"Blind submission in women is considered a virtue, while submission to wrong is itself wrong, and resistance to wrong is virtue alike in women as in man"
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“Blind submission” lands like an accusation, not a diagnosis. Ernestine Rose is targeting a double standard so ordinary it can pass as manners: obedience is framed as feminine goodness, even when it props up cruelty, exploitation, or legal inequality. Her phrasing is engineered to make that norm feel suddenly indefensible. The word “blind” does the work of stripping submission of its romance; it’s not tenderness or harmony, it’s self-erasure dressed up as moral polish.
Rose’s key move is to separate submission as a gendered expectation from submission as an ethical choice. “Submission to wrong is itself wrong” flips the script on the era’s favorite alibi: that women are virtuous precisely because they endure. In her logic, endurance isn’t purity when the thing being endured is injustice. It becomes complicity. That’s a radical recalibration in the 19th-century world she was fighting in, where women’s legal identity was often absorbed into a husband’s and where public dissent could be treated as unfeminine, even monstrous.
The subtext is strategic: Rose isn’t merely asking men to be kinder or women to be stronger. She’s insisting on a shared moral standard that makes patriarchal “protection” look like a con. By ending with “alike in women as in man,” she claims equality on the terrain that matters most in political argument: virtue. Resistance isn’t a masculine posture; it’s the basic duty of a conscience.
Rose’s key move is to separate submission as a gendered expectation from submission as an ethical choice. “Submission to wrong is itself wrong” flips the script on the era’s favorite alibi: that women are virtuous precisely because they endure. In her logic, endurance isn’t purity when the thing being endured is injustice. It becomes complicity. That’s a radical recalibration in the 19th-century world she was fighting in, where women’s legal identity was often absorbed into a husband’s and where public dissent could be treated as unfeminine, even monstrous.
The subtext is strategic: Rose isn’t merely asking men to be kinder or women to be stronger. She’s insisting on a shared moral standard that makes patriarchal “protection” look like a con. By ending with “alike in women as in man,” she claims equality on the terrain that matters most in political argument: virtue. Resistance isn’t a masculine posture; it’s the basic duty of a conscience.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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