“And I say that it is wrong to expect purity from wives and not also from their husbands.”
“My dear Yanna, we shall have to call justice to our aid. There are certain virtues that belong peculiarly to men, and others which belong peculiarly to women. For instance, bravery is to a man all that chastity is to a woman. The want of courage that disgraces a man is no slur to a woman. If a ship is going to pieces, 218 men postpone their own deliverance until all the women have been saved; and if they did not, they would be infamous forever in the eyes of their fellow men. In the hour of death or danger, women faint and cry out, and it is no shame to them, it is only womanly, and they are loved the more for it; but if men were to so far forget themselves, what a measure of contempt would be justly given them! Yet men do not complain of this apparent unfairness; they know that being men, they must suffer as men, and not claim the privilege of a woman’s immunity.”
“One sin cannot excuse another, Cousin Alida.”
“It is not only one, there are many other points, which are just as remarkable; for instance, there is the dishonor of being found out cheating at cards. Men laugh at the fault in women; they call them ‘pretty little frauds,’ and go on with the game. But if a man is caught in the same act, he is quickly sent to Coventry, or to Halifax, or to some other shameful limbo.”
“Women are proverbially weak, and men assume to be their superiors in strength of character. They ought to prove it.”
“Come, come, Mrs. Filmer! If a woman’s weakness is an excuse, then the vigor, the strength, and the temptations of men are a much larger one. Their very excess of life makes them powerful to do, and impotent to resist. It is clearly unreasonable to expect men to be both as they are and as they are not. Simple justice demands that we should be more tolerant with men than with women on the score of those offences, which are the death-blow to a woman’s good name. You see, then, that each sex has a right to plead certain extenuations not permissible to the other sex.”
“I see that it is the privilege of the male sex to wound and to injure the female sex; and the privilege of the latter to bear and to forgive.”
“Well, then, Yanna, to forgive is a noble privilege, a safe and blessed generosity. And I can tell you, that I have known many pure, chaste wives who were just as bad wives as you could possibly find—cruel, selfish, spiritually-proud, intolerant women, filling their husband’s days with the bitterness of their tempers, or else giving way to an egotism of despair and weeping worse than all the wrongs they complain of.”
“My dear cousin, I do hope that you do not include me in that list.”