Do you reproach a man then for taking our part against the selfish and animal passions of his sex, and against the impunity accorded them by the laws? Do you reproach him for taking in hand the cause of morals and health, in opposition to the degradation of soul and body? A young girl stipulate the sale of her person! say you? what essential difference do you find between this kind of contract, and those that are made to-day before the notary on the occasion of a marriage? Did not most among you, ladies, purchase your husbands with so much dowry, so much income, so much _expectations_? And if these husbands of yours did not think it shameful to be sold, and if you do not esteem them less for it, be good enough to tell me from what principle you judge it shameful for a young girl to do the same in order to rear her children, and to live without prostituting herself? For my part, I do not see. Ladies, you are grown-up children: men feign to have contempt for the woman who thinks of her interests in love ... because they wish, if possible, to keep their money, that is all. Is this to say that I admit all the ideas of M. de Girardin? No. I admit with him, that woman can only be free and the equal of man, in so far as she is a wife, through a change in marriage. That, in the state of insecurity in which she is placed with respect to wages and to maternity outside of marriages, woman _does well_ to take measures to prevent man from shifting the obligations of paternity from himself to her. I would willingly admit that the child should bear the mother's name only, if men did not object so strongly to it. The child, belonging to both, should bear both names, and choose, at majority, the one that he preferred; or else the daughters should bear the name of the mother and the sons that of the father, from the time of majority. I readily admit the equality of children before the mother and the law; for bastardy is meaningless in nature and is social iniquity. But what I do not admit, is the ideal M. de Girardin has formed with regard to the respective functions of each sex: The exclusion of woman from active occupations; The universalizing of the dower; Lastly, family education. To say that man represents labor, the genius of enterprise, that he speculates, acquires, brings in,--that woman represents economy, the spirit of foresight,--that she administers, preserves, transmits, is to establish a series which does not appear to me at all in conformity with the nature of things, since it is notorious that a great number of women do what M. de Girardin attributes to the other sex, and _vice versâ_.