... launched a thousand ships
          And burned the topless towers of Ilium.

Woman’s helplessness, forsooth!  On the contrary, woman is the best equipped fighting machine that ever went to battle.  And she is this, not from any sufferance on the part of man, not from any consideration on his part toward her “weakness,” but merely because he cannot help himself, because nature has so made her.

No simple reasoning will account for her influence over man.  It is not an influence he allows.  It is an influence he cannot resist, and it is an influence which he cannot explain, though he may make believe to do so.  That “protection,” for example, which he extends to her from the common physical perils with which he is more muscularly constituted to cope—­why is it extended?  Merely out of pity to a weaker being than himself?  Does other weakness always command his pity?  We know that it does not.  No, this “protection” is but a part of an instinctive reverence, for which he can give no reason, the same kind of reverence which he has always given to divine beings, to any manifestation or vessel of the mysteriously sacred something in human life.  He respects and protects woman from the same instinct which makes him shrink from profaning an altar or robbing a church, or sends him on his knees before any apparition supposedly divine.  Priests and women are often classed together, but not because the priests are regarded as effeminately “helpless”; rather because both are recognized as ministers of sacred mysteries, both belong to the spiritual sphere, and have commerce with the occult holiness of things.  Also be it remarked that this “protection” is chiefly needed against the brutality and bestiality of man’s own heart, which woman and religion alike rather hold in subjection by their mysterious influence than have to thank for any favours of self-control.  Man “protects” woman because he first worships her, because, if she has for him not always the beauty of holiness, she at least always suggests the holiness of beauty.

Now when has man ever suggested holiness to the most adoring woman?  I do not refer to the professional holiness of saints and ecclesiastics, but to that sense of hallowed strangeness, of mystic purity, of spiritual exquisiteness, which breathes from a beautiful woman and makes the touch of her hand a religious ecstasy, and her very garments a thrilling mystery.  How impossible it is to imagine a woman writing the Vita Nuova, or a girl feeling toward a boy such feelings of awe and worship as set the boy Dante a-tremble at his first sight of the girl Beatrice.