This is promising, is it not?
At the same meeting, Miss Miller announced her intention of paying no more taxes.[5] “I will force the tax collector,” she said, “to break into my house and sell my goods by auction, when I shall have a gathering of friends to protest against the injustice done to women, with the full intention of making my resistance more forcible and myself more disagreeable and troublesome to the authorities every year.”
[5] To the great amusement of the peaceful inhabitants of London, this lady has just carried out her threats. You will, however, be glad to hear that her friends managed to restore to her the distrained goods, so that the little performance did not tell much on the lady’s purse.
This is energy worthy of a better cause.
It is needless to add that such ladies are mostly unclaimed blessings, and that none of them set up as professional beauties. When a woman is beautiful, she is generally content with playing a woman’s part; when she is a mother, this sublime rôle is sufficient for her. These tedious persons embrace the thankless career of advocates of woman’s rights, because they have never found anything better to embrace. And these excellent ladies must not put it into their heads that they have created the part, for it existed in the days of Aristophanes: Praxagora was neither more nor less ridiculous than the present champions of Women’s rights.
It would be the reverse of generous for a man to reproach a woman with being an old maid. When a man does not marry, it is for want of an inclination; when a woman does not marry, it is for want of an invitation.
However that may be, the old maid is a social failure, and, in England, almost a social evil. At all events, she is a social nuisance, when she sets up as an institution, a system, and claims the right of being placed at the helm ex-officio.
It is quite right that the old maid should be respected, when she consents to remain an obscure heroine, and to devote to doing good the energies that it is not her lot to be able to devote to the sacred duties of a wife and mother; let her be tolerated when she pounces upon her fellow-creatures, in their houses, in omnibuses, and in trains, to try to convert them; let her be pitied, when she is reduced to the necessity of wasting her treasures of love on her cat and her parrot. But when she talks of devoting her spare energies to striking terror into the breast of man, it is high time that some Member of Parliament should see if there is no possibility of passing a bill through the House (before she gets in) to dispose of her, as widows are disposed of in Malabar.