A Short History of English Liberalism — John Shaqi
A Short History of English LiberalismBlease, W. Lyon (Walter Lyon)
History
A Short History of English Liberalism
Blease, W. Lyon (Walter Lyon)
Great Britain -- Politics and government; Liberal Party (Great Britain); Liberalism
Within the borders of Great Britain the Tory philosophy was expressed most
crudely and practised most universally in the relations of men and women.
Women were made only for those purposes which they could fulfil in
connection with men. They must be trained only in those qualities which men
required in them, irrespective of their own varying capacities and
dispositions. They must not engage in any occupation where they might
compete with men. Their political conditions were prescribed by men. Even
the moral rules which regulated their private conduct were settled by men,
who degraded the wretched prostitute while they permitted themselves the
indulgence which produced her downfall. When a woman married a man her real
{53} property passed to him for his life and her personal property
absolutely, and the subordination of her judgment to his, enjoined upon her
by the marriage service, was secured by this deprivation of her economic
independence. "The profession of ladies," said Mrs. Hannah More, "to which
the bent of their instruction should be turned, is that of daughters,
wives, mothers, and mistresses of families."[56] "Men," said Mrs. Barbauld,
"have various departments in life; women have but one.... It is, to be a
wife, a mother, a mistress of a family."[57] Association with a man being
the beginning and end of a woman's course of life, her whole mind was to be
trained, not according to her capacities, but according to what a man would
want of her. Almost every contemporary treatise on the education of women
emphasizes the necessity of suppressing the woman's intellect in the
presence of the man's. "If you have any learning," said Dr. Gregory in a
very popular work, "keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who
generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts
and a cultivated understanding."[58] "Young ladies," said Mrs. Barbauld,
"ought only to have such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them
agreeable companions to a man of sense,"[59] and she persuaded Mrs.
Elizabeth Montagu to abandon her scheme of endowing a women's college.
Toryism has never elsewhere been so remorseless in warping nature to its
own prejudices, and no slave was ever more carefully trained to
intellectual feebleness and triviality, or more carefully educated in
submission and docility towards his master, than was the ordinary young
English lady of the end of the eighteenth century.[60]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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