“* * * the terrible aggregate social woman, of man’s creation, hated by him, dreaded, scorned, satirized, and nevertheless, upheld, esteemed, applauded: a mark of civilization, on to which our human society must hold as long as we have nothing humaner. She exhibits virtue, with face of waxen angel, with paw of desert beast, and blood of victims on it.”
This is discrimination; the general dearth of which is lamented by Lady Dunstane:[274]
“The English notion of women seems to be that we are born white sheep or black; circumstances have nothing to do with our colour. They dread to grant distinctions, and to judge of us discerningly is beyond them.”
And Lætitia, after listening to a long Patterne discourse on feminine traits and limitations, laconically sums up the whole matter in a compact epigram:[275]
“‘The generic woman appears to have an extraordinary faculty for swallowing the individual.’”
After this, decidedly flat and puerile falls the witticism of Kingsley, spoken by Bracebridge in reply to Lancelot’s impatient question why women would “make such fools of themselves with clergymen”:[276]
“They are quite right. They always like the strong men—the fighters and the workers. In Voltaire’s time they all ran after the philosophers. In the middle ages, books tell us, they worshipped the knights errant. They are always on the winning side, the cunning little beauties. In the war-time, when the soldiers had to play the world’s game, the ladies all caught the red-coat fever; now, in these talking and thinking days (and be hanged to them for bores), they have the black-coat fever for the same reason.”
Thackeray also is guilty of the generalization not at his time discovered to be fallacious:[277]
“Women won’t see matters-of-fact in a matter-of-fact point of view, and justice, unless it is tinged with a little romance, gets no respect from them.”
The generosity of “Little Sister” in condoning young Firmin’s unwise passiveness is based on “that admirable injustice which belongs to all good women, and for which let us be daily thankful.” At this point the undevout votary burns considerable medieval incense at the feminine shrine,—not caring much if a little smoke should blow into his idols’ eyes:[278]