The Cockaynes in Paris; Or, 'Gone abroad'Jerrold, Blanchard
General
The Cockaynes in Paris; Or, 'Gone abroad'
Jerrold, Blanchard
Paris (France) -- Description and travel
"My dearest Emmy,--No answer from you? How unkind! But still I continue
to give you my ideas of the moment from this. What do we want? A writer
in one of the frivolous sheets which are called newspapers on this side
of the Channel, has been giving himself great airs; looking out of his
window, with two or three touches of his pen he dismisses the poor women
who pass under his balcony, and closes the casement with the conviction
that woman's rights and wrongs are put away for another generation.
Foolish women! They are plentiful enough, and they muster in fair
numbers at the Wauxhall meetings which have been going on here, to the
infinite amusement of the superior creatures who drink absinthe, smoke
cigars, and gamble, hours after we silly things have gone to bed. I am
not writing to deny woman's weakness, nor her vanity, nor the ridiculous
exhibition she makes of herself when she takes to "orating"--as the
Yankees say--and lecturing, and dressing herself up in her brother's
clothes. Do you think, my dear Emmy, there are many women foolish enough
to applaud Dr. Mary Walker because she dresses like an overgrown
school-girl, and shows her trousers? What is she like in society?
Neither man nor woman. But how many have imitated her? How many women in
England, France, and America have taken to the platform? One would think
that all womankind was in a state of revolution, and about to make a
general descent upon the tailors and tobacconists, turning over the
lords of the creation to the milliners and the baby-linen warehouses.
This is just the way men argue, and push themselves out of a
difficulty. This French philosophical pretender, who has been observing
us from his window (I can't imagine where he lives), describes one or
two social monstrosities--with false complexions, hair, figure,--and
morals; brazen in manner, defiant in walk--female intellectual
all-in-alls. His model drives, hunts, orates, passes resolutions,
dissects--in short does everything except attend to baby. This she
leaves to the husband. He takes the pap-bowl, and she shoulders the gun.
He looks out the linen while she sharpens her razors. The foolish public
laugh all along the boulevards, and say what a charming creature a woman
will be when she drives a locomotive, commands a frigate, and storms a
citadel!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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