gth began to
be less attentive to her; so much so, that she observed that
whereas in walking home with her in the evening, he used to take
pains to go round the two sides of the public square, in order to
make the walk as long as possible, he now cut it short by always
striking across the center; "so that his love for me," she
observes, "must have decreased in the inverse ratio between the
diagonal of a rectangular parallelogram and the sum of two
adjacent sides." Who shall say that mathematics are wasted on a
woman after that? Now, that is the sum of the science that is
taught in half our institutions of education, in more than half
our fashionable boarding-schools, in nearly all the most
cultivated social circles in the land. How can you expect, from
such women, any nobleness or appreciation of nobleness? How can
you expect any from such a woman's husband, when all his thoughts
of woman have been crushed down, by sad experience, to the level
of his wife's capacities? When I find a man who is obstinate
against Woman's Rights, I try to find out either what sort of a
mother or what sort of a wife that man has, and there I find the
key to his position; for how can you expect any man to have a
noble and equal idea of woman, when his mother knows nothing in
the universe beyond a cooking-stove, and his wife has not much
experimental acquaintance even with that?

No; the first obstacle to this Woman's Rights movement is the
feminine, that builds all its hopes upon the wretched adulation
and flattery of men--that thinks "the gentlemen admire weakness
in a woman." Well, so they do admire to flatter it and to laugh
at it! Those are the women who have called out from gifted men,
age after age, those terrible denunciations of which literature
is full. Women who are here, who think men admire weakness in a
woman, let me tell you that if you want to know what men really
think of women, you must go beyond the flatteries of the
ball-room; you must go beyond the compliments of the public
speaker. You must follow your young admirer from the ball-room
into the bar-room, where he ridicules you among his companions,
and laughs at the folly he has been flattering. You must pass
from the public meeting into the office or study, to learn how
the man who flatte