As regards education, for example. Granting the alleged defects of
women, is it not somewhat absurd to sanction and maintain a system of
education which would seem to have been specially contrived to
exaggerate all these defects?

Naturally not so firmly strung, nor so well balanced, as boys, girls are
in great measure debarred from the sports and physical exercises which
are justly thought absolutely necessary for the full development of the
vigour of the more favoured sex. Women are, by nature, more excitable
than men--prone to be swept by tides of emotion, proceeding from hidden
and inward, as well as from obvious and external causes; and female
education does its best to weaken every physical counterpoise to this
nervous mobility--tends in all ways to stimulate the emotional part of
the mind and stunt the rest. We find girls naturally timid, inclined to
dependence, born conservatives; and we teach them that independence is
unladylike; that blind faith is the right frame of mind; and that
whatever we may be permitted, and indeed encouraged, to do to our
brother, our sister is to be left to the tyranny of authority and
tradition. With few insignificant exceptions, girls have been educated
either to be drudges, or toys, beneath man; or a sort of angels above
him; the highest ideal aimed at oscillating between Clärchen and
Beatrice. The possibility that the ideal of womanhood lies neither in
the fair saint, nor in the fair sinner; that the female type of
character is neither better nor worse than the male, but only weaker;
that women are meant neither to be men's guides nor their playthings,
but their comrades, their fellows and their equals, so far as Nature
puts no bar to that equality, does not seem to have entered into the
minds of those who have had the conduct of the education of girls.

If the present system of female education stands self-condemned, as