of the question.

And first of all, consider the immense resources which the education
of women has prepared for you in your efforts to turn your wife from
her fleeting taste for science. Just see with what admirable stupidity
girls lend themselves to reap the benefit of the education which is
imposed upon them in France; we give them in charge to nursery maids,
to companions, to governesses who teach them twenty tricks of coquetry
and false modesty, for every single noble and true idea which they
impart to them. Girls are brought up as slaves, and are accustomed to
the idea that they are sent into the world to imitate their
grandmothers, to breed canary birds, to make herbals, to water little
Bengal rose-bushes, to fill in worsted work, or to put on collars.
Moreover, if a little girl in her tenth year has more refinement than
a boy of twenty, she is timid and awkward. She is frightened at a
spider, chatters nonsense, thinks of dress, talks about the fashions
and has not the courage to be either a watchful mother or a chaste
wife.

Notice what progress she had made; she has been shown how to paint
roses, and to embroider ties in such a way as to earn eight sous a
day. She has learned the history of France in _Ragois_ and chronology
in the _Tables du Citoyen Chantreau_, and her young imagination has
been set free in the realm of geography; all without any aim,
excepting that of keeping away all that might be dangerous to her
heart; but at the same time her mother and her teachers repeat with
unwearied voice the lesson, that the whole science of a woman lies in
knowing how to arrange the fig leaf which our Mother Eve wore. "She
does not hear for fifteen years," says Diderot, "anything else but 'my
daughter, your fig leaf is on badly; my daughter, your fig leaf is on