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

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

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

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