AUTHOR. Do you not even interdict to her those vocations in which strength is needed, or which are attended with danger?
READER. Women are not forbidden to be carpenters or tilers, yet they do not become such, because their nature opposes it; it is precisely because nature does oppose it, that I think society unreasonable in meddling with the nature. There is no need to prohibit what is impossible; and if what has been declared impossible is done, it is because it is possible: now society has no right to prohibit what is possible to any of its members; this appears even absurd where vocation is in question.
AUTHOR. Let each one follow his private occupation at his own risk and peril, then; but are there not certain public functions which are not suitable for women?
READER. No one knows this, since they are not open for her admission; and, were it so, the prohibition would be useless: competition would show the falsity of ill-founded pretentions.
AUTHOR. When will woman become the equal of man in marriage?
READER. When the person of the wife is not pledged in marriage; when the engagements are reciprocal, and when the wife is not treated as a minor and absorbed in the husband. And this should be so:
Because it is not allowable to alienate one's personality, such an alienation, being immoral and void of itself;
Because the wife being a distinct individual, cannot be actually absorbed by the husband, and a law is absurd when it rests on a fiction and supposes an impossibility;
Because, in fine, woman, being the equal of man before Society, cannot, under any pretext, lose this equality by reason of a closer association with him.
AUTHOR. There are two questions in marriage, aside from that of the person—property and children. Do you not think that the married woman ought, like the unmarried woman who has attained majority, to be mistress of her property, to be free to exercise any profession that suits her, and to be at liberty to sell, to buy, to give, to receive, and to institute suits at law?