You must follow nature’s guidance if you would walk aright.  The native characters of sex should be respected as nature’s handiwork.  You are always saying, “Women have such and such faults, from which we are free.”  You are misled by your vanity; what would be faults in you are virtues in them; and things would go worse, if they were without these so-called faults.  Take care that they do not degenerate into evil, but beware of destroying them.

On the other hand, women are always exclaiming that we educate them for nothing but vanity and coquetry, that we keep them amused with trifles that we may be their masters; we are responsible, so they say, for the faults we attribute to them.  How silly!  What have men to do with the education of girls?  What is there to hinder their mothers educating them as they please?  There are no colleges for girls; so much the better for them!  Would God there were none for the boys, their education would be more sensible and more wholesome.  Who is it that compels a girl to waste her time on foolish trifles?  Are they forced, against their will, to spend half their time over their toilet, following the example set them by you?  Who prevents you teaching them, or having them taught, whatever seems good in your eyes?  Is it our fault that we are charmed by their beauty and delighted by their airs and graces, if we are attracted and flattered by the arts they learn from you, if we love to see them prettily dressed, if we let them display at leisure the weapons by which we are subjugated?  Well then, educate them like men.  The more women are like men, the less influence they will have over men, and then men will be masters indeed.

All the faculties common to both sexes are not equally shared between them, but taken as a whole they are fairly divided.  Woman is worth more as a woman and less as a man; when she makes a good use of her own rights, she has the best of it; when she tries to usurp our rights, she is our inferior.  It is impossible to controvert this, except by quoting exceptions after the usual fashion of the partisans of the fair sex.

To cultivate the masculine virtues in women and to neglect their own is evidently to do them an injury.  Women are too clear-sighted to be thus deceived; when they try to usurp our privileges they do not abandon their own; with this result:  they are unable to make use of two incompatible things, so they fall below their own level as women, instead of rising to the level of men.  If you are a sensible mother you will take my advice.  Do not try to make your daughter a good man in defiance of nature.  Make her a good woman, and be sure it will be better both for her and us.