marriage-market demanded certain qualifications; and, as a matter of economic and social necessity, if those qualifications were lacking, their counterfeit presentment was assumed. When helplessness and fragility were the fashion amongst wives, the girl child who was naturally as plucky as her brothers was schooled into an affected and false timidity. Men were understood to admire and reverence the maternal instinct in women; so the girl who had no especial interest in children affected a mechanical delight in, petted, fondled and made much of them. (I myself have seen this done on more than one occasion; of course in the presence of men.) And—worst and most treacherous insincerity of all—since men were understood to dislike clever women, the girl who had brains, capacity, intellect, sought to conceal, denied possession of them, so that her future husband might enjoy, unchallenged, the pleasurable conviction of her mental inferiority to himself.
Of all the wrongs that have been inflicted upon woman there has been none like unto this—the enforced arrest of her mental growth—and none which bears more bitter and eloquent testimony
