Volume 2 — MIDDLE AGES. (continued 3)

That women are more fond of ornament than men is probably true; but I doubt whether there is so much difference between the personal vanity of the sexes, as has been imagined. Dandies are a large class, if not a respectable one. No maiden lady was ever more irritable under a sense of personal deformity than were Pope and Byron; and Bonaparte was quite as vain of his small foot, as Madam de Staël of her beautiful arms.

In searching the history of women, the mild, unobtrusive domestic virtues, which constitute their greatest charm, and ought always to be the ground-work of their character, are not found on record. We hear of storms and tempests, and northern lights; but men do not describe the perpetual blessing of sunshine.

The personal bravery evinced by women at all periods excites surprise. We hear scarcely any thing of the Phœnician women, except that they agreed to perish in the flames, if their countrymen lost a certain battle, and that they crowned with flowers the woman who first made that motion in the council. The Moorish women of Spain were full of this fiery spirit. When Boabdil wept at taking a farewell glance of beautiful Granada, his proud-hearted mother said, scornfully, “You do well to weep for it like a woman, since you would not defend it like a man.”

The old Hungarian women, when their country was invaded by the Turks, performed prodigies of valor; and now, among the predatory tribes of Illyria and Dalmatia, he who attempted to insult a girl, would find that she wore a dagger and pistol at her belt. But Christianity, which has done so much for woman—which, at a time when its pure maxims could produce nothing better, by reason of man’s own evils, brought forth the generous spirit of chivalry from the iron despotism of the middle ages—Christianity is removing the garlands from the bloody front of war, and teaching her sons and her daughters that evil must be “overcome with good.”

Women are apt to be more aristocratic than men; for the habits of their life compel attention to details, and consequently make them more observing of manners than of principles.

Where the Mohammedan religion prevails, man’s reason is taught to bow blindly to faith, and his affections have little freedom to seek their corresponding truth; in all such countries women are slaves.

At those periods when reason has run wild, and men have maintained that there was no such thing as unchangeable truth, but that every one made it, according to the state of his own will—at such times, there has always been a tendency to have men and women change places, that the latter might command armies and harangue senates, while men attended to domestic concerns. These doctrines were maintained by infidels of the French revolution, and by their modern disciple, Fanny Wright.

Many silly things have been written, and are now written, concerning the equality of the sexes; but that true and perfect companionship, which gives both man and woman complete freedom in their places, without a restless desire to go out of them, is as yet imperfectly understood. The time will come, when it will be seen that the moral and intellectual condition of woman must be, and ought to be, in exact correspondence with that of man, not only in its general aspect, but in its individual manifestations; and then it will be perceived that all this discussion about relative superiority, is as idle as a controversy to determine which is most important to the world, the light of the sun, or the warmth of the sun.