human
One begins to learn everything too late, she wrote to Algitha.
gpt
This ought all to have been familiar long ago. I don't know anything about the world in which I live. I have never before caught so much as a distant glimpse of it. And even now there are strange thick wrappings from the past that cling tight round and hold me aloof, strive as I may to strip off that past-made personality, and to understand, by touch, what things are made of. I feel as if I would risk anything in order to really know that. Why should a woman treat herself as if she were Dresden china? She is more or less insulted and degraded whatever happens, especially if she obeys what our generation is pleased to call the moral law. The more I see of life, the more hideous seems the position that women hold in relation to the social structure, and the more sickening the current nonsense that is talked about us and our 'missions' and 'spheres.' It is so feeble, so futile, to try to ornament an essentially degrading fact. It is such insolence to talk to us--good heavens, to _us!_--about holiness and sacredness, when men (to whom surely a sense of humour has been denied) divide their women into two great classes, both of whom they insult and enslave, insisting peremptorily on the existence of each division, but treating one class as private and the other as public property. One might as well talk to driven cattle in the shambles about their 'sacred mission' as to women. It is an added mockery, a gratuitous piece of insolence.