of the sexes now was no greater paradox than to advocate either of those theories but a short time ago.  “But,” she continues, “who shall the matter be tried by?” and here we suspect she has reached the root of the difficulty.  Both men and women, she admits, are too much interested to be impartial judges; therefore she appeals to “rectified reason” as umpire.  She considers in order the various claims to predominance which men have put forward, and confutes them one by one.  “Man concludes that all other creatures were made for him because he was not created until all were in readiness for him:”  even granting that to be unanswerable, she says it only proves that men were made for women, and not vice versa:  “they are our natural drudges....  Men are magnified because they succeed in taming a tiger, an elephant or such like animals;” therefore what rank must belong to woman, “who spends years in training that fiercer animal, MAN?” She instances a journeyman tailor she once saw belabor his wife with a neck of mutton, “to make her know, as he said, her sovereign lord and master.  And this is perhaps as strong an argument as their sex is able to produce, though conveyed, in a greasy light....  To stoop to regard for the strutting things is not enough; to humor them more than we could children with any tolerable decency is too little; they must be served, forsooth!” It is grievous injustice to Sophia, but one almost fancies one hears Madame George Sand.  She allows that to please man ought to be part of the sex’s business if it were likely to succeed; “but such is the fanatical composition of their natures that the more pains is taken in endeavoring to please them, the less generally is the labor successful; ... and surely women were created by Heaven for some better end than to labor in vain their whole life long.”  The supercilious commendations of men are gall and wormwood to her:  “Some, more condescending, are gracious enough to confess that many women have wit and conduct; but yet they are of opinion that even such of us as are the most remarkable for either or both still betray something which speaks the imbecility of our sex.”  She makes an excellent plea forgiving women a thorough education, complaining that it is denied them, and then they are charged with being superficial:  “True knowledge and solid learning cannot but make woman as well as man more humble; ... and it must be owned that if a little superficial knowledge has rendered some of our sex vain, it equally renders some of theirs insupportable.”  With all the sex’s frivolity, she adds, women have not been found to spend their lives on mere entia rationis splitting hairs and weighing motes like the Schoolmen.  She concludes that men deprive women of education lest they should oust them “from those public offices which they fill so miserably.”  She handles her logic admirably, and exposes her adversaries for begging the question and reasoning in a circle.