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Female affection

Chapter 2: PREFACE.
By Basil Montagu
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Gender & Sexuality StudiesPhilosophy & Ethics

About This Book

The author argues that tenderness and benevolence are fundamental traits of women, treating affection as the most conspicuous feminine quality while acknowledging other putative traits such as taste for ornament, gaiety, impulsiveness, and variability. The essay outlines the pleasures derived from attachment—love, friendship, gratitude, and general charity—and supports its claims with anecdotal evidence drawn from travel narratives and scriptural exemplars, showing repeated instances of female hospitality, pity, and self-sacrifice across cultures. The work combines moral reflection with illustrative stories to emphasize affection's constancy and social value.

PREFACE.

There are certain properties of the female mind upon which doubt has existed, and may, possibly, long exist.

1. Women are said to be fond of ornament—an evil against which they were thus warned by St. Paul—“I will that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, not with embroidered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array, but which becometh women professing godliness, with good works.”

2. Women are said to be fond of gaiety:

“Some men to business, some to pleasure take,”—

but the ruling passion of woman is not the love of business.

3. It is said that women act more from impulse than from foresight:

“Men have many faults, women have only two,—”

of which the want of foresight is one.

4. Women, it is said, are variable:

——“Varium et mutabile semper
Fœmina.”

Women are fond of intellect, of courage, of virtue; and are capable of the most heroic acts.

Such are properties of the female mind, upon which doubt may be entertained; but there is one property upon which doubt cannot exist—it is the nature of woman to be affectionate.

B. M.