“But I hear you indignantly reject the boon of equality with such creatures as men now are. With you I would equally elevate both sexes. Really enlightened women, disdaining equally the submissive tricks of the slave and the caprices of the despot, breathing freely only in the air of the esteem of equals, and of mutual, unbought, uncommanded, affection, would find it difficult to meet with associates worthy of them in men as now formed, full of ignorance and vanity, priding themselves on a _sexual_ superiority, entirely independent of any merit, any superior qualities, or pretentions to them, claiming respect from the strength of their arm, and the lordly faculty of producing beards attached by nature to their chins! No: unworthy of, as incapable of appreciating, the delight of the society of such women, are the great majority of the existing race of men. The pleasures of mere animal appetite, the pleasures of commanding (the prettier and more helpless the slave, the greater these pleasures of the brute), are the only pleasures which the majority of men seek from women, are the only pleasures which their education and the hypocritical system of morals, with which they have been necessarily imbued, permit them to expect.... To wish for the enjoyment of the higher pleasures of sympathy and communication of knowledge between the sexes, heightened by that mutual grace and glow, that decorum and mutual respect, to which the feeling of perfect, unrestrained equality in the intercourse gives birth, a man must have heard of such pleasures, must be able to conceive them, and must have an organisation from nature or education, or both, capable of receiving delight from them when presented to him. To enjoy these pleasures, to which their other pleasures, a few excepted, are but the play of children or brutes, the bulk of men want a sixth sense; they want the capacity of feeling them, and of believing that such things are in nature to be found. A mole cannot enjoy the “beauties and glories” of the visible world; nor can brute men enjoy the intellectual and sympathetic pleasures of equal intercourse with women, such as some are, such as all might be. Real and comprehensive knowledge, physical and moral, equally and impartially given by education, and by all other means to both sexes, is the key to such higher enjoyments.... “Demand with mild but unshrinking firmness, perfect equality with men: demand equal civil and criminal laws, an equal system of morals, and, as indispensable to these, equal political laws, to afford you an equal chance of happiness with men, from the development and exercise of your faculties.” —William Thompson (“Appeal of One Half the Human Race,” 1825, pp. xii, 195). Ethics, 74, 147, 173, 177, 186.