If a woman discards the quiet modest bearing of her sex, and adopts the airs of such foolish creatures, she is not following her vocation, she is forsaking it; she is robbing herself of the rights to which she lays claim.  “If we were different,” she says, “the men would not like us.”  She is mistaken.  Only a fool likes folly; to wish to attract such men only shows her own foolishness.  If there were no frivolous men, women would soon make them, and women are more responsible for men’s follies than men are for theirs.  The woman who loves true manhood and seeks to find favour in its sight will adopt means adapted to her ends.  Woman is a coquette by profession, but her coquetry varies with her aims; let these aims be in accordance with those of nature, and a woman will receive a fitting education.

Even the tiniest little girls love finery; they are not content to be pretty, they must be admired; their little airs and graces show that their heads are full of this idea, and as soon as they can understand they are controlled by “What will people think of you?” If you are foolish enough to try this way with little boys, it will not have the same effect; give them their freedom and their sports, and they care very little what people think; it is a work of time to bring them under the control of this law.

However acquired, this early education of little girls is an excellent thing in itself.  As the birth of the body must precede the birth of the mind, so the training of the body must precede the cultivation of the mind.  This is true of both sexes; but the aim of physical training for boys and girls is not the same; in the one case it is the development of strength, in the other of grace; not that these qualities should be peculiar to either sex, but that their relative values should be different.  Women should be strong enough to do anything gracefully; men should be skilful enough to do anything easily.

The exaggeration of feminine delicacy leads to effeminacy in men.  Women should not be strong like men but for them, so that their sons may be strong.  Convents and boarding-schools, with their plain food and ample opportunities for amusements, races, and games in the open air and in the garden, are better in this respect than the home, where the little girl is fed on delicacies, continually encouraged or reproved, where she is kept sitting in a stuffy room, always under her mother’s eye, afraid to stand or walk or speak or breathe, without a moment’s freedom to play or jump or run or shout, or to be her natural, lively, little self; there is either harmful indulgence or misguided severity, and no trace of reason.  In this fashion heart and body are alike destroyed.