If you give a boy the education of a girl, or a girl the education of a boy, the result will be an unsubmissive or degraded being. It is always this result which must be reached by all who, believing that they are protesting against laws and usages, are really in rebellion against Nature. 'I dream of a society,' said Jules Simon, 'where women would be the mistresses in their own household, and would figure in public affairs only through the intermediary of their fathers and their husbands. I would like to sacrifice myself for woman, but not to obey her. I repel her domination, but I crave for her influence.'
The name of woman will ever be glorious so long as it is synonymous with beauty, tenderness, sweetness, devotion, all the sacred troop of virtues. It will be glorious, thanks to the Lucretias, the Penelopes, the Cornelias, ancient and modern, the devoted daughters, the loving wives, the adorable mothers, to the thousands of obscure heroines, who remind us, in the words of the great poet of antiquity, that the best women have been those whom the world has heard least of.
The loveliest picture in the world is that which represents a soldier lying on the battlefield with a woman kneeling by his side tending his wounds. Let the field be that of the everyday battle of life.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE KIND OF WOMAN I LOVE
Another answer to critics — Distorted minds — The portrait of a womanly woman.
I once wrote an article on 'The Woman I Hate,' which brought me an avalanche of letters, not all very pleasing reading. Many of them conveyed to me the wrath of viragos, women's-righters, petticoated males, trousered females, misunderstood and unclaimed women, ripe, spectacled spinsters, cockatoos of all sorts and conditions, who happened by the irony of fate and freaks of nature to be born of a sex of which they failed to be an ornament.
One of these correspondents accused me of 'possessing a nasty mind' for sneering at lady doctors. 'You insult women,' she says. 'Can you imagine, for instance, a respectable woman submitting to an examination by a man?' My dear lady, I am afraid I must return you the compliment. Let me assure you that, just as an artist will see nothing in a female figure beyond beauty and perfect harmony of lines, and will admire her with as cool a mind as he would a statue, just so a doctor will examine a woman as he would a piece of anatomy, and your mind must be fearfully distorted and impure, if you imagine for a moment that a single objectionable thought will pass through the mind of this man of science.
If you really do think so, let me assure you that I pity you, or even must despise you, from the bottom of my heart. And, while on this subject, allow me to remind you that an eminent American man exclaimed only the other day: 'In our country we have a great many female doctors, female lawyers, female journalists, female orators, female preachers, and females in all classes and professions and trades, but what we want is a good many more female women.'