To
meditate on the past, present, and future condition of females in society must
ever waken the liveliest feelings of the generous heart. When we look back upon
past ages, and see woman who was created for virtue and refinement, performing
from day to day and year to year menial drudgeries which properly belonged to
the brute creation when we see her the debased & degraded slave of man to
whom she was by her Maker given for a companion, emotions which we neither can
nor ought to check agitate and o’erwhelm our minds, “When we look
into the pages of history we find innumerable examples of the base light in
which females were regarded by the ancients, and in those countries too, in
which every possible means was taken to improve the minds of the other sex.
– Thus was the whole sex sunk in the brutish ignorance & barbarism.
And if by chance woman was raised to distinction by any nation – as she
was by the Egyptians, who placed her in situations not suited to the station
for which she was created, it was only to excite her vanity and then sink her
into still lower degradation. To the Greeks & Romans render immortal by
their perfection in all the intellectual sciences and arts, we in vain lock
to set inferior nations an example of justice to our sex. Woman was considered
by them as too contemptible an object to be admitted even to their society &
totally failing to give a proper intellectual cultivation to the noble powers
of her mind they remained in their dominant state of nature.
