ABSTRACT
This is a matter infinitely more worthy your [women readers’] debates than what colours are most agreeable, or what’s the dress becomes you best. Your glass will not do you half so much service as a serious reflection on your own minds…No solicitude in the adornation of your selves is discommended, provided you employ your care about that which is really your self, and do not neglect that particle of divinity within you, which must survive, and may (if you please) be happy and perfect, when it’s unsuitable and much inferior companion is mouldering in the dust…Remember, I pray you, the famous women of former ages, the Orindas of late, and the more modern heroines, and blush to think how much is now, and will hereafter be said of them, when you your selves…must be buried in silence and forgetfulness!… How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing…
Although it has been said by men of more wit than wisdom, and perhaps of more malice than either, that women are naturally incapable of acting prudently, or that they are necessarily determined to folly, I must by no means grant it…
The incapacity, if there be any, is acquired not natural; and none of their follies are so necessary, but that they might avoid them if they pleased themselves…
…Women are from their very infancy debarred those advantages with the want of which they are afterwards reproached, and nursed up in those vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are men as to expect brick where they afford no straw; and so abundantly civil as to take care we should make good that obliging epithet of ignorant, which out of an excess of good manners they are pleased to bestow on us!…
…seeing it is ignorance, either habitual or actual, which is the cause of all sin, how are they like to escape this, who are bred up in that? That therefore women are unprofitable to most, and a plague and dishonour to some men is not much to be regretted on account of the men, because ’tis the product of their own folly, in denying them the benefits of an ingenious and liberal education, the most effectual means to direct them into, and to secure their progress in, the ways of virtue.
