To preserve personal beauty, woman's glory! the limbs and faculties
are cramped with worse than Chinese bands, and the sedentary life
which they are condemned to live, whilst boys frolic in the open
air, weakens the muscles and relaxes the nerves. As for Rousseau's
remarks, which have since been echoed by several writers, that they
have naturally, that is from their birth, independent of education,
a fondness for dolls, dressing, and talking, they are so puerile as
not to merit a serious refutation. That a girl, condemned to sit
for hours together listening to the idle chat of weak nurses or to
attend at her mother's toilet, will endeavour to join the
conversation, is, indeed very natural; and that she will imitate
her mother or aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless
doll, as they do in dressing her, poor innocent babe! is
undoubtedly a most natural consequence. For men of the greatest
abilities have seldom had sufficient strength to rise above the
surrounding atmosphere; and, if the page of genius has always been
blurred by the prejudices of the age, some allowance should be made
for a sex, who, like kings, always see things through a false
medium.

In this manner may the fondness for dress, conspicuous in women, be
easily accounted for, without supposing it the result of a desire
to please the sex on which they are dependent. The absurdity, in
short, of supposing that a girl is naturally a coquette, and that a
desire connected with the impulse of nature to propagate the
species, should appear even before an improper education has, by
heating the imagination, called it forth prematurely, is so
unphilosophical, that such a sagacious observer as Rousseau would
not have adopted it, if he had not been accustomed to make reason
give way to his desire of singularity, and truth to a favourite