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A PIONEER OF THE MOVEMENT
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point of view, and draws a vivid picture of the domestic miseries and the moral degradation to both men and women arising from women being trained in the idea that the one object in an unmarried woman's life is to catch a husband. In the scathing and cruel light of common sense she places in close juxtaposition two leading facts which ate like acids into the moral fibre of the whole of society in her time. The one aim and object of women was to get married; an unmarried woman was a social failure. Women who had passed the marrying and child-bearing age were treated with scant courtesy. A writer quoted by Mary Wollstonecraft had expressed this sentiment in plain language by exclaiming, "What business have women turned of forty to do in the world?" Yet while in a variety of ways it was dinned into the minds and consciences of women that husband-catching was the end of their existence, they were at the same time enjoined that this object must never be avowed. The aim must be pursued with unceasing vigilance, the whole of women's education, dress, manners, and thoughts must be subordinated to this one object, but they must never openly avow it. In Mary Wollstonecraft's time those who undertook to lead the female mind in the principles of virtue advised women never to avow their love for the man they were about to marry; it was argued that it was "indelicate in a female" to let it appear that she married from inclination; she must always strive to make it appear that her physical and mental weakness had caused her to yield to force. On the first of these two nonsensical