For my part, I do not see.
Ladies, you are grown-up children: men feign to have contempt for the woman who thinks of her interests in love ... because they wish, if possible, to keep their money, that is all.
Is this to say that I admit all the ideas of M. de Girardin? No.
I admit with him, that woman can only be free and the equal of man, in so far as she is a wife, through a change in marriage.
That, in the state of insecurity in which she is placed with respect to wages and to maternity outside of marriages, woman does well to take measures to prevent man from shifting the obligations of paternity from himself to her.
I would willingly admit that the child should bear the mother's name only, if men did not object so strongly to it. The child, belonging to both, should bear both names, and choose, at majority, the one that he preferred; or else the daughters should bear the name of the mother and the sons that of the father, from the time of majority.
I readily admit the equality of children before the mother and the law; for bastardy is meaningless in nature and is social iniquity. But what I do not admit, is the ideal M. de Girardin has formed with regard to the respective functions of each sex:
The exclusion of woman from active occupations;
The universalizing of the dower;
Lastly, family education.