Note 2 — Chapter Ten
Reading edition
When a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disheartened by the circumstance to see clearly the absurdity of this command. This is the condition of women, for whom I have the same compassion that I would have for a prisoner so long cramped in a narrow cage that he could not use his limbs. While many women are thinking their own thoughts there are others without so potent a brain, who have as yet, failed to see the absurdity of allowing others to think for them. For this condition of mental and moral blunders the church is responsible.—Ralph Waldo Emerson.