An enquiry into the duties of the female sex / By Thomas Gisborne.

  • Gisborne, Thomas, 1758-1846.
Date:
1813
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An enquiry into the duties of the female sex / By Thomas Gisborne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    most efficacious means of guarding the frontier against inva- ders, and of obstructing their progress, if they should ever force their way into the interior, would fix his attention in the first instance, on the general aspect of the region which he is called upon to defend. He would study the mountains, the defiles, the rivers, the forests. He would inform himself what quartets are open to inroads; what are the circum- stances whicl fav' ur the machinations, what the undisguised violence, of the enemy; what are the posts which the assail- ants w( uld find it most advantageous to occupy; what the stations from which, if once in their possession, it would be most difficult to dislodge them. The plan of defence which he would prescribe, while, on the one hand, it would be formed on those fundamental principles, which military ex- perience has established as the basis of all warlike operations, would 1 e adapted, on the other, with unremitting attention to all the discriminating features which characterise the particular district, in which those general principles are to be reduced to practice. A writer, in like manner, who ventures to hope, that in suggesting observations on the duties incumbent on the fe- male sex, he may be found to have drawn his conclusions from the sources of nature and of truth, should endeavour, in the first place, to ascertain the characteristical impressions which the Creator has stamped on the female mind; the leading features, if such there be, by which he has discrimi- nated the talents and dispositions of women from those of men. For it is from these original indications of the inten- tion of Providence, taken in conjunction with the additional and still clearer proofs of the Divine wdll which the Scriptures shall be found to have disclosed, that the course and extent of female duties, and the true value of the female character, are to be collected. In different countries, and at different periods, female ex- cellence has been estimated by very different standards. At