Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers: Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With The Freethinkers."Bradlaugh, Charles
Religion
Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers: Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With The Freethinkers."
Bradlaugh, Charles
Rationalists -- Biography
Galiana.--Not so much as in instinct. A woman is habitually ill. She is
affectionate, engaging, irritable, capricious, easily offended, easily
appeased, a trifle amuses her. The imagination is always in play. Fear,
hope, joy, despair, and disgust, follow each other more rapidly, are
manifested more strongly, effaced more quickly, than with us. They like
a plentiful repose, at intervals company; anything for excitement. Ask
the doctor if it is not the same with his patients. But ask yourself,
do we not all treat them as we do sick people, lavish attention, soothe,
flatter, caress, and get tired of them?
Condorcet, in a letter, remarking on the above conversation, says:--"I
do not insist upon it as probable that woman will ever be Euler
or Voltaire; but I am satisfied that she may one day be Pascal or
Rousseau." This very qualification, we consider, is sufficient to
absolve Condorcet from, the charge of being a "woman hater." His
opponents, when driven from every other source, have fallen back on
this, and alleged that he viewed the sexes as unequal, and that the
stronger had a right to lord it over the weaker. But which is the
weaker? Euler and Voltaire were masculine men. A woman to be masculine,
in the true sense of the word, is an anomaly, to be witnessed with pain.
She is not in a normal condition. She is a monster. Women should live in
society fully educated and developed in their physical frame, and then
they would be more feminine in proportion as they approach the character
of Mary Wollstonecraft. They have no right to domineer as tyrants, and
then fall into the most abject of slaves. In each of the characters of
Pascal and Rousseau, was an excess of sensibility, which overbalanced
their other qualities, and rendered their otherwise great talents
wayward, and, to a certain extent, fruitless. The peculiarity of man
is physical power, and intellectual force; that of woman is an acute
sensibility. Condorcet, then, was justified in expressing the opinions
he avowed upon the subject.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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