Does this mean that she must be brought up in ignorance and kept to housework only?  Is she to be man’s handmaid or his help-meet?  Will he dispense with her greatest charm, her companionship?  To keep her a slave will he prevent her knowing and feeling?  Will he make an automaton of her?  No, indeed, that is not the teaching of nature, who has given women such a pleasant easy wit.  On the contrary, nature means them to think, to will, to love, to cultivate their minds as well as their persons; she puts these weapons in their hands to make up for their lack of strength and to enable them to direct the strength of men.  They should learn many things, but only such things as are suitable.

When I consider the special purpose of woman, when I observe her inclinations or reckon up her duties, everything combines to indicate the mode of education she requires.  Men and women are made for each other, but their mutual dependence differs in degree; man is dependent on woman through his desires; woman is dependent on man through her desires and also through her needs; he could do without her better than she can do without him.  She cannot fulfil her purpose in life without his aid, without his goodwill, without his respect; she is dependent on our feelings, on the price we put upon her virtue, and the opinion we have of her charms and her deserts.  Nature herself has decreed that woman, both for herself and her children, should be at the mercy of man’s judgment.

Worth alone will not suffice, a woman must be thought worthy; nor beauty, she must be admired; nor virtue, she must be respected.  A woman’s honour does not depend on her conduct alone, but on her reputation, and no woman who permits herself to be considered vile is really virtuous.  A man has no one but himself to consider, and so long as he does right he may defy public opinion; but when a woman does right her task is only half finished, and what people think of her matters as much as what she really is.  Hence her education must, in this respect, be different from man’s education.  “What will people think” is the grave of a man’s virtue and the throne of a woman’s.

The children’s health depends in the first place on the mother’s, and the early education of man is also in a woman’s hands; his morals, his passions, his tastes, his pleasures, his happiness itself, depend on her.  A woman’s education must therefore be planned in relation to man.  To be pleasing in his sight, to win his respect and love, to train him in childhood, to tend him in manhood, to counsel and console, to make his life pleasant and happy, these are the duties of woman for all time, and this is what she should be taught while she is young.  The further we depart from this principle, the further we shall be from our goal, and all our precepts will fail to secure her happiness or our own.

Every woman desires to be pleasing in men’s eyes, and this is right; but there is a great difference between wishing to please a man of worth, a really lovable man, and seeking to please those foppish manikins who are a disgrace to their own sex and to the sex which they imitate.  Neither nature nor reason can induce a woman to love an effeminate person, nor will she win love by imitating such a person.