Where the human race has little other culture than what it receives from
nature, the two sexes live together, unconscious of almost any restraint
on their words or on their actions. The Greeks, in the heroic ages, as
appears from the whole history of their conduct, were totally
unacquainted with delicacy. The Romans in the infancy of their empire,
were the same. Tacitus informs us that the ancient Germans had not
separate beds for the two sexes, but that they lay promiscuously on
reeds or on heath, spread along the walls of their houses. This custom
still prevails in Lapland, among the peasants of Norway, Poland, and
Russia; and it is not altogether obliterated in some parts of the
highlands of Scotland and Wales.
In Otaheite, to appear naked or in clothes, are circumstances equally
indifferent to both sexes; nor does any word in their language, nor any
action to which they are prompted by nature, seem more indelicate or
reprehensible than another. Such are the effects of a total want of
culture.
Effects not very dissimilar, are, in France and Italy, produced from a
redundance of it. Though those are the polite countries in Europe, women
there set themselves above shame, and despise delicacy. It is laughed
out of existence, as a silly and unfashionable weakness.
But in China, one of the politest countries in Asia, and perhaps not
even, in this respect, behind France, or Italy, the case is quite
otherwise. No human being can be more delicate than a Chinese woman in
her dress, in her behavior, and in her conversation; and should she ever
happen to be exposed in any unbecoming manner, she feels with the
greatest poignancy the awkwardness of her situation, and if possible,
covers her face, that she may not be known.
In the midst of so many discordant appearances, the mind is perplexed,
and can hardly fix upon any cause to which female delicacy is to be
ascribed. If we attend, however, to the whole animal creation, if we
consider it attentively wherever it falls under our observation, it will
discover to us, that in the female there is a greater degree of delicacy
or coy reserve than in the male. Is not this a proof, that, through the
wide extent of creation, the seeds of delicacy are more liberally
bestowed upon females than upon males?
In the remotest periods of which we have any historical account, we find
that the women had a delicacy to which the other sex were strangers.
Rebecca veiled herself when she first approached Isaac, her future
husband. Many of the fables of antiquity mark, with the most
distinguishing characters, the force of female delicacy. Of this kind is
the fable of Actaeon and Diana. Actaeon, a famous hunter, being in the
woods with his hounds, beating for game, accidentally spied Diana and
her nymphs bathing in a river. Prompted by curiosity, he stole silently
into a neighboring thicket, that he might have a nearer view of them.
The goddess discovering him, was so affronted at his audacity, and so
much ashamed to have been seen naked, that in revenge she immediately
transformed him into a stag, set his own hounds upon him, and encouraged
them to overtake and devour him. Besides this, and other fables, and
historical anecdotes of antiquity, their poets seldom exhibit a female
character without adorning it with the graces of modesty and delicacy.
Hence we may infer, that these qualities have not been only essential to
virtuous women in civilized countries, but were also constantly praised
and esteemed by men of sensibility; and that delicacy is an innate
principle in the female mind.
There are so many evils attending the loss of virtue in women, and so
greatly are the minds of that sex depraved when they have deviated from
the path of rectitude, that a general contamination of their morals may
be considered as one of the greatest misfortunes that can befal a state,
as in time it destroys almost every public virtue of the men. Hence all
wise legislators have strictly enforced upon the sex a particular purity
of manners; and not satisfied that they should abstain from vice only,
have required them even to shun every appearance of it.
Such, in some periods, were the laws of the Romans; and such were the
effects of these laws, that if ever female delicacy shone forth in a
conspicuous manner, it was perhaps among those people, after they had
worn off much of the barbarity of their first ages, and before they
became contaminated, by the wealth and manners of the nations which they
plundered and subjected. Then it was that we find many of their women
surpassing in modesty almost every thing related by fable; and then it
was that their ideas of delicacy were so highly refined, that they could
not even bear the secret consciousness of an involuntary crime, and far
less of having tacitly consented to it.