This is a pitiless exposure of the shifts and subterfuges to which you must stoop in posing as a lady or gentleman, when you are only a person. What happiness, what profit, come out of such masquerading? It is better, a hundred times better, to save your soul alive, and preserve something of self-respect, as one of the unreceived and unrecognised Non-Respectables. You will find this enchanted garden of Philistia, fenced with high walls bristling with spikes, and set with warning boards, is a very shoddy Paradise when you are admitted to it on sufferance. It is the domain of the "bores and bored," the haunt of parasites and toadies, incessantly scheming and distrusting each other in a deadly dull atmosphere of uncongeniality.
My sister, you gain nothing by fostering this malady of Respectability, by vapouring and wasting your sweetness in the aridity of the Little Muddleton Road. So long as you slavishly conform to the barbaric customs and codes of that wretched clan, so long will you be abject and unhappy. Come out of the fetid air of the Charnel-house of Convention, rip off those corsets and cramping disguises, cast away your high-heeled boots, and stand erect and fearless among men and women who dare to live free uncontaminated lives, beyond the reek and blight of the infected purlieus.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] "The Emancipation of Women," by J. Gibson.
[3] The italics in this passage are mine.
[4] Heine, in his confessions, says: "We men will sometimes lie outright: women, like all passive creatures, seldom invent, but can so distort a fact that they can thereby injure us more surely than by a downright lie."
[5] "The Way of Marriage."