physical force.

Which shall I treat first, the wrong done to the individual or
that done to society? I will start with the individual. And from
the start I will say that the very instinct of secondariness, so
often postulated as a reason for the social subjection of women,
is, on the part of those who urge it, either an invention or an
error. The instinct, as I understand it, is all the other way.
The little girl does not know in herself any inferiority to the
boy. He can perhaps beat her, but while he may consider this a
mark of superiority, she is too wise to accept it as such. In
their lessons she flies where he walks. She cries for his
floggings oftener than he can laugh at her failures. She needs
less machinery than he to arrive at the same mental and moral
results. Nature has given him a mental hammer, but it has given
her a mental needle, and she has embroidered the rainbow before
he has forged the thunder. How does he overtake her swift steps?
How tame and bind her fiery soul?

Now I confess that he has an accomplice greater than himself. The
girl, coming upon the full consciousness of womanhood, comes also
upon that of its opposite. The primal divine unity of the race
makes itself felt in her dreamy bosom. She is but half of the
ideal--the perfect human being--the other half is not yet hers;
she must seek diligently till she find it. Do not laugh. The
pilgrimage of Psyche is performed by every maiden soul; but love,
the supreme god, in the little child is not always found. So far,
so good. The woman often finds a mate; sometimes has quite a
selection of mates offered her. If she finds the complement of
her incomplete being, what more can she want? What wrong is done
her? This simply. If her single life was incomplete, that of her
partner without her was no less so. The need of marriage was
equal with both. Nay, but for the aid of vices to which the male
part of society give system and culture, the need of marriage on
his part will be more imperative than on hers. Its natural
burdens fall with fivefold force on her. She must bear the
children. She must give the flower of her life to services full
of weariness and of anguish. Now, however the matter may stand
between man and woman, the State's need of marriage is
imperative. A