Nearly a century and a half ago an English lady, out of patience with the intolerable assumptions of the other sex, raised her voice in behalf of her own.  In 1793 there was published in London a pamphlet entitled “Woman not Inferior to Man, or a Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men.  By Sophia, a Person of Quality.”  The title-page has a quotation from Rowe’s Fair Penitent: 

How hard is the condition of our sex! 
—­Through every state of life the slave of man!

* * * * *

         Wherefore are we

Born with souls, but to assert ourselves,
Shake off this wild obedience they exact,
And claim an equal empire o’er the world?

From such a title and such an epigraph one might expect the most incendiary sentiments in the pages which follow, and that Sophia had nothing less in view than to overthrow the usurper; but this she disclaims:  she has no intention, she avers, “to stir up any of my own sex to revolt against the men, or to invert the present order of things with regard to government and authority” Her sole object appears to be to bring men to a proper sense of their deficiencies and the emptiness of their pretensions.  But she is a person of admirable dignity and discretion:  it is not until the conclusion, when she has not left them a leg to stand upon, that she magnanimously waives all the advantages to accrue from their humiliation, and merely bids them in future to know their true place.  The composition is in every way worthy of these elevated sentiments.  Sophia need not have announced herself a person of quality:  there is evidence of it on every leaf of her book.  One recognizes the accomplished gentlewoman of a hundred years ago, with her solid reading, her strong common sense, her sober religious convictions, her household science.  No doubt she loved fine lace and old china; there are recondite internal proofs that she was pretty; and on closing the book a far-off rustle of her brocade reaches us as she makes her spreading curtsey.  But we will let her speak for herself a little.  Her first position is certainly a strong one:  “If this haughty sex would have us believe they have a natural right of superiority over us, why don’t they prove their charter from Nature by making use of reason to subdue themselves?...  Were we to see men everywhere and at all times masters of themselves, and their animal appetites in perfect subordination to their rational faculties, we should have some color to think that Nature designed them as masters to us.”  The doctrine of female inferiority she considers “a vulgar though ancient error,” observing that until very recent ages the sun was believed to revolve round the earth, and the notion of the antipodes was “a heresy in philosophy”—­that to assert the equality