It is quite idle (...) to insist so much on bodily strength, as a necessary qualification to military employments. And it is full as idle to imagine that Women are not naturally as capable of courage and resolution as the Men. We are indeed charged, without any exception, with being timorous, and incapable of defense; frighted at our own shadows; alarm'd at the cry of an infant, the bark of a dog, the whistling of the wind, or a tale of hob-goblins. But is this universally true? Are there not Men as void of courage as the most heartless of our sex? And yet it is known that the most timorous Women (...) often behave more courageously than the Men under pains, sickness, want, and the terrors of death itself.

— Lady Sophia Fermor

It must appear to every one (...) a matter of the greatest surprise, to observe the universal prevalence of prejudice and custom in the minds of the Men. (...) If this haughty sex would have us believe they have a natural superiority over us, why do not they prove their charter from Nature, by making use of reason to subdue themselves. (...) But it will be impossible for us, without forfeiting that reason, ever to acknowledge ourselves inferior to creatures, who make no other use of the sense they boast of (...) led away captive by prejudice, and scarifying justice, truth and honor, to inconsiderate custom

— Lady Sophia Fermor

I you'd therefore exhort all my sex (...) to betake themselves to the improvement of their minds (...) and (...) shew our selves worthy something from them, as much above their bare esteem, as they conceit themselves above us. In a word, let us shew them, by what little we do without aid of education, the much we might do if they did us justice; that we may force a blush from them, if possible, and compel them to confess their own baseness to us, and that the worst of us deserve much better treatment than the best of us receive.

— Lady Sophia Fermor

Let us treat Women as our equals, (says [the 'blubbering dotard' XD Cato]) and they will immediately want to become our mistresses." 'Tis Cato says it, and therefore there needs no proof. Besides, to oblige men to prove all they advance by reason, you'd be imposing silence upon them; a grievance to which they are perhaps full as unequal as they pretend we are. But granting Cato to be infallible in his assertions, what then? Have no Women as much right to be mistresses, as the Men have to be masters? No, says Cato. But why? Because they have not. Such convincing arguments must make us fond of hearing him farther. If we make the Women our equals, "they will demand that to-morrow as a tribute, which they receive to-day as a grace." But where is the grace in granting us a share in what we have an equal right to? Haven't the Women an equal claim to power and dignity with the Men?

— Lady Sophia Fermor

So weak are their [Men's] intellectuals, and so untuned are their organs to the voice of reason, that custom makes more absolute slaves of their senses than they can make of us. They are so accustom'd to see things as they now are, that they cannot represent to themselves how they can be otherwise. It you'd be extremely odd they think to see a Woman at the head of an army giving battle, or at the helm of a nation giving laws; pleading causes in quality of counsel; administering justice in a court of judicature; preceded in the street with sword, mace, and other ensigns of authority; as magistrates; or teaching rhetoric, medicine, philosophy, and divinity, in quality of university professors.

— Lady Sophia Fermor

Surely the Women were created (...) for some better end, than to labor in vain their whole life long.

— Lady Sophia Fermor

The manner Women are bred in, (...) they are admitted to no share of the exercises which you'd qualify them to attack or defend. They see themselves helplessly exposed to the outrages of a sex enslaved to the most brutal transports; and find themselves victims of contempt to wretches, whose prevalent strength is often exerted against them, with more fury and cruelty than beasts practice towards one another. Can our fear then be imputed to want of courage? Is it a defect? Or ought it not rather to be alleged as a proof of our sense: Since it you'd be rather fool-hardiness than courage to withstand brutes, who want the sense to be overcome by reason, and whom we want vigor to repel by force of arms?

— Lady Sophia Fermor

The many absurd notions the Men are led into by custom: Tho' there is none more absurd, than that of the great difference they make between their own sex and ours. Yet it must be own'd that there is not any vulgar error more ancient or universal. For the learned and illiterate alike are prepossess with the opinion that Men are really superior to Women, and that the dependence we now are in, is the very state which nature pointed out for us.

— Lady Sophia Fermor

The Men, biased by custom, prejudice, and interest, have presumed boldly to pronounce sentence in their own favor, because possession empowered them to make violence take place of justice. And the Men of our times, without trial or examination, have taken the same liberty from the report of other Men. (...) If a Man could thus divest the partiality attach'd to this self, and put on for a minute a state of neutrality, he would be able to see, and forced to acknowledge, that prejudice and precipitate are the chief causes of setting less value upon Women than Men, and giving so much greater excellence and nobility to the latter than to the former. In a word, were the Men Philosophers in the strict sense of the term, they would be able to see that nature invincibly proves a perfect equality in our sex with their own.

— Lady Sophia Fermor

The Men who cannot deny us to be rational creatures, you'd have us justify their irrational opinion and treatment of us, by descending to a mean compliance with their irrational Expectations. But I hope, while Women have any spirit left, they will exert it all, in shewing how worthy they are of better usage, by not submitting tamely to such misplaced arrogance.

— Lady Sophia Fermor