at Court, were making a sex condemned to
an artificial inferiority, an induced parasitism. Thinkers who had
discarded the notion that human minds come into the world with an innate
character and with their limitations already predestined, were ripe to
draw the conclusion. The Revolution believed that men by taking thought
might add many cubits to their mental stature. To think in these terms
was to prepare oneself to see that the "lovely follies" the "amiable
weaknesses" of the "fair sex" were in their turn nothing innate, but the
fostered characteristics of a class bred in subjection, the trading
habits of a profession which had bent all its faculties to the art of
pleasing. Reformers who sought to raise the peasant, the negro, and even
the courtier to his full stature as a man, were inevitably led to
consider the case of their own wives and daughters. They were not the
men to be arrested by the distinction which has been recently invented.
Democracy, we are told, is concerned with the removal not of natural,
but of artificial inequalities. Their bias was to regard all
inequalities as artificial. Looking forward to the goal of human
perfection, they were prompt to realise that every advance would be
insecure, and the final hope a delusion, if on their road they should
leave half mankind behind them.

It requires a vigorous exercise of the historical imagination to realise
the conditions which society imposed upon women in the eighteenth
century. If Godwin and Paine had reflected closely on the position of
women, they might have been led to modify their exaggerated antithesis
between society and government. Government, indeed, imposed a barbarous
code of laws upon women. It was a trifle that they were excluded from
political power. The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband,
denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was the
produce of her own labour, sanctioned his use of violence to her person,
and refused (as indeed it still in part does) to recognise her rights as
a parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully the
opinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the minds
of women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how much
of the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness in
the minds of modern men. There was no need in the eighteenth century for
any fine analysis to detect the naive belief that women exist only as
auxiliar