Have I not said enough, Zenobia?"
"I cannot think that this is true," observed Priscilla, who had been
gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes. "And I am sure I do not
wish it to be true!"
"Poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously. "She is the
type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it. He
is never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards
what he loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even more
blindness to his own interests than profligate disregard of ours!"
"Is this true?" asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to
Hollingsworth. "Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have
been saying?"
"No, Priscilla!" answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.
"They have neither of them spoken one true word yet."
"Do you despise woman?" said Zenobia.
"Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"
"Despise her? No!" cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy
head and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely.
"She is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and
character. Her place is at man's side. Her office, that of the
sympathizer; the unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition,
withheld in every other manner, but given, in pity, through woman's
heart, lest man should utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of
God's own voice, pronouncing, 'It is well done!' All the separate
action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false,
foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities,
void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs!
Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster--and, thank
Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without
man as her acknowledged principal! As true as I had once a mother
whom I loved, were there any possible prospect of woman's taking the
social stand which some of them,--poor, miserable, abortive creatures,
who only dream of such things because they have missed woman's
peculiar happiness, or because nature made them really neither man
nor woman!--if there were a chance of their attaining the end which
these petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my
own sex to use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of
sovereignty, to scourge them back within their proper bounds! But it
will not be needful.
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