"By her nature she is in a state of constant demoralization, always on this side or that of justice.... Justice is insupportable to her.... Her conscience is anti-judicial."
She is aristocratic, loves privileges and distinctions; "in all revolutions that have liberty and equality for their object, women make the most resistance. They did more harm in the revolution of February than all the powers of the masculine reaction combined.
"Women have so little judicial sense that the legislator who fixed the age of moral responsibility at sixteen for both sexes, might have delayed it till forty-five, for women. Woman's conscience is decidedly of no value till this age."
In herself, woman is immodest.
It is from man therefore that she receives modesty, "which is the product of manly dignity, the corollary of justice.
"Woman has no other inclination, no other aptitude than love.
"In affairs of love, the initiative belongs truly to woman."—Justice, Vol. III., pp. 364, 366.
AUTHOR. How many persons you will astonish, Master, by revealing to them that modesty comes from man; that consequently all the young girls who have been seduced, all the little girls whose corruptors and violators are punished by the courts, are but jades, who, through their initiative, have caused men to forget their character as inspirers of chastity!
You enlighten me, illustrious Master; and I shall at once draw up a memorial to demand that all seduced and violated women and girls shall be punished as they deserve; and that, to console the seducers, suborners, corruptors and violators, poor innocent victims of feminine ferocity, for having sinned against the corollary of justice and the product of manly dignity, rose-trees shall be forced to blossom, in order that the maires of the forty thousand communes of France and Algeria may crown them winners of the roses.
PROUDHON. Jest as you please; woman is nevertheless so perverse in her nature, that, through inclination, she seeks men who are ugly, old, and wicked.