us) line of presentation of advocacy meant to articulate a specifically female point of view in public discourse. To be sure, oppositional advocacy was there to meet it and remains there now, but the voices of whom Wollstonecraft's was the first of lasting relevance to the modern period have not been completely suppressed.
Greer speaks indirectly to the challenge of characterizing the status of British women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when she observes that Wollstonecraft considered deceit a "secondary sex characteristic of the female mind," though the necessity of women's deceit was attributed to the consequences of female degradation. It can be inferred that Wollstonecraft no less than Greer would have wished to diminish the cause of equal social standing for women, but the double vision of women as being or wishing to be perceived straightforwardly as human beings, as against the image of a being peculiarly and particularly female, has been a persistent and difficult factor of analysis of women's issues for far longer than 200 years.
In the early nineteenth century, the social status of women in Britain, particularly in the middle classes, where the greatest change in women's status was to occur from that time onward, appears to have been understood by and large in relation to the men in their lives, whether fathers, brothers, or husbands. The same was not true for men, as indicated by the phrase in use from the marriage ceremony to the poetic tradition: "man and wife," not "husband and wife." Women and men moved in different spheres, and it was understood that women's sphere, mainly domestic life, was subordinate to and less important than men's, namely public life, although men's authority was recognized in the home as well.
Social codes that were meant to be well understood by all were well and truly in place. Marriage manuals instructed brides in the fine art of marital subservience. Sandford warns young...