softening the cheek. Otherwise, even the brightest eyes and the most perfectly shaped features are wasted decoration. And in every movement—showing active limbs and well-formed joints—you should sense both grace and modesty.

This kind of excellence doesn’t happen by accident. It’s earned through efforts that support each other:

• Judgment comes from reflection.
• Affection grows through the steady discharge of duties.
• Humanity is built by practicing compassion toward every living creature.

That last point matters more than people admit. Kindness to animals should be deliberately taught as part of national education—because it isn’t currently one of our national strengths. Among the poor, you’ll often find more tenderness toward their quiet, dependent animals in a “rough” society than in a “civilized” one. Civilization, oddly enough, can prevent the close daily contact that creates affection in a simple home. And people with uncultivated minds—depraved less by “nature” than by the brutal refinements of a society where they’re constantly crushed by the rich—often take revenge the only way they can: by dominating those beneath them.

Children first catch this habit at school, where one of the boys’ rare entertainments is tormenting whatever miserable animals cross their path. And the step from cruelty to animals to domestic tyranny—over wives, children, and servants—is frighteningly small. Justice, or even benevolence, won’t become a powerful motive unless it reaches across the whole creation. I’d even state it as a rule: people who can watch suffering without feeling it will soon learn to cause it.

Ordinary people—by which I mean most people, not just the poor—are often ruled by whatever they feel right now and by whatever habits chance has given them. You can’t rely much on partial feelings, even when they’re decent ones. If reflection doesn’t strengthen them, custom wears them down until they’re barely noticeable. Our natural sympathies grow stronger when we think deeply about them, and they grow dull when we use them thoughtlessly. Shakespeare understood this: Macbeth was more shaken by his first murder than by the hundred that followed—murders he committed to prop up the first. Repetition deadens the nerve.

And don’t imagine the rich are immune. In fact, shallow “humanity,” based on mood and sensation, is often even more obvious among them.

Consider the woman who sobs over a bird starving in a snare, and rages at the men who whip an exhausted donkey or goad an ox to madness—then keeps her coachman and horses waiting for hours in biting frost or driving rain while she sits sealed behind windows that don’t let in a hint of the weather. Or the woman who puts her dogs in her bed and nurses them with theatrical tenderness when they’re ill, but lets her babies grow up crooked and neglected in the nursery.

This isn’t a made-up picture; it happened. The woman I’m thinking of was widely called beautiful—beautiful enough for people who never notice the absence of mind when a face is full and fair. But literature hadn’t pulled her away from domestic duties, and knowledge hadn’t “corrupted” her innocence. No. She was perfectly “feminine,” in the way some men use that word as praise. And she didn’t truly love the spoiled animals that took the space her children should have held. She simply performed—a pretty babble of French-and-English nonsense—to entertain the men clustered around her. The wife, the mother, the human being were swallowed up by a manufactured character produced by bad education and the selfish vanity that beauty can breed.

I don’t like distinctions that don’t mean anything, and I’ll say plainly: the fine lady who cuddles her lapdog instead of her child can disgust me just as much as the man who beats his horse while bragging that he knows perfectly well he’s doing wrong.

All of this foolishness shows how mistaken people are who, even when they let women step out of confinement, still refuse to cultivate their minds. If you want virtues to take root, you have to plant them in understanding. If women had real sense, they could develop a genuine taste for home life—not a narrow confinement, but a reasonable order of love that embraces the whole household: husband, children, and even the family dog, each in their proper place. They wouldn’t insult humanity by caring more for an animal’s comfort than for a servant’s basic well-being.

My comments on national education are, again, hints. But my main point is clear: educate girls and boys together so that both are improved. And let children sleep at home so they learn to love home. At the same time, don’t smother public feeling inside private walls. Send them to school to mix with equals—because only through the daily jostling of equality do we learn to see ourselves honestly.

If we want human beings to be more virtuous—and therefore happier—men and women must act from the same guiding principles. But how can that happen if only one sex is allowed to understand why those principles are reasonable? And if we want a truly fair social compact—if we want the spread of those enlightening ideas that can actually improve human life—then women must be allowed to build their virtue on knowledge. That’s nearly impossible unless they’re educated through the same serious pursuits as men.

Right now, women are made so inferior by ignorance and trivial desires that they scarcely deserve equal rank. Or, forced to rely on sly maneuvering, they “climb” toward knowledge only enough to mislead men. Either way, the outcome is the same: society loses.

History makes another point obvious: women won’t stay confined to purely domestic tasks. They won’t fulfill family duties well unless their minds have some wider range. And as long as they’re kept ignorant, they become slaves to pleasure in the same proportion that they’re made slaves to men. They also won’t be kept out of major enterprises. But when their minds are narrowed, they tend to spoil what they can’t understand.

The worst part is that men’s own weaknesses—both their vices and even the softer side of their virtues—often give certain women enormous power over them. And when those women are weak-minded, driven by childish passions and vanity, they cast a false light over the very objects that men, who ought to be guiding public judgment, are trying to see clearly. Men of imagination—those enthusiastic, hopeful temperaments who so often steer public affairs—commonly relax in the company of women. History is full of what can follow: vice, oppression, and political damage driven by private intrigues, especially where a “favorite” whispers in the background. And even when the intentions are good, well-meaning foolishness can do real harm.

In business, it’s often easier to deal with a scoundrel than a fool. A scoundrel sticks to a plan; you can anticipate it and expose it. Folly, by contrast, veers suddenly and wrecks things in unpredictable ways. The power that foolish, corrupt women have held over wise, sensitive men is well known. I’ll mention just one example.

Who ever drew a more elevated portrait of a woman than Rousseau? And yet, taken as a whole, he worked constantly to degrade women. Why was he so anxious to do that? To justify to himself the affection he felt—out of weakness and a kind of moral tenderness—for that foolish woman, Thérèse. He couldn’t lift her up to the ordinary level of women, so he labored to drag women down to hers.

He found her useful as a humble companion. Pride then pushed him to invent “superior virtues” in the person he chose to live with. But didn’t her behavior during his life—and after his death—show how badly he misjudged her when he called her a “celestial innocent”? In his bitterness, he even admits that when his physical infirmities meant he could no longer treat her like a lover, her affection for him faded. Of course it did. If two people share almost no sentiments beyond sex, then when the sexual bond breaks, what holds them together?

To turn sensibility into broad humanity—to make affection capable of friendship, duty, and genuine companionship—requires sense. Many women, as they are raised, don’t have enough mental development even to form deep affection for another woman or real friendship with a man. And the economic dependence that forces women to cling to men for survival breeds a kind of pet-like attachment—a “purring” fondness directed toward whoever feeds and indulges them.

Many men enjoy that kind of devotion, because it centers on them in a crude way. But if men ever become more virtuous, they’ll want something better: they’ll want to sit by the fire and talk with a friend after they’ve outgrown playing with a mistress.

There’s another truth here, too: understanding is what gives sensual pleasure variety and depth. A mind is low on the intellectual ladder if it can keep “loving” when neither virtue nor sense has shaped desire into anything recognizably human.

And sense will always dominate. So if women are not, in general, raised closer to men’s level, then a few exceptional women—like the famous Greek courtesans—will gather talented men around them and pull them away from their families. Many of those men would have stayed home if their wives had more sense, or if they possessed the graces that grow naturally from exercising the understanding and imagination—the true parents of taste.

A talented woman, if she isn’t plainly unattractive, will almost always gain great power, amplified by the social weakness forced on her sex. And as men develop more virtue and delicacy through reason, they’ll increasingly want those qualities in women too. But women can only gain them the same way men do: through education, reflection, and disciplined practice.

Look at France and Italy. Have women there confined themselves to domestic life? Even without formal political standing, haven’t they often held enormous influence—unofficially, and sometimes illegally—corrupting themselves and the men whose passions they learned to manipulate? However I turn the subject over, reason and experience keep bringing me back to the same conclusion: the only way to lead women to fulfill their distinctive duties is to stop treating them like constrained creatures and instead let them share in the inherent rights of humanity.

Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous—just as men become more so—because improvement has to be mutual. If one half of the human race is forced to submit to injustice, that injustice doesn’t just vanish. It rebounds. It eats away at the virtue of the oppressor, like rot from the inside—like an insect that destroys what it lives under.

So let men choose: man and woman were made for each other, but not to be fused into a single being. And if men refuse to improve women, they will inevitably corrupt them.

When I speak of improvement and emancipation, I mean the whole sex. I know that a few women—by accident or by strong natural inclination—have gained more knowledge than most, and their behavior has sometimes been overbearing. But there have also been women who, as they learned, did not throw off modesty, and who did not make a pedantic show of despising the ignorance they worked to dispel in their own minds.

The eye-rolling you hear whenever anyone brings up women’s education—especially from women who pride themselves on being “pretty”—often comes from plain old envy. The moment they notice that bright eyes and polished, playful flirting won’t keep a room’s attention all night—because a woman with a trained mind has started steering the conversation somewhere interesting—they reach for the usual comfort: “Well, women like that hardly ever get husbands.” And I’ve watched more than a few foolish women use every trick they have to derail a serious discussion with flirting—an apt word for the little performance—just to yank the spotlight back to their looks when the men were, for once, forgetting to treat them like decorations.

Now, it’s true that genuinely rare talents can sometimes inflate a person’s ego—and that kind of swollen pride is ugly in anyone, man or woman. But that only makes the deeper problem more obvious: how badly must women’s abilities have been allowed to corrode if the tiny scraps of learning some women managed to grab—women sneeringly labeled “learned”—were enough to make them stand out as unusual? A little knowledge was treated as a marvel: enough to puff up the woman who had it, and enough to spark jealousy in her peers—and even in some men. In fact, hasn’t the bare minimum of clear thinking made many women targets of harsh condemnation?

I’m not speaking in theories here. I’ve repeatedly heard women mocked and picked apart for the smallest “faults” simply because they followed medical advice and did something different in how they cared for their babies. I’ve even heard this brutal hatred of anything new go further still: a sensible woman was branded an “unnatural mother” because she tried, wisely, to protect her children’s health—and then, despite her care, lost one child to the ordinary hazards of infancy that no amount of caution can always prevent. Her acquaintances declared, with smug certainty, that it must be the result of “newfangled notions”—meaning the scandalous innovations of comfort and cleanliness. And the people who parade their “experience,” while clinging to harmful customs that the best physicians say have already reduced the human population, almost seemed to celebrate the tragedy, because it let them point and say, “See? The old ways are safest.”

Even if women’s education mattered for nothing else, it would matter for this: the sheer number of human lives sacrificed to the idol of prejudice. And in how many ways are children destroyed by men’s sexual selfishness? Add to that the lack of natural affection in many women—pulled away from their responsibilities by the desire to be admired—and the ignorance of others, and you get a grim truth: human infancy is often more dangerous than the infancy of animals. Yet men still resist putting women in positions where they can gain the understanding needed for something as basic as nursing their own babies well.

This point hits me so hard that I could rest my whole argument on it. Anything that undermines a woman’s ability to be a competent mother pushes her out of the role society itself insists is her “proper sphere.”

And given how women are currently raised, it’s unrealistic to expect most mothers to do either of the two things that matter most. First, to care for a child’s body with the sensible attention required to build a strong constitution—assuming, of course, the child isn’t already paying for the “sins of its fathers.” Second, to guide a child’s temper with such judgment that, later on, the grown child won’t have to unlearn everything the mother—its first teacher—directly or indirectly drilled in. Unless a mind is unusually strong, the silly habits we associate with “womanish” upbringing cling to the personality for life.

In other words: a mother’s weakness doesn’t stop with her. It lands on her children. And as long as women are trained to lean on their husbands for judgment, this outcome is inevitable. You can’t improve a mind by halves. No one can act wisely by mere imitation, because every real-life situation has its own particular shape, and you need judgment to adapt general rules to the moment. The person who learns to think clearly in one area soon expands that ability into others; and a woman with enough sense to raise her children well won’t submit—right or wrong—to a husband’s will, or quietly accept social rules that turn a wife into a nonentity.

So what should be done? In public schools, women should be taught the basics of anatomy and medicine—not only so they can care properly for their own health, but so they can be rational nurses to their infants, their parents, and their husbands. Mortality statistics are inflated by the blunders of stubborn older women who hand out home-brew “remedies” while knowing nothing about the human body they’re meddling with. And for the same practical, household reason, women should also learn the anatomy of the mind—which means letting girls and boys study and pursue knowledge together, so they can observe how human understanding grows through the sciences and arts, without ever neglecting the most important study of all: morality, along with the political history of humankind.

People like to call a man a “microcosm,” a little world in himself. In that same sense, every family is its own small state. And yes, states have mostly been run by schemes and manipulations that shame humanity. Because constitutions are unjust and laws unequal, even the so-called worldly wise end up tangled in confusion and begin to doubt whether it’s even reasonable to fight for human rights. When the public moral “reservoir” is poisoned, the corruption flows outward, like polluted water, seeping into every part of the political body. But if better—really, fairer—principles shaped the laws (laws that ought to govern society, rather than the mere people who carry them out), then duty could become the standard of private life.

There’s more. If women exercised both body and mind, they’d gain the mental energy that motherhood demands, along with the fortitude that separates steady character from the stubborn perversity that comes from weakness. This matters, because it’s dangerous to tell lazy people to “be firm”: they often translate “steady” into “rigid,” and, to avoid effort, they punish harshly for faults that patient, reasonable guidance could have prevented in the first place.

But fortitude assumes strength of mind. And how does anyone gain mental strength—by passive compliance? by constantly asking for advice instead of using their own judgment? by obeying out of fear, rather than practicing the self-control and forbearance we all need? The conclusion is hard to miss: make women rational beings and free citizens, and they’ll quickly become good wives and mothers—assuming, that is, that men don’t neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.

When I describe the benefits of the public-and-private education I’ve sketched, I focus most on what it would change for women, because women are oppressed. But the damage oppression produces doesn’t stay neatly contained in the “injured part.” The rot spreads through the whole of society. So when I long to see my sex become more fully moral agents, I can’t help feeling a surge of hope—not just for women, but for everyone—for the wide spread of that deep, elevating contentment that only a truly moral society can create.

13

Ignorance Has Consequences

Let’s be honest: there are plenty of foolish habits that show up more often in women than in men. Some are things women do that make no sense; others are things they don’t do—like thinking for themselves—when they should. But none of this is mysterious. It all grows out of the same soil: ignorance and prejudice.

And that matters, because the “delicacy” and “weakness” that many men have deliberately tried—sometimes for vanity, sometimes for control, sometimes out of habit—to preserve in women doesn’t just make women frail. It makes them less able to carry out the real responsibilities of their lives. Think about it:

• If a woman’s body is so weakened that she can’t nurse her own baby,
• and her mind is so under-trained that she can’t steady her temper,

then what exactly are we calling “natural” about her situation?

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SECT. I — Fortune-Tellers, Quacks, and the Hunger to Know the Future

One of the clearest, most embarrassing examples of weakness produced by ignorance is this: the appetite for superstition.

In a city like London, there’s no shortage of predatory people who make their living by feeding on women’s credulity. They lurk like parasites, charging money to “cast nativities”—in plain English, to draw up horoscopes and tell fortunes. What’s striking is who falls for it. It’s not only the poor or the uneducated. Plenty of women who are proud of their title, their wealth, and their “superior” place in society—women who openly sneer at the “vulgar”—still run straight into the arms of vulgar prejudice the moment it flatters their curiosity.

That contradiction should tell you something important: the supposed distinction between “refined” and “common” is often just a costume. If the mind hasn’t been cultivated, rank doesn’t rescue it.

Here’s the deeper reason this superstition spreads so easily. Many women are not taught that the most important knowledge is the knowledge of duty—what they owe to others and how to live well in the present by doing it. When you aren’t trained to find meaning in responsibility, you go looking for meaning somewhere else. So instead of learning how to live, you become desperate to peek ahead—to find out what’s coming, to make life feel dramatic, and to fill the blank space that ignorance leaves behind.

And yes, I’m going to speak plainly to women who indulge these games. Because it isn’t just silly girls whispering about horoscopes. Ladies—women who run households, who are taken seriously, who command carriages and servants—aren’t ashamed to drive to the very door of the “cunning man.” If any such reader is here, I’m asking you to answer these questions in your own conscience, as if you were standing before God:

• Do you believe there is one God, and that he is powerful, wise, and good?
• Do you believe he created everything, and that every being depends on him?
• Do you trust the wisdom that’s visible in the world—and even in your own body—and believe he has ordered what you can’t see with the same harmony and purpose as what you can?
• Do you admit that seeing the future—knowing what doesn’t yet exist as if it already did—is an ability that belongs to the Creator alone?

If God ever chose to reveal a hidden event before it happened, who would he reveal it to? History has a consistent answer: not to petty tricksters. Not to greedy impostors. But to people marked by seriousness and holiness—revered elders, men known for piety.

That’s how ancient oracles worked. Priests dedicated to a god delivered the “message.” Those systems were soaked in pageantry. They were surrounded by public ceremony, political backing, and a kind of theatrical sanctity that made lies look sacred. In that world, a Greek or Roman woman could be forgiven for visiting an oracle when she felt anxious about the future. Her question might be irrational, but it wouldn’t necessarily be impious—because it fit the accepted religious structure of her society.

But what about Christians?

Can Christian women really claim the same excuse? Can a Christian honestly imagine that the favorites of the Most High would need to creep around in disguise, running scams, using dishonest tricks to swindle “silly women” out of money—money that could have relieved the poor, who beg and go unanswered?

Don’t tell me these questions insult common sense. Your behavior is what insults it—and worse, it drags your whole sex into contempt. If you carried even a spark of religious seriousness into those shadowy rooms, you should tremble at the mix of thoughtlessness and irrational “devotion” you’re practicing. Yet because I’m speaking here to women who have been kept ignorant—ignorant in the strongest sense—it would be pointless to argue in abstract about why it’s foolish to demand what divine wisdom has chosen to conceal.

Still, try to follow this much: the entire purpose of life is to form human beings into something better—wiser and more virtuous. If fortune-telling were actually sanctioned by God, it would scramble the moral order of the world. And if it is not sanctioned by God, then why would you expect truth from it? How could someone foresee events that haven’t yet taken shape in the world—a sleazy opportunist who fattens himself by preying on the gullible?

Maybe, someone will say, the devil helps them. Fine—if you really believe in such a being, an enemy of goodness and of God, ask yourself one simple thing: can you go to church afterward, having just placed yourself under obligation to him?

And from fortune-tellers it’s an easy step to the next, more fashionable deception: the whole tribe of “magnetizers,” who claim to heal and astonish by mysterious forces.

So let me ask a new set of questions—because a little basic knowledge here would save a great deal of money, humiliation, and harm.

Do you know anything about the human body—how it works? If you don’t, then learn at least what every child ought to know: when the body’s finely balanced system is thrown off—not by sudden violent illness, but by long habits of excess or laziness—it doesn’t snap back like a machine with a reset button. Chronic disease is repaired slowly. And if the core functions of life aren’t destroyed, the reliable path back to health is not magic. It’s the ordinary, demanding trio:

• regimen (which is just another word for temperance),
• fresh air and exercise,
• and a few medicines, prescribed by people who have actually studied the body.

That’s what holds up under honest scrutiny. That’s what “miracles” can’t replace.

So what do you believe about these magnetizers?

• Are they delegated by God?
• Or are they helped by that convenient all-purpose explanation—the devil?
• When they claim to cure what physicians couldn’t, are they working with reason and nature?
• Or are they claiming supernatural power?

Some of them talk about “communication” with the spirit world, as if they can consult invisible beings whenever they like. It sounds impressive—until you remember that even in old stories about guardian spirits and “familiar demons,” the people who claimed that privilege insisted it was the result of strict self-control and piety. They presented it as the reward of disciplined virtue.

But today’s wonder-workers don’t stand above others by their temperance or holiness. They don’t heal out of love for God. They heal for money. They are, in effect, priests of quackery—only without the convenient business model of selling prayers for souls, or filling churches with crutches and wax limbs to prove their “touch” restored what was lost.

I don’t pretend to know their technical jargon. I’m not initiated into their secret vocabulary. But one thing is plain enough: men who refuse to live by reason and earn their bread honestly are strangely lucky in finding such obliging spirits to help them. And if those spirits were truly wise and good, would they choose such shabby instruments to display their supposed benevolence?

To claim powers like this is dangerously close to blasphemy.

Look at the world with sober eyes and you’ll see a steady pattern: certain vices reliably produce certain consequences. That’s part of how Providence teaches. So how could anyone insult God’s wisdom so crudely as to imagine that miracles are handed out to suspend those laws—just to restore the intemperate and the vicious to health, so they can continue their habits without consequence?

“Be whole, and sin no more,” Jesus said. He healed bodies to reach minds. Are we supposed to believe that people who don’t follow his example—people with no moral authority—will perform greater miracles than he did?

Some readers may flinch at hearing Christ’s name so close to such sordid frauds. I understand the reaction. But remember: the people chasing these delusions do it while calling themselves Christians. They wear his name. They claim to be his disciples. And he himself gave a test: you know the tree by its fruit—you know whether someone serves God or sin by what they do.

Yes, it’s easier to chase a saint’s “touch,” or to be “magnetized,” than it is to restrain appetites or govern passions. But the hard truth is this: health—whether of body or mind—returns through self-government and rational means, or else we end up turning the Supreme Judge into a petty tyrant who plays favorites.

God isn’t human. He doesn’t change moods. He doesn’t punish out of wounded pride. Reason tells us something steadier: the common Father “wounds” only to heal. When our irregular habits bring consequences, those consequences teach us what vice really is. Experience becomes a harsh instructor, but a useful one: it trains us to hate what harms us and to love what improves us, as our wisdom grows. In that sense, the poison carries its antidote. Either we reform and stop sinning against our own bodies—or premature death, the natural penalty of vice, snaps life’s thread.

At that point, inquiry hits a wall. Still, I won’t hide what I believe. If punishment follows beyond this life, then—given what God is—it must aim at reform, the way disease’s pain teaches us to respect health. The idea of “pure punishment,” with no good end, clashes so violently with the God we can infer from the world and from reason that I could sooner believe God ignores human conduct altogether than believe he punishes without a benevolent purpose.

To imagine an all-wise, all-powerful Being—good as he is great—creating someone foreknowing that after fifty or sixty years of restless life, that creature would be plunged into endless misery… that isn’t piety. It’s blasphemy. What would the undying worm feed on? Folly and ignorance, some will say. I won’t drag out the conclusion that would follow, except to say this: under such a picture, God becomes a “consuming fire” in the worst sense. Love would be swallowed by fear. Darkness would swallow his counsels. And we would want—though it would be useless—to flee from his presence.

Yet many devout people pride themselves on “submitting” to God blindly, as if his will were nothing more than an arbitrary rod. It resembles the way some cultures worship the devil: not out of love, but out of fear. In everyday life we have a name for that posture. It’s what people do when they bow to raw power and cringe before whoever can crush them.

Rational religion is the opposite. It’s the willing submission of a mind that respects God because he is perfectly wise—because whatever he wills must be guided by right motives, and therefore must be reasonable.

And if that is how we respect God, then how can we give any credit to secret “revelations” and mystical insinuations that insult his laws? Even if a “miracle” seemed to stare us in the face, should we believe God would use miracles to authorize confusion—to stamp error with his approval? We either accept that impious conclusion, or we treat with contempt every promise to restore health by supernatural means and every claim to foresee what only God can foresee.

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SECT. II — The “Sentimental” Trap

Here’s another kind of feminine weakness, often produced by a narrow, shut-in education: the mind develops a romantic distortion that people have rightly called sentimentality.

When women are trained to live inside their sensations—and are taught that happiness is found only in love—they start polishing raw desire into something that sounds elevated. They invent abstract, “metaphysical” ideas about passion. And the result is not purity. It’s often the opposite: these lofty refinements become the excuse for neglecting real duties, and in the middle of all this so-called sublimity they frequently tumble straight into actual vice.

These are the women who feed on the daydreams served up by dull novelists. Those writers understand little about human nature, so they recycle stale plots and dress them up with seductive scenes, all poured out in a syrupy “sentimental” language that does two kinds of damage at once:

• it corrupts taste, teaching the mind to prefer the artificial,
• and it pulls the heart away from ordinary obligations.

I’m not even talking about the understanding—because in these cases it has never been exercised. Its powers lie asleep, like the old notion of fire hidden inside matter: present, perhaps, but unused and inert.

And consider the social setup that helps produce this. Women are denied political rights. As wives, they’re barely allowed a civil existence at all, except in criminal matters. So their attention naturally shrinks from the community’s concerns to the tiny theater of private life. Yet private duty is always done poorly when it’s disconnected from the general good.

When a woman’s “main job,” as society defines it, is simply to please—and when oppression bars her from wider, more meaningful work—then feelings become the biggest events in her world. She overthinks what a broader education would have corrected or quieted. Reflection digs deeper grooves where the mind should have been allowed to move freely.

Locked into trivial tasks, she absorbs the opinions that her only “interesting” reading supplies. And if her mind is never trained to grasp anything large or serious, is it surprising that she finds history dry, arguments addressed to the understanding unbearable, and thoughtful discussions nearly unintelligible? In that state she becomes dependent on the novelist for entertainment.

When I speak against novels, though, I mean in comparison with books that actually strengthen the mind and discipline the imagination. Any reading is better than leaving the mind blank, because even a small effort enlarges it a little and gives it a touch of strength. And even works aimed mainly at imagination can lift a reader above the coarsest appetites, adding at least a faint layer of delicacy to life.

I say this from experience. I’ve known several “notable” women—and one especially, who was genuinely good, as good as such a cramped mind could manage—who made it a rule that her three daughters would never lay eyes on a novel. She had money and social standing. She hired various tutors, and a sort of servant-governess to keep the girls under surveillance.

From their instructors, the girls learned how to label furniture in French and Italian—tables, chairs, and so on. But the books they encountered were either far beyond them or strictly devotional. So they gained neither ideas nor real feeling. When they weren’t forced to repeat words, they spent their time dressing, quarrelling, or whispering with maids in secret, until they were introduced into society as “marriageable.”

Meanwhile their mother, a widow, worked tirelessly to “keep up her connections”—that is, to maintain a wide web of acquaintances so her daughters could be properly launched into fashionable life. The result?

These young women entered the world with minds vulgar in every sense, with spoiled tempers, puffed up with their own importance, and looking down on anyone who couldn’t compete with them in clothes and display.

As for love, nature—or perhaps their nurses—had taught them the bodily meaning of the word. Since they had few subjects for conversation and even fewer refined sentiments, they spoke about their desires without much delicacy whenever they were unguarded, freely discussing marriage in crude terms.

Would novels have harmed these girls? Hardly.

In fact, I almost forgot one telling detail. One of them affected a “simple” innocence that tipped into stupidity, and with a coy smile would ask and say the most indecent things—things she had learned while sheltered from the world, too frightened to speak openly in her mother’s presence, because her mother ruled with a heavy hand. Yet this mother congratulated herself on having educated them “exemplarily.” The girls read chapters and psalms before breakfast and never touched a “silly novel.”

This is only one example. I can recall many other women who were never led step by step into serious study, never permitted to choose their reading, and so grew into overgrown children. Or else, by mixing in society, they picked up what people call “common sense”—the ability to recognize everyday situations one by one, as isolated facts. But intellect in the real sense—the capacity to form general or abstract ideas, or even solid middle-level principles—was never developed. Their minds sat still. When no sensory novelty stirred them, they became low-spirited, cried, or fell asleep.

So when I urge my sex not to waste themselves on flimsy books, it isn’t to leave them with nothing. It’s to push them toward something better. And in that, I agree with a shrewd man I once knew, who raised a daughter and a niece and chose a very different plan for each.

The niece, who had real ability, had already been indulged—before she came under his guardianship—in desultory reading.

Her father tried to steer her toward history and moral essays—and he did manage it with his son. But his daughter was a different story. Her mother spoiled her, so she’d grown allergic to anything that looked like steady effort. So he gave in and let her read novels.

He even had a rationale ready: if she ever developed a real taste for reading—even the wrong kind—at least he’d have something to build on. Better misguided opinions, he argued, than an empty mind.

And honestly, that tells you how badly women’s education had been neglected. For many women, “learning” was only available through this muddy channel: popular fiction. Some, with sharper minds, eventually read enough novels to start despising them. But they had to wade through the swamp before they could see the dry land.

How do you cure a novel obsession?
Not by scolding. The most effective medicine, I think, is well-aimed ridicule—not blanket mockery of everything, which just bounces off, but something more surgical. Imagine a thoughtful adult with a real sense of humor reading a handful of fashionable novels aloud to a girl and, as they go:

• mimicking the overblown tones the books demand,
• comparing their “tragic” scenes to genuinely moving events from history,
• setting their cardboard “heroes” beside real historical courage,
• pointing out how these stories caricature human nature—not in a clever way, but in a foolish, distorted one.

Do that, and you can swap romantic fantasies for sound judgments without turning the whole topic into a forbidden fruit.

Still, there’s a broader problem here, and it isn’t confined to women. In one respect, most men and women look remarkably alike: they show the same lack of taste and modesty.

Ignorant women—forced into “chastity” mainly to protect their reputation—often let their imaginations run wild in the artificial, sexualized scenes novelists sketch. They dismiss the calm dignity and mature steadiness of history as boring. Meanwhile, men take the same corrupted appetite into real life: they chase “spice” and novelty, drifting toward the flashy and the wanton instead of the straightforward charm of virtue and the sober respectability of good sense.

And novels do something else, too: they train women—especially fashionable women—to talk in superlatives. Everything becomes “the most,” “the worst,” “utterly,” “perfectly.” Yet the polished, scattered life they live rarely allows any deep, legitimate passion to take root. So what happens? They perform the language of feeling without the feeling itself. Dramatic phrases spill out in practiced tones, and every small inconvenience triggers a bright little flare—like a phosphorescent glow that imitates fire in the dark without ever becoming real flame.

SECT. III

Ignorance has consequences—and it breeds a particular kind of “cleverness.”
When someone is kept weak and uneducated, nature sharpens their cunning as a survival tool. In women, this often shows up as an intense fixation on dress, along with the vanity you’d expect that fixation to produce. The tragedy is what it crowds out: healthy ambition, emulation, and magnanimity—the desire to grow, to excel, to be great-souled.

I agree with Rousseau on one point: the physical side of “pleasing” does involve ornaments. Precisely for that reason, girls should be guarded against the contagious obsession with dress that’s so common among weak-minded women—so they don’t stop at the merely physical.

Because the truth is simple: a woman who thinks she can keep pleasing people for long without engaging her mind—without developing what you might call the moral art of pleasing—is fooling herself. And if the word “art” feels like a profanation here—since true grace should be the result of virtue, not a calculated performance—then fine. Call it what you like. The point stands: ignorance never produces that higher kind of grace. The playful charm of innocence that refined libertines find so enticing is something else entirely. It’s not the same as the steady, dignified grace that comes from strength of character.

You can see this pattern in societies, too. A strong hunger for external decoration is a hallmark of barbarous states—though in those societies it’s usually men, not women, who decorate themselves. And notice what that implies: when women are permitted to stand even somewhat on the same level as men, society has advanced at least one step toward civilization.

So the attention paid to dress, which people love to label a “female tendency,” is really a human tendency. Let me put it more precisely: when the mind isn’t opened enough to take pleasure in reflection, the body becomes the main canvas. People adorn it with painstaking care. If clothing isn’t the outlet, then it becomes tattooing or painting—another way of turning ambition into decoration.

This urge can run so deep that even the brutal yoke of slavery can’t smother it. The “savage” thirst for admiration persists. Enslaved people often spend their painfully earned savings on a bit of cheap finery. And I’ve rarely known a good servant—man or woman—who wasn’t particularly fond of dress. Their clothes are their treasure.

From that, I draw an analogy: the extravagant obsession with dress seen in women comes from the same source—a mind left uncultivated.

When men meet, they have ready-made topics: business, politics, literature. But, as Swift jokes, “how naturally do women apply their hands to each other’s lappets and ruffles.” And of course it seems natural—because women are given so little else to be absorbed by. They aren’t assigned business that matters. They aren’t trained to love literature. They find politics dry because they haven’t been led to care about humanity through the grand pursuits that elevate the species and promote general happiness.

Men also have multiple routes to power and fame. Some collide—people in the same profession often compete rather than befriend—but there are many others with whom they never clash. Women, by contrast, are placed in a position where, socially speaking, they’re nearly all competitors.

Before marriage, their “job” is to please men. After marriage—with a few exceptions—they pursue the same goal with the stubborn persistence of instinct. Even virtuous women rarely forget their sex in company; they’re continually working to be agreeable. A beautiful woman and a witty man can look equally desperate to pull attention toward themselves. And the bitter feuds among contemporary wits are famous.

So is it any wonder that when a woman’s entire ambition is poured into beauty—and when self-interest pours gasoline on vanity—endless rivalries follow? Everyone is running the same race. Women would have to be better than mortals to avoid viewing one another with suspicion, and often with envy.

Here’s the larger point: an excessive passion for dress, pleasure, and sway are the passions of “savages”—of people who haven’t yet let the mind take the lead, who haven’t learned to think with the steady energy required to link ideas into the abstract chains that produce principles. And given women’s education and the current structure of “civilized” life, it’s hard to deny that women are pushed into a similar condition.

That’s why it’s both absurd and cruel to simply laugh at women or satirize their follies when they’re never allowed to act freely by the light of their own reason. People trained to obey authority blindly will naturally try to dodge it with cunning. That’s not shocking; it’s predictable.

But if someone can prove that women truly ought to obey men implicitly, then I’ll concede the rest immediately: yes—then it would be woman’s duty to cultivate dress to please, and cunning to survive.

The problem is that “virtues” propped up by ignorance can never be stable. A house built on sand won’t stand when the storm hits. The inference almost draws itself: if you insist on making women “virtuous” through authority—which is a contradiction—then lock them up in seraglios and watch them with jealous vigilance.

Don’t worry that such treatment will scar their souls. A soul that can endure it is made of yielding material—barely alive, animated enough to move the body.

Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear,
And best distinguish’d by black, brown, or fair.

The most brutal wounds, in that case, will heal quickly. Women will still populate the world and dress to please men—fulfilling all the purposes certain celebrated writers have decided they were made for.

SECT. IV

People often claim women have more sensibility—even more humanity—than men. They point to women’s intense attachments and quick rushes of compassion as proof. But the clinging affection that grows out of ignorance is rarely noble. Most of the time it’s just another form of selfishness—much like the attachments of children, or even animals.

I’ve known plenty of weak women whose entire emotional life was swallowed up by their husbands. As for their “humanity,” it was faint at best—more like a brief tremor of pity than a steady moral disposition. An eminent speaker put it well: humanity doesn’t consist in “a squeamish ear.” It belongs to the mind as much as to the nerves.

Still, this narrow, exclusive affection shouldn’t be paraded as proof that women are naturally inferior. It’s the natural result of confined views. Even women of strong sense, when their attention is trapped in small tasks and private schemes, rarely rise to heroism—except when love spurs them on. And love, as a truly heroic passion—like genius—seems to appear only once in an age.

So I agree with the moralist who says women seldom show as much generosity as men, and that their narrow affections often sacrifice justice and humanity, making the sex appear inferior—especially since those affections are so often shaped by men. But I insist that if women weren’t depressed from the cradle, their understanding would strengthen and their hearts would expand with it.

A little sensibility combined with great weakness often produces intense sexual attachment. Friendship, by contrast, requires reason to cement it. So yes: you’ll find more friendship among men than among women, and men generally have a stronger sense of justice.

Women’s exclusive affections even resemble Cato’s famously unjust love of country. He wanted to crush Carthage—not to save Rome, but to feed Rome’s vanity. In general, people sacrifice humanity to whatever “familiar principle” they’re devoted to, forgetting that genuine duties support one another rather than compete.

And besides—how can women be just or generous when they’re treated as the slaves of injustice?

SECT. V

Since society insists that women are “destined” to rear children—that is, to lay down the foundations of physical and mental health for the next generation—then the ignorance that disables them is plainly against the order of things.

Women’s minds can absorb much more than they’re allowed, and they must, or they’ll never become sensible mothers. Many men carefully supervise the breeding of horses yet ignore the nursery, as though paying attention to children were beneath them. Strange—a lack of sense and feeling. Meanwhile, how many children are effectively murdered by women’s ignorance?

Even when children survive—neither neglected nor smothered by blind indulgence—how few are guided well in their earliest mental life. A child is allowed to become unruly at home, then gets shipped off to school to have their spirit “broken.” And the methods schools use to control crowds of children often scatter the seeds of vice into a mind that’s been roughly torn up and replanted.

I’ve sometimes compared these children—who should never have needed harsh restraint, and wouldn’t have if they’d been guided steadily from the start—to the desperate plunges of a spirited filly I once watched being broken on a beach. Each time it fought the rider, its feet sank deeper into the sand, until at last it submitted, sullen and defeated.

I’ve always found horses—animals I’m fond of—remarkably tractable when treated with humanity and consistency. It makes me suspect that violent “breaking” methods injure them at the root. But of one thing I’m sure: you should never try to forcibly tame a child after you’ve foolishly let them run wild. Every violation of justice and reason in dealing with children weakens their reason.

Children form a character early—so early that experience leads me to think the foundation of moral character is largely fixed before the age of seven, precisely during the years when women are typically given sole charge. After that, half of education becomes damage control: correcting faults that never would have formed if mothers had more understanding. And the correction is usually rushed, and therefore badly done.

One striking example of maternal folly shouldn’t be skipped: how mothers treat servants in front of children. They let children assume that servants exist to wait on them and absorb their moods.

A child should learn to accept help as a favor, not a right. As an early lesson in independence, the child should be taught—by the mother’s example—not to demand constant personal attendance, which is an insult to humanity to require from another person when you’re healthy. Instead of being trained to put on airs, the child should first be made to feel their own weakness and, from it, the natural equality of human beings.

And yet how often have I heard servants barked for—ordered to put a child to bed, then sent away, then summoned again and again because “master” or “miss” clung to mamma and wanted to stay up longer. Forced into slavish attendance on this little idol, the child displays the most disgusting habits of the spoiled.

In short, most mothers either:

• leave their children almost entirely to servants, or
• because the children are “theirs,” treat them like little demigods.

And I’ve repeatedly noticed this: women who idolize their own children rarely show ordinary humanity to servants, and they feel little tenderness for any children but their own.

These exclusive affections—and this intensely personal way of seeing the world—are products of ignorance. They keep women stuck, unable to improve. Many women devote their lives to their children only to weaken their bodies and sour their tempers, while also sabotaging any sensible educational plan a more rational father might attempt. Because unless the mother supports the father, the father’s restraint will always be framed as tyranny.

None of this means motherhood must swallow a woman’s whole mind. A woman with a sound constitution can still:

• keep herself scrupulously neat,
• help maintain her family when necessary,
• and improve her understanding through reading and conversation with both sexes.

Nature, after all, has arranged things wisely: if women nursed their children themselves, they’d preserve their own health, and the spacing between births would be longer—so we’d seldom see households overflowing with infants.

And if women followed a steady plan instead of wasting time chasing each new fashion in dress, managing a home and children wouldn’t shut them out of literature, or prevent them from attaching themselves to a science with the steady attention that strengthens the mind, or from practicing one of the fine arts that refine taste.

What pulls women away is a particular social routine: visiting to show off finery, card-playing, and balls—not to mention the empty bustle of morning “trifles.” These habits drag women from duty in order to make them insignificant—to make them “pleasing,” in today’s twisted sense of pleasing: charming to every man except their husband.

A constant round of pleasures that never exercises the affections doesn’t improve the understanding, even if people flatter themselves by calling it “seeing the world.” In fact, it cools the heart and makes duty feel repellent. The empty social interchange becomes necessary by habit even after it stops being fun.

We won’t see women truly affectionate until society becomes more equal—until rank barriers lose their grip and women are freed. We won’t see that dignified domestic happiness either, the simple grandeur that ignorant or corrupted minds can’t even taste. And we’ll never properly begin the crucial work of education until a woman’s mind is no longer treated as secondary to her body.

Expecting a foolish, ignorant woman to be a good mother is as reasonable as expecting wheat from weeds, or figs from thistles.

SECT. VI

As I move into my concluding reflections, I don’t need to tell a perceptive reader that my whole discussion has been about uncovering a few simple principles and clearing away the debris that hid them. But not everyone reads perceptively. So I’ll add a few clarifications to bring this argument home to reason—especially that sluggish reason that lazily accepts opinions on trust and then defends them stubbornly, just to avoid the work of thinking.

Moralists have always agreed on this: unless virtue is nursed by liberty, it will never grow strong. What they say about men, I apply to all humanity. Morality must be grounded in immutable principles, and no one deserves to be called rational or virtuous if they obey any authority except that of reason.

If we want women to become genuinely useful members of society, we should educate their understanding on a broad scale. That’s how they’ll gain a rational love of country—rooted in knowledge—because we’re rarely invested in what we don’t understand.

And to show why this matters, I’ve tried to make one point unavoidable: private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart, and public virtue is nothing but the sum of private virtues.

But the artificial distinctions society insists on undermine both. They hammer down the solid gold of virtue until all that remains is a glittery coating—vice dressed up as morality. When wealth earns more respect than virtue, people will chase wealth first. And when women are praised for a childish simper that advertises an empty mind, the mind is left to lie uncultivated.

Yet real pleasure—real voluptuousness—has to come from the mind. What can compare to the sensations that grow from mutual affection, supported by mutual respect?

What are the cold, feverish grabs of raw appetite, really—if not sin hugging death—when you set them beside the quiet, steady overflow of a clean conscience and a vivid, uplifted imagination?

And yes, I want to say this plainly to the “libertine” who prides himself on desire while he sneers at women’s understanding: the very mind you dismiss is what animates real affection. Without it, the only “rapture” you can get is a quick flash—bright for a second, then gone. In fact, without virtue, sexual attachment doesn’t just fade; it collapses, like a cheap candle guttering in its holder, leaving behind nothing but sour disgust.

You don’t need a laboratory to test this. Look at the men who’ve spent years chasing pleasure through one woman after another. Strangely—or maybe not—they often end up holding women in the lowest esteem. Their habits train them to treat love as consumption, not communion.

Virtue is the true purifier of joy. Try to banish it, and you don’t get lasting freedom—you get ugliness. Even if foolish men tried to scare virtue off the earth so they could indulge every appetite unchecked, some more discerning sensualist would end up scrambling after it, begging it to return. Why? Because even pleasure needs a standard. It needs something that gives it taste and meaning.

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How corrupt “romance” damages everyone

It’s hard to deny that, as things stand, many women are made either foolish or vicious by ignorance. And it isn’t wild to think that society as a whole would improve if women’s habits—and, more importantly, women’s education and opportunities—were transformed.

People love to praise marriage as the birthplace of the tender attachments that lift human beings out of the animal crowd. But here’s the problem: the corrupt relationship between the sexes, fed by wealth, leisure, and vanity, does more harm to morality than all other human vices put together.

When men treat sexual access as a casual pastime before marriage, they learn a brutal lesson:

• They learn to see “love” as selfish gratification.
• They learn to detach it from esteem.
• They even learn to detach it from the quieter, humane affection that can grow from habit and shared life.

Once that happens, they don’t just betray lovers; they throw justice and friendship aside, too. Their taste gets warped. They stop valuing a straightforward, honest display of feeling, and start craving performance—postures, games, and “airs.”

That’s why the libertine has so little use for what is actually most beautiful: a noble simplicity of affection that doesn’t need to dress itself up. Yet that unadorned affection is exactly what strengthens marriage—and marriage, when it’s real, is what keeps a home steady enough to raise children well. Children will never be properly educated until friendship exists between the parents.

A house split against itself doesn’t invite virtue in. Virtue leaves—and a whole swarm of destructive impulses moves in.

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Why intimacy can’t grow in a dishonest home

Husband and wife can’t keep their affection pure when they share almost no thoughts, pursue entirely separate aims, and don’t trust each other inside their own walls. The closeness that tenderness should naturally flow from simply won’t—can’t—take root between people who live by vice. Genuine intimacy requires honesty, respect, and self-command.

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Chastity, “modesty,” and the mutual degradation of both sexes

Men have insisted loudly on a sharp sexual distinction, as if nature itself demanded it. I argue that much of what they treat as “natural” is actually arbitrary—a social arrangement dressed up as destiny. And here’s an observation that several sensible men I’ve spoken with have agreed is solid:

• The little chastity found among men—and the contempt that follows for modesty—degrades both sexes.
• Meanwhile, what gets labeled “women’s modesty” often becomes nothing more than an artful veil for wantonness, because modesty isn’t truly honored in society.

As long as modesty is respected only when it serves men’s convenience, it won’t reliably reflect purity. It will be trained into a strategy.

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Oppression breeds “female” faults

I firmly believe that most so-called female follies grow out of men’s tyranny. And the cunning that people complain about in women—yes, I admit it’s common—doesn’t drop from the sky. It’s produced by oppression. When you deny someone straightforward power, you teach them to survive through indirection.

You can see the same pattern elsewhere. Take dissenters, for example. Weren’t they, with strict truth, often described as “cunning”? And isn’t that useful evidence of a broader rule—that when anything other than reason restrains the human spirit, people learn to dissemble, to maneuver, to rely on little tricks because open action is punished?

Their obsessive decorum, their fussy scruples, their childish commotion over trifles—the whole prim theatricality that satire has captured so well—didn’t just shape their manners. It shaped their minds, pressing them into a mold of petty narrowness.

I’m speaking in general terms; I know many admirable people have belonged to sects. Still, it remains true that dissenters often showed the same kind of cramped prejudice for their party that women are trained to show for their families. And the same mixture of timid caution and sudden headstrong bursts often disfigured both.

Oppression, in other words, sculpted their characters into a recognizable likeness of the oppressed half of humanity. Was it not notorious that dissenters, like women, loved to gather, deliberate endlessly, and ask advice of one another—until, by a tangle of small contrivances, some small end was finally achieved? The same anxious attention to reputation stood out in both the dissenting and the female world, and it came from the same source.

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Rights, character, and the absurd logic of “natural” domination

In defending the rights women should claim alongside men, I haven’t tried to excuse women’s faults. I’ve tried to show they are the natural results of education and social position. If that’s true, then it’s reasonable to expect their character to change—and their vices and follies to diminish—when they are permitted to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense.

Let woman share rights, and she will strive to match virtues—because she must become better when emancipated, or else you’d be forced to “justify” the authority that chains such a supposedly weak creature to duty.

And if you really want to defend that authority—if you truly believe women exist to be ruled by force—then be honest about the world you’re arguing for. You might as well open a new trade with Russia for whips: a wedding gift every father should hand to his son-in-law, so the husband can keep his household “in order” by the same method. He would reign without any pretense of justice, gripping his little scepter as sole master of his home, because—so the story goes—he is the only rational being in it, endowed with divine, unchallengeable sovereignty by the Creator.

But accept that position, and you must also accept its consequences. If women have no inherent rights, then, by the same logic, their duties evaporate as well—because rights and duties are inseparable.

So be just, you men of understanding. Don’t punish women more harshly for their mistakes than you punish the vicious tricks of the horse or donkey you feed—granting an animal provender while demanding good behavior. If you deny a woman the rights of reason, then at least admit what you’re doing: you’re granting her only the privileges of ignorance. And if you still insist on expecting virtue where you have not allowed understanding, you are worse than Egyptian taskmasters—demanding bricks without straw, demanding moral excellence while denying the conditions that make it possible.