Women -- England -- History; Women -- Great Britain -- History
The social hypocrisy of the eighteenth century, as it relates to
woman, was due to the failure as yet to place the sex in correct
adjustment with the times. Instead of considering her as having
serious qualities and value other than the realization of matrimony,
everything that entered into woman's life pointed in that one
direction. The art of pleasing was not cultivated as an opportunity
of the sex due to their special graces of spirit and of person, which
might legitimately be employed for their own sake to make the world
happier and brighter. There was not afforded to men the restfulness
and pleasure in the company of women which would serve as a delightful
foil to the practical and anxious cares of their daily lives; nor
were women taught to believe in themselves as capable persons in the
spheres of life in which feminine personality, taste, and touch
best affect and mould civilization. Except in a few notable cases,
literature and art, to say nothing of science, were outside of woman's
sphere, because she neither believed in herself nor was seriously
regarded by men as a factor in any of the wide relations of life other
than those which were involved in her sex. The arts of the toilette,
conversation, and deportment were all in which she was considered to
need to be adept. Where naturalness was suppressed, it is not strange
that the young women should have been influenced by false standards;
false modesty, false sensitiveness, false ignorance, were depended
upon to give them the artlessness and innocence of deportment which
should recommend them to the blasé men of the times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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