In all countries, then, the ideal woman changes, chameleon-like, to suit
the taste of man; and the great doctrine that her happiness does
somewhat depend on his liking is part of the very foundation of her
existence. According to his will she is bond or free, educated or
ignorant, lax or strict, house-keeping or roving; and though we advocate
neither the bondage nor the ignorance, yet we do hold to the principle
that, by the laws which regulate all human communities everywhere, she
is bound to study the wishes of man, and to mould her life in harmony
with his liking. No society can get on in which there is total
independence of sections and members, for society is built up on the
mutual dependence of all its sections and all its members. Hence the
defiant attitudes which women have lately assumed, and their
indifference to the wishes and remonstrances of men, cannot lead to any
good results whatever. It is not the revolt of slaves against their
tyrants--in that we could sympathize--which they have begun, but a
revolt against their duties. And this it is which makes the present
state of things so deplorable. It is the vague restlessness, the fierce
extravagance, the neglect of home, the indolent fine-ladyism, the
passionate love of pleasure which characterise the modern woman, that
saddens men, and destroys in them that respect which their very pride
prompts them to feel. And it is the painful conviction that the ideal
woman of truth and modesty and simple love and homely living has somehow
faded away under the paint and tinsel of this modern reality which makes
us speak out as we have done, in the hope, perhaps a forlorn one, that
if she could be made to thoroughly understand what men think of her, she
would, by the very force of natural instinct and social necessity, order
herself in some accordance with the lost ideal, and become again what we
once loved and what we all regret.