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Her sole object appears to be to bring men to a proper sense of their deficiencies and the emptiness of their pretensions. But she is a person of admirable dignity and discretion: it is not until the conclusion, when she has not left them a leg to stand upon, that she magnanimously waives all the advantages to accrue from their humiliation, and merely bids them in future to know their true place. The composition is in every way worthy of these elevated sentiments. Sophia need not have announced herself a person of quality: there is evidence of it on every leaf of her book. One recognizes the accomplished gentlewoman of a hundred years ago, with her solid reading, her strong common sense, her sober religious convictions, her household science. No doubt she loved fine lace and old china; there are recondite internal proofs that she was pretty; and on closing the book a far-off rustle of her brocade reaches us as she makes her spreading curtsey. But we will let her speak for herself a little. Her first position is certainly a strong one:
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If this haughty sex would have us believe they have a natural right of superiority over us, why don't they prove their charter from Nature by making use of reason to subdue themselves?... Were we to see _men_ everywhere and at all times masters of themselves, and their animal appetites in perfect subordination to their rational faculties, we should have some color to think that Nature designed them as masters to us. The doctrine of female inferiority she considers
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observing that until very recent ages the sun was believed to revolve round the earth, and the notion of the antipodes was
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--that to assert the equality of the sexes now was no greater paradox than to advocate either of those theories but a short time ago.
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But, she continues,
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and here we suspect she has reached the root of the difficulty. Both men and women, she admits, are too much interested to be impartial judges; therefore she appeals to
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as umpire. She considers in order the various claims to predominance which men have put forward, and confutes them one by one.
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Man concludes that all other creatures were made for him because he was not created until all were in readiness for him: even granting that to be unanswerable, she says it only proves that men were made for women, and not _vice versâ_:
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therefore what rank must belong to woman,
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She instances a journeyman tailor she once saw belabor his wife with a neck of mutton,
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It is grievous injustice to Sophia, but one almost fancies one hears Madame George Sand. She allows that to please man ought to be part of the sex's business if it were likely to succeed;
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The supercilious commendations of men are gall and wormwood to her:
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Some, more condescending, are gracious enough to confess that many _women_ have wit and conduct; but yet they are of opinion that even such of us as are the most remarkable for either or both still betray something which speaks the imbecility of our sex. She makes an excellent plea forgiving women a thorough education, complaining that it is denied them, and then they are charged with being superficial:
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True knowledge and solid learning cannot but make woman as well as man more humble; ... and it must be owned that if a little superficial knowledge has rendered some of our sex vain, it equally renders some of theirs insupportable. With all the sex's frivolity, she adds, women have not been found to spend their lives on mere _entia rationis_ splitting hairs and weighing motes like the Schoolmen. She concludes that men deprive women of education lest they should oust them
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She handles her logic admirably, and exposes her adversaries for begging the question and reasoning in a circle. Of course she enforces her assertions by citing the women who have distinguished themselves in every position of responsibility, military, political and intellectual, and only refrains from multiplying instances because of their number. Not to quote those alone who have filled chairs of medicine with honor, she ingeniously remarks that the remedies classed as
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are those oftenest prescribed, to the glory of her sex, who by patience, humanity and observation have invented without the help of Galen and Hippocrates an infinity of reliefs for the sick which their adherents can neither improve nor disapprove. She makes her final point on the question of moral superiority. It is sometimes stated