ious occupation or interest would take them less away than
the frivolous pleasures to which idleness, a want of object in life,
and an inferior education have condemned them.

The principal source of this fear is the idea that every person
admitted to exercise the rights of citizenship immediately aspires to
govern others. This may be true to a certain extent, at a time when
the constitution is being established, but the feeling can scarcely
prove durable. And so it is scarcely necessary to believe that because
women may become members of national assemblies, they would
immediately abandon their children, their homes, and their needles.
They would only be the better fitted to educate their children and to
rear men. It is natural that a woman should suckle her infant; that
she should watch over its early childhood. Detained in her home by
these cares, and less muscular than the man, it is also natural that
she should lead a more retired, a more domestic life. The woman,
therefore, as well as the man in a corresponding class of life, would
be under the necessity of performing certain duties at certain times
according to circumstances. This may be a motive for not giving her
the preference in an election, but it cannot be a reason for legal
exclusion. Gallantry would doubtless lose by the change, but domestic
customs would be improved by equality in this as in other things.

Up to this time the manners of all nations have been more or less
brutal and corrupt. I only know of one exception, and that is in
favour of the Americans of the United States, who are spread, few in
number, over a wide territory. Up to this time, among all nations,
legal inequality has existed between men and women; and it would not
be difficult to show that, in these two phenomena, the second is one
of the causes of the first, because inequality necessarily introduces
corruption, and is the most common cause of it, if even it be not the
sole cause.

I now demand that opponents should condescend to refute these
propositions by other methods than by pleasantries and declamations;
above all, that they should show me any natural difference between men
and women which may legitimately serve as foundation for the
deprivation of a right.

The equality of rights established between men by our new constitution
has brought down upon us eloquent declamations and never-ending
pleasantries; but up till now no one has been able to oppose to it one
single reas