If a woman had written anything so absurd, she would have been cried down from one end of the world to the other.
Why, gentlemen, do you not exclude from equality all men who are weak, all those who are incapable of performing the functions that you prejudge woman incapable of performing?
When you are in question, you admit indeed that the right to perform every function supposes neither the faculty nor the inclination to make use of it; why do you not reason in the same manner when the question concerns us? What would you think of women if, having your rights while you were in subjection, they should keep you in an inferior position because you could not accomplish the great functions of gestation and lactation.
Man, they would say, being unable to be mother and nurse, shall not have the right of being instructed like us; of having, like us, civil dignity. His coarser temperament renders him incapable of being a witness to a certificate of birth or death; it is evident that his clumsiness excludes him judicially from diplomatic functions; we cannot therefore recognize his right to solicit them, etc.
Ah! gentlemen, you reason in the same manner in excluding woman from equality under the pretext that, in general, she is of a temperament weaker than your own; that is, you reason absurdly.
5. Woman cannot be the equal of man in right because he protects and maintains her.
If it is because you protect and maintain us, that we ought not to have our right, restore it then to unmarried women who are of age, and to widows whom you neither protect nor maintain.
Restore their right then to the wives who have no need of your protection, since the law protects them, even against you; to the wives whom you do not maintain, since they bring you either a dowry, or a profession, or services which you would be obliged to recompense if any other rendered them to you.
And if to be maintained by another, suffices to deprive an individual of his right, take it away from the host of men who are maintained by the incomes or the labor of their wives.
6. Man, in the exercise of certain rights, is the proxy of woman.