8. You say that morality is in a direct ratio to physical and intellectual force combined. This pleasantry we will not refute; every one knows too well that these things have no relation, and that facts contradict your assertion.
9. You say: woman being one third weaker, should have in social labor one third the privileges of man.
Upon what elements do you base this proportion? In order to establish it, did you carry a dynamometer about through our districts and measure the strength of each man and of each woman?
But were your affirmation true, is naught but strength employed in labor? Then, great economist, what do we do with skill? What Samsonian muscles are needed to keep books, dispense justice, measure cloth, cut and sew garments, etc.!
And what is the end of civilization if not to shift the employ of our strength from ourselves to machinery that we may be at liberty to use only our intellect and skill?
10. You say: the infirmities, the weaknesses, the maternity of woman, and her aptitude for love, exclude her from all functions; she is judicially and absolutely excluded from all political, industrial and doctrinal direction.
She cannot be a political leader.... Yet history shows us numerous empresses, queens, regents and sovereign princesses who have governed with wisdom and glory, and have shown themselves far superior to many male sovereigns, unless Maria Theresa, Catherine II, Isabella and Blanche of Castile, and many others, are but myths.
Woman cannot be a legislator.... All the women whom I have just cited have been so, and many more beside.
Women can be neither philosophers nor professors.
Hypatia, massacred by the Christians, taught Philosophy with luster; in the Middle Age and later, Italian women filled chairs of Philosophy, Law and Mathematics, and excited admiration and enthusiasm; in France, at the present time, the Polytechnists are making great account of the geometrician, Sophie Germain, who has taken it into her head to study Kant.