Woman, with respect to physical, intellectual and moral beauty, is to man as 3 to 2; "thus it may be said, indeed, that between man and woman there exists a certain equivalence, arising from their respective comparison, in the two-fold point of view of strength and beauty; if, by labor, genius, and justice, man is to woman as 27 to 8, in her turn, by graces of form and mind, by amenity of character and tenderness of heart, she is to man as 27 to 8.... But these respective qualities are incommutable, cannot be the subject of any contract....
"Now, as every question of preponderance in the government of human life is within the jurisdiction either of the economical order, or of the philosophical or judicial order, it is evident that superiority of beauty, even of that which is intellectual and moral, cannot create a compensation for woman, whose condition is thus made fatally subordinate."—Id.
Do you understand me now?
AUTHOR. I understand that this is pure sophistry, a thing easily demonstrated; that if your thesis is absurd, your antithesis, however complimentary it may be, is quite as much so; that you have piled contradictions upon contradictions, and that it is a sad spectacle to me to see so strong and fine an intellect as yours abandon itself to such practices.
You shall judge for yourself whether my reproaches and regrets are well founded.
In the Thesis you say: man alone is in himself intelligent and just, he alone is adequate to his destiny. Woman has no reason for existing; without man, she would not emerge from the bestial condition.
In the Antithesis: without woman, who is the principle of animation of man, the motive power of all science, of all art, of all industry, of all virtue—without woman, who renders justice possible, thought comprehensible and applicable, man, far from being in himself just, intelligent, a worker, would be but a brute, who would violate his female, strangle his little ones, and pursue his fellow men in order to devour them.
What follows from these divergent affirmations? That if woman alone is inadequate to her destiny, man alone is inadequate to his, and that the adequateness of both is caused by the synthesis of their respective qualities.
It also follows, by your own admission, that man receives as much from woman as she receives from him, since, if he rescues her from the bestial state, she rescues him from the state of brute ferocity.
It follows, lastly, by your own admission, that there is equivalence between the respective qualities of the two sexes. Only you pretend that these qualities cannot be measured by each other, and cannot therefore be subject for contract, and that the qualities of man being more important to the social state than those of woman, the latter should be subordinated to the former.