sonality by attempting to
control others. To allow to any human beings no existence of their
own but what depends on others, is giving far too high a premium on
bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped for,
and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire; those
to whom others will not leave the undisturbed management of their own
affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling for
their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence also women's
passion for personal beauty, and dress and display; and all the evils
that flow from it, in the way of mischievous luxury and social
immorality. The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal
antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is
the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire of power over others can
only cease to be a depraving agency among mankind, when each of them
individually is able to do without it: which can only be where
respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an
established principle.

But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that
the free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of
individual happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a
source of unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women. There
is nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the
pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the
active faculties. Women who have the cares of a family, and while
they have the cares of a family, have this outlet, and it generally
suffices for them: but what of the greatly increasing number of
women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation which
they are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of the
women whose children have been lost to them by death or distance, or
have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own? There are
abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business,
retire with a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but
to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests and excitements
that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings
ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no one thinks of the
parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid
what they are told is their debt to society--having brought up a
family blamelessly to manhood and womanhood--having kept a house