Replying to the charge brought by some, that those who would shut out woman from the sphere of public activity and of competition with man abase and sacrifice her, Adolphe Monod says: "There is one who abases and sacrifices woman: it is this same world, sometimes frivolous, sometimes bold, which treacherously takes up her defense. You abase and sacrifice her, whenever you entice her, to satisfy your egotism and glorify your theories, from the path which God has marked out for her. You have abased and sacrificed her in placing her upon the pedestal and man at her feet, in your fiction, in your plays, in your salons; because, instead of the mission to aid and glorify man, you have substituted that of weakening and effeminating him; because for the mission which she can and ought to fulfill, you substitute one in which she cannot succeed and to which she ought [101] not to pretend. What idea, then have you of woman if you believe her willing to exchange the humble glory of accomplishing the mission which belongs to her for the mortifying vanity of failing in that which belongs to another--satisfied with being an incomplete man when she might be a complete woman, and of losing her natural and legitimate influence in the barren pursuit of an influence fictitious and usurped? Nothing more remains to her than to regret the nature God has given her, and to indulge this regret by begging without shame from our sex the name and dress and gait of man." This was a French preacher, long since departed, and who has had occasion, I doubt not, to turn over in his grave a thousand times since, because of the heaven-crying follies that have been committed by would-be emancipators of woman in his country and elsewhere--these "woman's rights" agitators who are the real enemies of womankind, who abase her and destroy her womanliness. But God's children who are of the gentler sex know the place God assigns to them, and glorify it and him by faithfully filling their place.

[TAG 101-102]