Mona Caird

If proper principles have not already had their part in the education of man, surely that must be owing solely to woman's flagrant dereliction of duty." instances neither few nor far between may be urged of wives and mothers possibly also sisters and maiden aunts who have raised men to action and dragged them from a disgraceful sloth to an honourable industry true indeed it were an altogether unjustifiable heresy to deny their influence and its beneficent effects but to use it as an argument for placing women on an equality with men would be a non sequitur of the most absurd description the influence wielded by those good women was so powerful for good because they were true to themselves and their sex because they were in a word so womanly The influence of the new woman upon the man is and shall be nil, because the spirit of antagonism between the sexes is being aroused by her pretensions, and comradeship becomes impossible when woman and man fight for supremacy.

women's advocates come and go like summer flies provoking to wrath by their insistent buzzing but when caught and examined proving to be insignificant enough they have their little day and cease to be who, for instance, now remembers Mrs. Mona Caird, that unconventional person who floated into publicity on the Marriage a Failure correspondence of the Daily Telegraph some few years ago, and in the heyday of her notoriety wrote and published that weak and ineffectual novel The Wing of Azrael.

Other women, more advanced in shamelessness, have taken her place, and capped the freedom of her views with outlooks of greater license.

And so the game proceeds, each woman daring a little further than her fellow adventurer into the muddy depths of free selection, of freedom in contracting marriages, and license in dissolving them.

Sydney, July 5th, 1890.

Mona Caird and her disciples have whispered in the ears of those women whose sufferings have set them pondering that the troubles which so often and so soon follow marriage are due to the marriage bond, to the practically inseparable tie, the legal link.

No bond, say they, then no ill-treatment.

Love that lasts, not languishes.