... The Elizabeths and Catherines did not make war in person, but they knew how to choose their generals; and it is enough that these are good. In every other branch of administration, has not woman given lessons to man? What prince has surpassed in firmness Maria Theresa who, in a disastrous moment, when the fidelity of her subjects was tottering and her ministers were struck with terror, undertook herself alone to inspire all with new courage? She intimidated by her presence, the disaffected Diet of Hungary; she harangued the Magnates in the Latin tongue, and brought her very enemies to swear on their sabres to die for her. This is an indication of the prodigies that would be wrought by feminine emulation in a social order which would permit free scope to her faculties. "And you, the oppressing sex,--would you not go beyond the faults imputed to women if you, like them, had been moulded by a servile education to believe yourselves automatons created to obey prejudices and to cringe before the master whom chance had given you? Have we not seen your pretensions to superiority confounded by Catharine, who trampled under foot the masculine sex? In creating titled favorites, she trailed man in the dust, and proved that it is possible for him in full liberty to abase himself beneath woman, whose degradation is forced, and consequently, excusable. It would be necessary, to confound the tyranny of man that, for the space of a century, a third sex should exist, which should be both male and female, and stronger than man. This new sex would prove by dint of blows that men as well as women were made for its pleasures; then we should hear men protest against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex, and confess that force ought not to be the sole law of right. Now why are these privileges, this independence, which they would reclaim from this third sex, refused by them to women. "In singling out those women who have had power to soar, from the virago, like Maria Theresia, to those of a gentler type, like the Ninons and the Sévignés, I am authorized in saying that woman, in a state of liberty, will surpass man in all functions of the mind and body which are not the attributes of physical strength. "Man seems already to foresee this; he becomes indignant and alarmed when women give the lie to the prejudice that accuses them of inferiority. _Masculine jealousy has especially broken out against women authors; philosophy has kept them out of academic honors, and has sent them back ignominiously to the household._"... (p. 148.)