“How hard is the condition of our sex,
Through every state of life the slaves of man!
In all the dear delightful days of youth,
A rigid father dictates to our wills,
And deals out pleasure with a scanty hand:
To his, the tyrant husband’s reign succeeds;
Proud with opinions of superior reason,
He holds domestic business and devotion
All we are capable to know, and shuts us,
Like cloistered idiots, from the world’s acquaintance
And all the joys of freedom. Wherefore are we
Born with high souls, but to assert ourselves,
Shake off this vile obedience they exact,
And claim an equal empire o’er the world?”
—(“The Fair Penitent,” Act III. sc. i.)
Letourneau shows the state of feminine tutelage carried still further:
“We shall find that in many civilisations relatively advanced, widowhood
even does not gratify the woman with a liberty of which she is never
thought worthy.” And later on he quotes from the code of Manu, Book
V.:—“A little girl, a young woman, and an old woman ought never to do
anything of their own will, even in their own house.... During her
childhood a woman depends on her father; during her youth on her
husband; her husband being dead, on her sons; if she has no sons, on the
near relatives of her husband; or in default of them, on those of her
father; if she has no paternal relatives, on the Sovereign. A woman
ought never to have her own way.”—(“The Evolution of Marriage,” Chaps.
VII., XII.)
Can a man be esteemed a human or even a rational being, who would accept
or tolerate such terms for the life of his sister woman—the mother of
the generations to come?
See also Note XVII., 8.