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    framed . In such a state of things it is easy to foresee , that impediments in the way of knowledge and of social happiness will continue to arise ^ and the weakness and errors of woman to revert upon the head of her oppressors . All injustice , every vice—and injustice is vice—carries with it its own punishment . The tyrant and the slave , the oppressor and the oppressed , the subjugator and the subjugated , are alike deteriorated in moral worth and degraded .

    • How ( observes Rousseau ) shall a woman , unaccustomed to reflection , be able to educate her offspring ?'—and yet the first years of man , all his first impressions , are invariably received from and directed by the sex . How important , both in a physical and moral view , are these first years , these first impressions ! Of this the philosophical observer of mind needs not to be informed .

    How , through the whole of life , do they continue to act upon , to form the future man ! While woman is only valued , admired , courted ,, for her personal graces and accomplishments ; while her establishment in life , her importance in society , principally depend upon these , it would be a moral miracle if she sedulousl y sought to cultivate any other . It is true ( but exceptions do not

    invalidate the rule ) that a few respectable women of talents have indignantly broken the degrading fetters by which the sex have been bound and restrained . In vain have these lifted the warning voice ; in vain , contemning the obloquy by which they were assailed , sought to rouse their own sex , and to appeal to the justice , the reason , even to the interest of the other ! But little

    reformation has yet taken place . Catherine Macauley , whose memory is entitled to more veneration than it has received , and whose acute and penetrating mind advanced before the period in which she lived , observes , in her Letters on Education / that' it ought to be the first care of education to teaeh virtue on immutable

    principles , and to avoid that confusion which must arise from confounding the laws and customs of society with obligations , founded on correct principles of equity . ' ¦ First ( she goes on to say ) there is but one rule of right for the conduct of all rational beings ; consequently , true virtue in one sex must be equally so in the other , when a proper opportunity calls for the exertion ; and vice versa , what is vice in one sex cannot have a different property when

    found in the other . Secondly , true wisdom , which is never found at variance with rectitude , is equally useful to women as to men ; because it is necessary to the highest degree of happiness , which can never exist with ignorance . Thirdly , that , as on our first entrance into another world , our state of happiness may possibly depend upon the degree of perfection we have attained in this , we cannot justly lessen , in either sex , the means by which perfection , another word for wisdom , is acquired . '

    She goes on to observe , < that the happiness and perfection of the iex . es are so reciprocally dependent on each other , that , until both are refined , it is vain to expect excellence in either . '— There

    Untitled Article

    4 & 0 O / i Female Education and Occupations .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1833, page 490, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2618/page/50/