Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/198

182 ," if I count you among the latter — that is, among those men who, ascribing certain occupations and duties to women, would mete out rights to them according to man's estimate of these duties. Yes, permit me to say, you treat women as beings of such inferiority that you deal out our rights to us with the soup ladle, as it were. For the chief objection, which you seem inclined to oppose to equal rights, is contained in the remark that the domestic affairs, especially the kitchen, would have to suffer if women were to take part in public life. Do you really wish to be taken seriously? Granted that the household could not be so promptly attended to as it is now; granted that men's gallantry would not also improve with their improved sense of justice toward us, so that they would not be willing to prepare their own coffee occasionally, while we attended a meeting, I ask only this: Do you place the kitchen above human rights? I do not begrudge men anything that they desire, but I must openly declare, if they want their kitchen run at the expense of our human rights they are welcome to a thorough fast, now and then, that they may learn to take care of themselves. Rather than teach men that the weaker sex has fewer rights than they, because it must cook for them, they ought themselves to be taught to cook, instead of Greek and Latin.

That the kitchen will have to suffer when men spend half of each day in the saloon, and half of