The duty
expected from them is, like all the duties arbitrarily imposed on
women, more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for
decorum, than reason; and thus taught slavishly to submit to their
parents, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage. I may be
told that a number of women are not slaves in the marriage state.
True, but they then become tyrants; for it is not rational freedom,
but a lawless kind of power resembling the authority exercised by
the favourites of absolute monarchs, which they obtain by debasing
means. I do not, likewise, dream of insinuating that either boys or
girls are always slaves, I only insist that when they are obliged to
submit to authority blindly, their faculties are weakened, and their
tempers rendered imperious or abject. I also lament that parents,
indolently availing themselves of a supposed privilege, damp the first
faint glimmering of reason, rendering at the same time the duty, which
they are so anxious to enforce, an empty name; because they will not
let it rest on the only basis on which a duty can rest securely: for
unless it be founded on knowledge, it cannot gain sufficient
strength to resist the squalls of passion, or the silent sapping of
self-love. But it is not the parents who have given the surest proof
of their affection for their children, or, to speak more properly, who
by fulfilling their duty, have allowed a natural parental affection to
take root in their hearts, the child of exercised sympathy and reason,
and not the over-weening offspring of selfish pride, who most
vehemently insist on their children submitting to their will merely
because it is their will.
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