““Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation.” The “excessive devotion” that results when women live “so entirely for men,” when a woman makes marriage “her whole existence”—or, as Sophia Hawthorne had phrased it, her “true destiny”—Margaret argued, has “cooled love, degraded marriage, and prevented either sex from being what it should be to itself or the other.” Woman “must be able to stand alone.” Marriage should be to woman, as it is to man, “only an experience.” While women sometimes wished to be men in order to partake of their freedoms and opportunities, “men never,” Margaret observed, “in any extreme of despair, wished to be women.””
