ree themselves. The two sexes have reciprocally exploited these assets of strength or beauty to make others suffer.
Men have increased their natural strength through the laws that they have imposed. Women have increased the price of possessing them by the difficulty of obtaining them. It would not be difficult to say on which side servitude today lies. Whatever the case may be, the goal for which women strive [is to escape servitude] and [they] use love to achieve it while men lead them away from achieving their goal. To try to inspire men while feeling nothing themselves or at least hiding what they feel is the sum of women's politics and morals.
But the more women perfected the art of making themselves desirable, hoped for, and pursued as a means of getting what they are resolved never to give, the more men multiplied their means by which to gain possession of it. The art of inspiring desire that one is not willing to satisfy, has, if nothing else, created the art of feigning unfelt emotions. . . .
Finally there is another woman more securely happy. Her happiness consists of being unaware of that which the world calls pleasure. Her glory is to live in obscurity. Contained within her duties as wife and mother, she dedicates her days to the practice of obscure virtues. Occupied with governing her family, she reigns over her husband with kindness, over her children with gentleness, and over her servants with goodness. Her house is home to religious beliefs, to filial piety, to conjugal love, to maternal tenderness, to order, to inner peace, to deep sleep, and to good health. . . .
[Part Four concerns the juridical status of women.]
The condition of women is nevertheless, in general, different in several areas from that of men as such. Women are rather more nubile than men, reaching puberty at twelve years of age. Their mind is generally developed earlier than that of men. . . .
Men, by the prerogative of their sex and by the strength of their temperament, are naturally capable of all sorts of uses and commitments, whereas women, either because of the fragility and delicate disposition of their sex are excluded from several roles, and are incapable of certain commitments.
Source: Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, eds., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers par une societé des gens de lettres, 17 vols. (175165) (Paris: Briasson, 1756), 6:46876.