Despair's Last Journey by David Christie Murray

'No man knows the sex. Women are like Tennyson's description of the law -- a wilderness of single instances; but except for those surprising examples which are detected for us only by the talisman of a great love, there is a family likeness amongst them. The woman is the tougher-fibred creature, and there is excellent good reason why she should be so. She suffers as no man ever suffers, and she could not bear her pangs -- she would go mad under them -- if she were half as sensitive to suffering as the less-tried male; and on the moral side the lady is a pachyderm and the average workman an un-shelled polype in comparison. I invoke,' he cried, striding the little grassy platform on which his feet had worn a pathway between his tent-door and the chattering runnel -- 'I invoke the unnumbered squads and battalions and armies of shame which are known, and always have been known, to every town and city which has ever dared to call itself civilized since history began.

From Lais in her jewelled litter to Cora in her English landau in the Bois, and on to the shabbiest small slut who flaunts her raddle and her broken feather in the slums of London, the same story is told and the same moral preached. Where is an equal army of men to be found to invite the contumely of their own sex? A woman's virtue is her continence, and a man's virtues are truthfulness and courage. There is an unspeakably great army of the one sex which makes a show and a lure of its penal uniform. Find me anywhere a band of men who flaunt themselves in an equal denial of the virtues proper to man, who parade themselves as cowards and liars, and strive to make a living by the parade of their own desertion from the manly principle. The tender sensibility of the generic woman is a fraud, and I should know that better than most men, because I so long believed in it and had so many rude awakenings from faith. But, oh I now and again -- happy the man who learns it early!