To woman: knowledge is useless to you; if you have it, you will pass for a pedant, and if you have courage, you will be disdainfully called virago.
To man: for you are instituted lyceums, universities, special schools, high prizes; all the institutions through which your intellect can be developed; all the libraries in which is accumulated the knowledge of the past.
To woman: for you is history in madrigals, the reading of prayer-books and novels. You have nothing to do with lyceums, special schools, high prizes, anything that would elevate your mind and enlarge your views; a learned woman is ridiculous!
Man must display the knowledge that he often possesses but superficially, woman must hide what she really possesses.
Man must appear courageous when he is often but a coward; woman must feign timidity when in reality she is not afraid.
For where man is reputed great and sublime, woman is found ridiculous, sometimes odious.
If you had verified as you should have done, these diametrically opposite systems of training, the one tending to develop and ennoble the being, the other to degrade it and render it imbecile, instead of writing such absurdities, you would have said to yourself: woman must really have the initiative to resist the iniquitous system of repression that weighs upon her; she must have great elasticity to show herself so often superior to the majority of men in intellect, and always in morality.
I am curious to know what you males would be if subjected to the same system as we. Look at those who have not studied like you, and tell me whether they are not in general beneath uncultivated women. Look then at the men who have received a feminine education; have they not all the affectation, all the narrowness of mind of silly women?
Look, on the contrary, at those women who, through the wish of their teachers or their own energy, have been subjected to masculine discipline, and tell me, on your conscience, whether they do not equal the most intelligent, the firmest among you?
7. You say: intellectual force is in proportion to physical force. Facts reply: great thoughts, useful works, date from the period when the physical forces began to decline. Facts say also: the athletic temperament, which is the most vigorous, is the least intellectual: statuaries fully comprehend this, and sculpture Hercules with a large body and a small head.