" The
confession of these last few lines refutes the whole of Mr. Mill's
elaborate argument on the worthlessness and immorality of that
religion which from his grave he lifts his sad and hollow voice to
overthrow.
LAWRENCE TURNBULL.
OUR MONTHLY GOSSIP.
WOMAN'S RIGHTS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.
Not only we, the latest seed of Time--
... not only we that prate
Of rights and wrongs, have loved the _women_ well.
Nearly a century and a half ago an English lady, out of patience with
the intolerable assumptions of the other sex, raised her voice in
behalf of her own. In 1793 there was published in London a pamphlet
entitled "_Woman not Inferior to Man, or a Short and Modest
Vindication of the Natural Right of the Fair Sex to a Perfect Equality
of Power, Dignity and Esteem with the Men_. By Sophia, a Person of
Quality." The title-page has a quotation from Rowe's _Fair Penitent_:
How hard is the condition of our sex!
--Through every state of life the slave of man!
* * * * *
Wherefore are we
Born with souls, but to assert ourselves,
Shake off this wild obedience they exact,
And claim an equal empire o'er the world?
From such a title and such an epigraph one might expect the most
incendiary sentiments in the pages which follow, and that Sophia had
nothing less in view than to overthrow the usurper; but this she
disclaims: she has no intention, she avers, "to stir up any of my own
sex to revolt against the _men_, or to invert the present order of
things with regard to _government_ and _authority_" Her sole object
appears to be to bring men to a proper sense of their deficiencies and
the emptiness of their pretensions.
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