Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/372

356 Would not the idea of personifying the goddess of love, in union with intellectual endowment, give to love itself a higher sanction and help to destroy the dominant, although not openly avowed, conception, according to which love and intellect do not agree with each other in woman? Does not the conception, which men in general entertain of the destiny of woman, presuppose her intellectual inferiority? Do they not, even where they adore her beauty and loveliness, secretly look upon her intellect either with contempt or with jealousy? There is no true beauty which is not permeated with intelligence, and there is nothing more glorious in the world than a beautiful woman of intellect. But how many men have enough intellect, masculine and humane intellect, not to fear the feminine intellect where they extol and demand feminine beauty? Are not most of them inclined to attach the suspicion of unwomanliness to the intellectual endowments of a woman, merely because their instinct tells them that a gifted woman can and must lay claim to a higher position, and greater respect, than that of a slave to man? "The eternal womanly draws us on" — thus declaims every hero with a tuft of hair under his nose. A woman could answer him: "The eternal manly draws us down."

If I have so far coupled true womanliness with physical beauty I do not wish-to be understood that the former could not exist without the latter. Two chief requirements of true womanliness are grace