Sir Thomas Bertram: — A little abstinence from the luxuries of Mansfield Park might bring your mind into a more sober state. Is that your choice, young woman?
Fanny Price: — Yes. It is.
Edmund Bertram: — Why, Fanny?
Fanny Price: — To be at home again... to be loved by my family, to feel affection without fear or restraint and... to feel myself the equal of those that surround me.
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do;nd it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
You always dread the unfamiliar. Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally 'bright,' did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well read man?
We're twins, you know. We share everything. What's his is mine, and what's mine is mine too.
All men are not created equal! Some are born smarter, or more beautiful, or with parents of greater status. Some, by contrast, are born of weak body or mind, or with few, if any, talents. All men are different! Yes, the very existence of man is discriminatory. Inequality is not a sin. Equality in itself is evil.
And maybe men say they're glad not to give birth, all the pain and blood, but really that's just so much sour grapes. For sure, men can't do anything near as incredible. Upper body strength, abstract thought, phalluses—any advantages men appear to have are pretty token.
You can't even hammer a nail with a phallus. Women are already born so far ahead ability-wise. The day men can give birth, that's when we can start talking about equal rights.
- 1
- 2