Page:Advice to young ladies on their duties and conduct in life - Arthur - 1849.djvu/140

132 convey, is often very great, especially as to the same set of terms different persons attach peculiar, and sometimes very important, shades of difference. By equal, as used in this chapter, is meant being alike as to mental conformation and mental power—which is denied. As to which is highest or lowest, superior or inferior, that is another matter. Here we believe woman to be the equal of man; not born to obedience, but to be his intelligent and loving companion.

Let no young woman be deceived by the class of reformers, to which we made allusion in the commencement of this chapter. Some of them, stepping out of the sphere for which God and their own peculiar mental qualities designed them, are assuming the place of men as itinerant and public lecturers; and most of them speak almost with a species of scoffing of the holy state of wedlock. No good, in any case, has ever arisen, but much evil, from the promulgation of their pernicious doctrines. Man they are too much in the habit of representing as a selfish tyrant, and woman as his plaything or slave; and they are full of intemperate appeals to their sex to throw off the yoke that man has placed upon their necks. That there are men who are selfish tyrants, and make slaves of their wives, is not to be denied; but just as many