Economics -- Early works to 1800; Finance -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Economic conditions -- 18th century
2. As no woman should be received but who declared herself willing, and
that it was the act of her choice to enter herself, so no person should
be confined to continue there a moment longer than the same voluntary
choice inclined her.
3. The charges of the house being to be paid by the ladies, every one
that entered should have only this incumbrance—that she should pay for
the whole year, though her mind should change as to her continuance.
4. An Act of Parliament should make it felony, without clergy, for any
man to enter by force or fraud into the house, or to solicit any woman,
though it were to marry, while she was in the house. And this law would
by no means be severe, because any woman who was willing to receive the
addresses of a man might discharge herself of the house when she pleased;
and, on the contrary, any woman who had occasion might discharge herself
of the impertinent addresses of any person she had an aversion to by
entering into the house.
In this house the persons who enter should be taught all sorts of
breeding suitable to both their genius and their quality, and, in
particular, music and dancing, which it would be cruelty to bar the sex
of, because they are their darlings; but, besides this, they should be
taught languages, as particularly French and Italian; and I would venture
the injury of giving a woman more tongues than one.
They should, as a particular study, be taught all the graces of speech,
and all the necessary air of conversation, which our common education is
so defective in that I need not expose it. They should be brought to
read books, and especially history, and so to read as to make them
understand the world, and be able to know and judge of things when they
hear of them.
To such whose genius would lead them to it I would deny no sort of
learning: but the chief thing in general is to cultivate the
understandings of the sex, that they may be capable of all sorts of
conversation; that, their parts and judgments being improved, they may be
as profitable in their conversation as they are pleasant.
Women, in my observation, have little or no difference in them but as
they are, or are not, distinguished by education. Tempers indeed may in
some degree influence them, but the main distinguishing part is their
breeding.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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