Thus, gentleman, without departing from the data of your theory, you behold woman placed everywhere by the side of man, except in the hard labor from which you yourselves will soon be released by machinery, and in the military institutions which, in all probability, will some day disappear.
Hitherto institutions, laws, sciences, philosophy have chiefly borne the masculine imprint; all of these things are only half human; in order that they may become wholly so, woman must be associated in them ostensibly and lawfully, consequently, she must be cultivated like you; culture will not make her like you, do not fear it; the rose and the carnation growing in the same soil, under the same sky, in the same sunshine, with the cares of the same gardener, remain rose and carnation: they are more beautiful in proportion as they are better cultivated, and as the elements which they absorb are more abundant: if man and woman differ, a similar education will only make them differ still more, because each will employ it in the development of that which is peculiar to himself.
For the interest of all things and people it is necessary that woman should enter all the avocations of life, that she should have her function in all the functions: after the general interest of humanity, comes that of the family; it cannot go before it.
Since woman now is generally mother and housewife while performing at the same time a host of other functions, she will become none the less so in taking upon herself a few more; besides, the time of life at which an individual enters certain important functions is that at which woman has finished her maternal task. A few women acting as public functionaries will not hinder the great majority of their companions from remaining in private life, any more than a few men in the same position hinder the mass of men from continuing there.
VI.
You admit a classification at last, you say, and still more you grant that there are masculine and feminine functions. You are mistaken, gentlemen: you accused me of being incapable of giving you a complete theory, I have given you the outlines of four—outlines which it would be easy for me to extend and perfect. But I do not admit a single one of these theories as a whole.
Are you eclectic, then?
The gods forbid! I have as much repugnance to eclecticism, as to mystic trinitarianism and androgyny.
I do not admit the theory of the identity of the sexes, because I believe with Biology that an essential organic difference modifies the entire being; that therefore woman must differ from man.
I do not admit the theory of the superiority of either sex, because it is absurd; humanity is man-woman or woman-man; we do not know what one sex would be if it were not incessantly modified by its relations with the other, and we know them only as thus modified: What we know to a certainty is that they form together the existing condition of humanity; that they are equally necessary and equally useful to each other and to society.