Free The Bleeding Heart by Marilyn French Page A

it.
    So if he did somehow find her again, she’d say she was busy.
    She returned to her books, forcing herself to concentrate. She reviewed the notes she had taken today:
No woman ever thinks abstractly. Man’s intelligence is abstract; woman’s concrete. Men love principles; women, persons. No woman ever really understands herself. (1899)
    Woman was appointed by God to be inferior to man in authority and power. This arrived because Eve assumed a place which did not belong to her. And since Eve, the lot of woman was made hard and bitter by the oppression of man. Women’s inferiority to man in respect of authority and rule is a memorial of past transgression. It is a proof that humanity is under a curse for sin, and it is a good reminder to man that he is not perfect. (1875)
    Never forget that a man is a selfish being. Keep that little fact in view continually; and if you want to please him, pander to it. Don’t cry, don’t make a fuss, and certainly don’t be quick-tempered. Be sweet above all, but your sweetness must be real. A man never wants to be controlled.
    You must learn to hide your feelings. You must never allow a man to sacrifice his comfort for you.
    Let this ever be in your mind: “I am a creature formed to give pleasure.”
    And never lose your temper: it ruins the face. (1895)
    The sphere of woman’s influence is domestic; she wins her master by sweet submission. (1844)
    Woman is man’s tempter and misleader. Her true place is at once the lowest and highest in creation. All women have an instinctive desire to be wives, even if they deny it. In being sweet servants to their husbands, they fulfill what is highest in them. (1878)
    In Woman, weakness itself is the true charter of power; it is an absolute attraction. All independence is unfeminine. The more dependent, the more cherished. (1835)
    She shut the last book, sighing. It was a strain to work on this subject. She kept being dragged into emotions she did not choose to feel. Still, she felt the subject was important, and no one else would write this book if she didn’t: Lot’s Wife: A Study of the Identification of Women with Suffering. This stage involved reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuals and sermons which were concerned with women’s role, either meditating upon it or prescribing female behavior. Many of the writers complacently justified women’s suffering, even gloried in it. Some of them said that women’s suffering was shameful, that it was unfair that men were so beastly to women, but alas! it had been decreed by God. Some said that women deserved it. Kindly clergymen had written these things. The writers were not strong in logic, but probably their readers had not noticed.
    If only I had more distance, if only I were less involved.
    Cal’s voice, droning on and on. He didn’t have to bother to make himself sound interesting, people followed him breathlessly. The Great Cal Taylor.
    “It is, of course, in the highest sense interesting ,” he gave interesting a special emphasis, a special expressiveness, it was his highest word of praise, “but it is, after all, part of a dead time. Your job—as a historian, which as a scholar you must be—is first of all to see the interest, and then to trace its connections. You should have no more emotion about it than a zoologist cataloguing toe shapes. Your work, my dear Dolores, is marred by your … well … passion. And your bias. Women, after all, were simply not important to the Renaissance, and your concentration on them, it seems to me, distorts the entire period.”
    “Women were important to Shakespeare. Science wasn’t important to the Renaissance, but people write about that.”
    “But my dear Dolores, you write about morality! It is, you know, one thing to document the moral standards of the Renaissance—although one thinks that this has quite amply been done already—and quite another to treat that morality as if it were a living one, as if you had a present