So ignorance regards mystery and evil as synonymous. Mysteries, if long continued, tend to produce useless disregard of accustomed habits, of religious teaching, and even of life itself. An impotent spirit of defiance, the secondary effects of fear, seizes upon men. The savage and the idolater reproach their gods, refuse them worship, and even deal blows upon the senseless image of wood or stone. Even the child, who does not comprehend why he is hurt when he falls, strikes or kicks the inanimate thing which wounded him.
Woman is to man the great mystery of life.
Because of this mystery, she has been well hated, well adored, well abused, deeply misrepresented. Because of this mystery, so much has been written of her functions, her capacities, her position, present and future. Bachelors and married men, beardless boys and octogenarians, philosophers and fools, priests and poets, the scientist and the ignoramus, alike make women the subject of their essays, their sermons, their songs, their diatribes. The law stepped in where the Church stopped, and, as Montesquieu says, without asking her if she desired punishment, it made her amenable to statutes, many of which were contrary to the inherent laws of her being. Morally dissected, in search of a soul, she has been physically dissected, that her maternal frame might be held to view as weak, as unenduring, as incapable of accomplishing her desires of progress.